About a thousand people stood solemnly in the rain at a cenotaph in downtown Halifax Monday morning to honor and remember those who served.

CBC broadcast live the Remembrance Day ceremony at Grand Parade in Halifax.

Mi’kmaw elder Marlene Companion led a smudging ceremony, a first for the event at the Grand Parade.

Jean Noël laid a wreath in memory of his brother, Maître Cpl. Kirk Bradley Noel, recipient of this year’s Memorial Cross. He served in the Navy before becoming a search and rescue technician.

Noel was killed in 2006 during a training exercise when a Cormorant helicopter crashed off the coast of Canso, Nova Scotia.

This year’s ceremony marked a return to downtown Halifax after the 2023 event was moved to Sullivans Pond in Dartmouth, with Grand Parade a designated encampment site amid the city’s housing crisis . The municipality closed the site to tents last winter.

The Royal Canadian Legion had a list of ceremonies across the province and people could search for the gathering closest to them. There were nine in the Halifax Regional Municipality, eight in Cape Breton and more than a dozen in communities across the mainland.

The Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa at the National War Memorial began at 10:30 a.m. ET.

It’s been 80 years since D-Day, which marked the beginning of the end of World War II. It is also 10 years since the end of the mission in Afghanistan, 60 years of peacekeeping operations in Cyprus and the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Air Force.