Canada Day Needs to Change Again

Jeff Green | Jun 30, 2021

Our local townships all support Canada Day events in the villages and hamlets each year. It is a day of community spirit. It is the start of summer, a chance to enjoy pancakes and maple syrup, strawberries, and our lakes on a hot day. This is followed by fireworks, as the marauding mosquitoes come out to feed, as dusk recedes into dark.

Then there is the only traffic jam of the year, which lasts about 8 minutes.

None of that happened last year because of COVID, and it is not happening this year, either, because of COVID again.

This year’s cancellation might not be as unwelcome to local councils and many others as last year’s was, however.

Because this year Canada Day comes at a time when many Canadians are questioning whether Canada really has that much to celebrate.

We all have birthdays, and that does not make us perfect people, it just makes us a year older, and flaws and all, many of us get a cake. Similarly, we mark the 154th anniversary of the formal establishment of the independent country of Canada on July 1st.

Canada Day has changed, however. Ever since the close call Quebec referendum in 1995, the federal government has been, literally, wrapping itself in the flag. Under Jean Chretien’s Liberals, the government invested in millions of flags, large and small, and in funding Canada festivities across the country with grants. The original intention was to create some patriotic fervor to compete with St. Jean Baptiste Day in Quebec, which had been renamed as “La Fete Nationale” by pro-independence Quebec governments.

Those Canada Day grants still exist, and at least in Ottawa and in rural communities, Canada Day has become more than a picnic day over the years, and politicians from all levels of government and of all political stripes make speeches about how lucky we are to live in the best country in the world on July 1st.

Canada Day is now similar to the 4th of July in the US, and US style patriotism has come to Canada as well.

But now, the confirmation of unmarked graves at residential schools in two locations, and with more to come, a long over-due reckoning is finally here. We are being forced to face the fact that Canada was built on lands that were stolen, and how generations of children were kidnapped, and stripped of family, culture and language, in schools that were prisons. This happened for over 120 years, almost to the end of the 20th Century.

This reckoning has both a collective and a personal element. As a group, how do we hold ourselves collectively responsible, and how do we alter the way we think about our national symbols, like Canada Day and our first Prime Minister John A. Macdonald.

As individual Canadians, we are called upon to reflect on our relationship to Canada, to the extent to which we have been actively or passively lending our support to some of the myths about who we are, and what we stand for, that are no longer viable.

Other countries, virtually all other countries, have or will be faced with this kind of reckoning, whether it is the colonial past of European and Asian Powers, the slavery and race based economy in the United States, or the Nazi past in Germany.

A German friend of mine pointed out that Germans have an expression, Vergangenheitsbewältigung – which roughly translates as “working through the past” to describe the ongoing process of coming to terms with both the Nazi era and what took place in the former East Germany until 1990.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung continues to play a role in German education, politics, and in the churches, and its relevance as an ongoing enterprise is underscored by current politics and the rise of political parties that promote exactly the kinds of attitudes that led to the atrocities of the Nazi era.

Germans do not have a patriotic annual holiday like Canada Day. Since 1990, Unification Day has been a national holiday and there are private parties and public concerts to mark the day, but flag waving is not part of the celebration.

Canada Day is a well-established Canadian tradition, and it is hard to see it being eliminated entirely, but it could stand to be altered over time to reflect the reality of our country's past and current struggles.

But then again, when calls for “cancel Sir John A, Macdonald” started to surface a few years ago, it did not seem like that would go anywhere.

But now his statue in Kingston, his adopted hometown, is in storage and his name will be pulled from schools across the country.

But statues only seem to go up in order to be pulled down, and while Sir John A Macdonald was certainly a product of his time, that time may be finally coming to an end.

It is more important for all of us, whether we are descended from First Nations, one of the so-called founding peoples, or one of the constant waves of immigrants since then, or all of the above, to come to terms with everything that has made Canada what it is. This includes its community spirit, entrepreneurial impulses and social consciousness. And also includes the residential schools and the attitudes that created and sustained them, persistent racism and sexism in our institutions, as well as the extraction-based economy that still most heavily impacts Indigenous communities in Canada and around the world.

All countries want to get better, and in a country with unprecedented wealth such as ours, there are also unprecedented opportunities to improve, but the first step is to acknowledge who we are and what we have been a part of in the past.

When Canada Day comes back next year, it will come with a measure of Vergangenheitsbewältigung for many of us. It is part of a coming of age for our still young country.