Highway of Heroes tree-planting campaign seeking funds for a 'living memorial'

If campaigners get their way, by 2022, you can expect to see thousands of new trees lining Canada’s Highway of Heroes –a stretch of Ontario’s Highway 401 where the caskets of fallen soldiers are transported as they’re repatriated to Canada.

Members of the Highway of Heroes Tree Campaign --which aims to plant two million tree saplings across Canada -- is looking for $3 million from the federal government and $2 million from Ontario to accomplish their goal.

Some of these trees would be planted along the Highway of Heroes that stretches from Trenton to Toronto in southern Ontario.

“We need more money from the federal government to get the job done,” the campaign’s chairman and co-founder Mark Cullen told CTV Your Morning Friday. “It’s very much a living memorial. It’s going to last hundreds and hundreds of years.”

The campaign is looking to line the Highway of Heroes with 117,000 new trees to represent the number of Canadian Armed Forces members who have died in combat.

Since the campaign’s first trees were planted in 2017, around 30,000 have already been placed. But the campaign still aims to plant another 80,000 including 24,000 more in 2019.

“We have lots of momentum. We have Canadians saying ‘we want this to happen and we want to be a part of this,’” said Cullen, a third-generation gardener who’s also president of the horticultural firm, Mark’s Choice Ltd. “And we really need the government to say, ‘we want to be a part of this also.’”

Cullen said government contributions would help them reach their 2020 fundraising goal. Campaigners have already raised $3.5 million of their $10 million-goal – coming from at least 2,500 individual private donors and $90,000 from Veterans Affairs Canada.

Cullen said people who have already donated their time and money to the campaign include groups representing soldiers who’ve fought in Afghanistan and Silver Cross mothers -- widows and mothers of fallen Canadian soldiers.

Most trees would honour service members in general

Besides the trees lining the Highway of Heroes, Cullen said the vast majority -- 1.8 million -- would be planted elsewhere across Canada. These would be planted on behalf of Canadians who are or who have volunteered for military service.

So far, 100,000 of these trees have been planted.