If you're down by Queen and Britain streets
You'll find Stonecutter's Lane
The house that my Grandfather built
Where I was born and raised
My Granddad was a mason
And my father in his time
When my time came I signed as an apprentice lad
The early Nineteen Hundreds
Were a rich, fat afternoon
We were cutting stone like demons
No work was done too soon
We were hired out on seven jobs
And so to take the slack
We put out advertisements for apprentice lads
You'd never find a better crew
They knew what work was
Cornices and lintels
They laid stone like they were gods
To hear the hammers ring out
You'd think it was a song
In August, Nineteen Fourteen
In the sultry summer heat
They took a vote in Ottawa
The drums began to beat
Honour, glory, us or them
The story doesn't change
To a man they all enlisted, my apprentice lads
I didn't say that I agreed
'Cause I knew what war was
It was worker killing worker
For some politician's cause
And off to battle they all marched
They gassed them at Cambrai
The dogs of war had done for my apprentice lads
In Nineteen Sixteen fire broke out
Parliament was razed
The call went out for masons
To rebuild and to re-lay
It was the contract of a lifetime
The house upon the hill
So they came out from Vancouver
They came down from Montreal
Master masons everyone
They were answering their call
There was no man under thirty
No man whose work I didn't know
The fields of France had swallowed the apprentice lads
It's Nineteen Twenty-One now
I'm standing at the peak
About to cap the Peace Tower off
There's no one here can speak
The mortar for that stone we mixed
With clay from Flanders' Fields
Laid it in it's place for those apprentice lads
Yeah, we laid it in it's place for those apprentice lads