William George Barker - Legacy

Legacy

His funeral, the largest national state event in Toronto's history, was attended by an honour guard of 2,000 soldiers. The cortege stretched for more than a mile and a half, and included the Chief of the General Staff and his senior officers, the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, the Mayor of Toronto, three federal government cabinet ministers, and six other Victoria Cross recipients. An honour guard was also provided by the United States Army. Some 50,000 spectators lined the streets of Toronto en route to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where Barker was interred in his wife's family crypt in the Mausoleum.

In his hometown, Dauphin, Manitoba, an elementary school and the Barker Airport (dedicated in 1998) are named in his honour. The Dauphin squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Cadets is named for Barker. An elementary school at CFB Borden in Ontario was also named after Barker before its closure in the mid-1990s. In 2012, Southport Aerospace Centre named their new flight student accommodation building after him. During the week of 8 January 1999, the Canadian Federal Government designated Barker a person of national historic significance, while the Discovery Channel's Flightpath series, a television documentary, included an episode entitled "First of the Few", a biography of William Barker, broadcast in Canada on 27 April 1999. In 2003 History TV broadcast "The Hero's Hero - The Forgotten Life of William Barker."

Barker's only daughter, Jean Antoinette Mackenzie (née Barker), died in July, 2007. On 22 September 2011, a memorial at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto was unveiled to mark William Barker as the “most decorated war hero in the history of Canada, the British Empire, and the Commonwealth of Nations.”