Ottawa is home to one of Canada's most extraordinary living links to the Second World War — and this week, that link got a visit fit for a history book.
Rolland Lalonde, a 103-year-old veteran from Ottawa who helped liberate the Netherlands in 1945, was quietly working on a painting of a tulip, intending to present it to the Dutch ambassador to Canada. But on Monday, the gift-giving went sideways in the most beautiful way possible: a Dutch princess showed up at his door to thank him in person.
A Painting, a Surprise, and 80 Years of Gratitude
Lalonde had no idea the visit was coming. He'd completed his tulip painting as a quiet, personal tribute — the tulip being a symbol deeply tied to the bond between Canada and the Netherlands. When Canadian troops liberated the Dutch people from Nazi occupation in the spring of 1945, the gratitude ran so deep that the Netherlands has sent Canada thousands of tulip bulbs every year since. That tradition gave rise to Ottawa's own Canadian Tulip Festival, which still blooms every May along the Rideau Canal.
For Lalonde, a man who actually lived through those liberation battles more than eight decades ago, the painting was just another way of honouring a memory that has clearly never faded. Getting to meet a princess instead? That wasn't part of the plan.
The Netherlands Never Forgot
The Dutch royal family has maintained a special connection to Canada that goes beyond diplomacy. During the Second World War, the Dutch royal family took refuge in Ottawa, and Princess Margriet was born at the Ottawa Civic Hospital in 1943 — Parliament Hill even temporarily declared the maternity ward extraterritorial so she could hold Dutch citizenship at birth. That act of generosity cemented a friendship between the two nations that endures to this day.
Veterans like Lalonde are the reason that friendship exists. The liberation of the Netherlands — a grinding, bloody campaign fought in the final months of the war — cost thousands of Canadian lives. For the Dutch, Canadian soldiers are not a footnote in history books. They are heroes, remembered in ceremonies, carved into monuments, and honoured with flowers every single year.
A Living Legend at 103
What makes Lalonde's story so remarkable is simply that he's still here — painting, creating, and carrying the memory of what he and his fellow soldiers accomplished. At 103, he represents a generation that is rapidly disappearing, and every visit, every painting, every handshake with a foreign dignitary is a reminder of what they gave.
For Ottawans, moments like this are a reason to pause. The Canadian Tulip Festival that lights up Dow's Lake and Commissioner's Park each May didn't just happen — it was earned by men like Rolland Lalonde, who crossed an ocean and fought so that people on the other side of the world could be free.
This week, one of those people — or at least her descendant — came back to say thank you.
Source: CBC Ottawa. Read the original story at CBC.ca.
