'We all own it': Man repairs vandalized Regina Cenotaph
Creeden Martell | CBC News | Posted: July 31, 2017 7:46 PM | Last Updated: August 1, 2017
Eisler said he has about 5 years experience working in restoration and inscriptions for memorials
Ron Eisler said he had a few minutes to spare after he had finished some yard work on Sunday afternoon — so he decided to restore the Regina Cenotaph, which had been vandalized earlier in the week.
Eisler, 37, said his father was in the military and the time he spent in cadets left him with fond memories.
"I don't know who owns that stone, or who pays for it, but I feel like we all own it," Eisler said. "It belongs to everyone in Canada."
Eisler said he hopes the repair work will dissuade future vandals from doing further damage to the memorial.
"If some guy can come by and undo what they did in 15 minutes, they're probably not going to bother again," Eisler said. "That's what I'm hoping anyway."
He's no amateur either. Eisler said he has been working with Remco Memorials for about a decade and has been working with memorial inscriptions since 2012.
Rather than wait for the city to get to the repair work and have the vandalism sit for a few days, he sprung into action and repaired the damage using a sandblaster.
"It would probably take a day or two," Eisler said of waiting for the city to address the damage.
"Then you got thousands of people walking by this desecrated monument that's just kind of a slap in the face to the people that died."
CBC reached out to the City of Regina for a statement regarding Eisler's removal of the graffiti, but a spokesperson said they don't have a comment.