Tag: Canada Day

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Coming to Terms With Who We Are

A few years ago, I wrote a Canada Day post that reflected a little on our nation’s shortcomings and hoped we could move past them. In light of the revelations over the past year, I’ve come to realize that post was written from a perspective of privileged naivete.

As I write this, the nation is reeling from the discovery of three sites of unmarked and/or mass graves, each site corresponding to a site where a Residential School once stood. Each site filled with the bodies of Indigenous children who died at those “schools” as part of the genocide the governments of the day waged against the First Nations people within our borders. Right now, the tally stands at over 1,000 children buried at these sites. Now that there’s an active push to examine the Residential School sites across the country, that number can only be expected to rise.

In between the discoveries, other examples of the deeply rooted and systemic racism within Canada have revealed themselves. In early June, a man in London, Ontario, took a vehicle and ran over a Muslim family, killing all but one nine year old child. A former intelligence officer has recently spoken out on systemic racism and harassment within CSIS, Canada’s intelligence agency. Another report records several racist incidents at one of Canada’s busiest border crossings. The first black leader of a federal political party – Annamie Paul of the Greens – is under fire from her own party, and faces a no-confidence vote.

My post in 2018 operated under the assumption that Canada was not, at heart, a racist country; we had our flaws, true, but we just needed to work at them. But now, faced with the mounting evidence, it is time to come to terms with who we are. Who we really are.

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Canada Day 2018

I would like to take this time to wish all my Canadian visitors a happy Canada Day!  Our nation is 151 years old today, and may I say it looks well for its age.

We have a lot of good things going for us here, but in between the BBQs and fireworks I’d like us to pause and reflect on the fact that our nation is not perfect.  We still have inequalities within our borders, between races, language groups, genders and gender orientations.  We’ve made progress in all of these areas, making Canada a better place for everyone, but we still have a long way to go.  And we must always be mindful that there are people who want us to halt our progress and return to more repressive and cruel ways.

Our civil rights, as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, are not immutable laws of nature, but are rather privileges, agreed upon by the majority, and they can be just as easily taken away.  Our American neighbours are learning this painful lesson right now, as an increasingly fascist government consolidates its power and punishes the weakest and most vulnerable for the crime of existing.  We must remember that there are proto-fascists within our own nation, who dream of doing the same thing here.

The last Conservative government used nationalism as one of its rallying cries, and in 2015 ran the most racist election campaign I’d had the displeasure of seeing.  Worse, they almost won on the strength of their racism.  We need to remember how close we came to following America’s spiral into the abyss.   We could still go that way, in the next election or the one after that.

So today, let us resolve to be kind to each other regardless of race or language or religion or gender or orientation.  Let us help the cause of justice where we can, with the gifts we possess.  Let us welcome those who come to our land seeking safe refuge.  Let us remember to vote, every election, and to carefully consider our vote, for evil’s best ally is not the fascist but the apathetic and the ignorant.

Happy Canada Day.  May the true north remain strong and free.