As Canadians, it’s our guilty pleasure to be praised by outsiders. We’re polite. We’re peace loving, tolerant and progressive. We take care of our sick. We value education. There’s also some stuff in there about beavers, hockey and Tim Hortons too.
It’s (mostly) all true and it’s absolutely worth celebrating this July 1.
But if you ask someone from the Squamish or Tsleil-Waututh Nations what this July 1 means to them, you can probably expect a much different answer. It was 50 years ago that Tsleil-Waututh
Chief Dan George delivered his famous Lament for Confederation speech to a packed stadium in Vancouver, declaring “the white man’s strange customs, which I could not understand, pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe.” His experience of Canada was also true.
That’s the nature of many nation states. There is the very good and the very bad. We are the people who enforced residential schools and the people who are still warmly welcomed in towns liberated by Canadian soldiers in two world wars.
The good news is, we’re on the right trajectory. To Canadianize an old quote: The moral arc of the universe is long but it curves, like a hockey stick, toward justice. It should not take another 150 to achieve reconciliation.
In the meantime, we have much to celebrate together.
It’s another sticky habit of ours to define being Canadian through contrast with our neighbours down south. There, many are denied the things we treasure, and not just Olympic gold in hockey.
By that measure, it’s never been clearer our 150th deserves to be our most raucous party yet.
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