First World War veteran dies at 106

One of the last remaining Canadian veterans of the First World War has died.

Clare Laking, 106, died at Toronto's Sunnybrook and Women's Health Sciences Centre on Saturday.

"Mr. Laking's passing leaves only four Canadian veterans from the Great War," the hospital said in a news release issued Sunday.

"It is believed that he was the last Canadian World War I veteran to have seen action, having fought on the front line."

The hospital said Laking remained in good health until only weeks before his death, curling until age 96, holding season tickets for the Toronto Maple Leafs until age 100 and holding a driver's licence until 102.

Laking was 18 when he joined the army against his father's wishes.

"My dad was against anything to do with the war," he told CBC News in 2004, as he marked Remembrance Day.

"So I said, 'I know, I'll shut him up and enlist.'"

He said his father never wrote him, even when he was injured near the end of the war.

But they later reconciled and he said in 2004 that he had come to agree with his father's pacifist ideas – that the world should settle its differences without war.

Laking was a private with the Canadian Field Artillery, 27th Battery, 4th Brigade.

He served in France for two years, stringing telephone wire for field telephones along the trenches.

"I'd run for 20 yards and ... then I'd flop, get up and run another 20 yards," Laking said in 2004, recalling his trips to the front line.

He suffered a small flesh wound near the end of the war, when shrapnel hit his head.

Laking was awarded the French Legion of Honour and the Golden Jubilee Medal.

After the war, he farmed and then worked for a series of lumber companies in Toronto.

In 1929, he married Helen Paterson, who died in 1993. He is survived by two children, four grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

The family intends to hold a small, private funeral, the hospital said.

They asked that any donations in his memory be made to the Veterans Comfort Fund.