Celebrating what, you ask? Well, Canada Day, of course!
I don't have much of substance for this post, and I had considered not making a post at all. But then I pondered: "how can I not post about my first Canada Day!?" More importantly, though, I have a suspicion that my American following doesn't know much, or anything, about the holiday. Not that I'm going to give you a Wikipedia run-down of it (I would encourage you to do that yourself), I thought I might just share a little bit about how I spent the day.
About Canada Day
- Canada Day is celebrated July 1 each year
- It is Canada's main (and for the most part, only) patriotic holiday
- It was designed to commemorate the founding, or Confederation, of Canada, which occurred on July 1, 1867 with the joining of four British colonies: Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia into a semi-independent country
- Formerly known as Dominion Day, the name was changed to Canada Day in 1982, when Canada's current Constitution was adopted
- It is celebrated as the unofficial start of the summer season across the country, with traditions including fireworks displays and barbecues
- It is celebrated across the country, though it is notably less popular in Quebec, where the citizens have a distinct culture that does not always jive with the rest of the country. Quebec has its own holiday, La Fête nationale du Québec, celebrated on June 24.
The current state of patriotic holidays
Similarly, Canada has not escaped controversy over its namesake holiday in recent years. Specifically, Canada has been grappling with the challenge of reconciling with indigenous peoples living in Canada. This is an American challenge, too, but I have been really quite surprised to see the lengths to which Canadian governments and organizations are going to right the wrongs of the past in ways I have seen in no other country. Still, though, there are some serious sore spots in relations between the modern Canadian state and First Nations people; over the past year, hundreds of unmarked graves of indigenous children have been found across the country--evidence of horrific abuse that those children endured in boarding schools during the 1900s. This has led to a lot of calls to "cancel" Canada Day, followed by a slogan: "no celebration until reconciliation."
Now, on this blog I will be intentionally staying away from my personal political views and analysis, but I would like to make it clear that I do believe in causes of social justice, and hearing news of the tragedies that have come out of Canada is a huge blemish on the reputation of a country which is normally seen as liberal and progressive. It also puts me in a bit of an awkward position, because here I am--the new kid on the block, ready to celebrate the place that I chose to be my home, which most people around here don't get to say--and I find that a lot of people frown on this day. It's kind of like going to a birthday party for a new friend after that friend's exes just talked a whole bunch of trash about them to you.
I ultimately chose to celebrate Canada Day, though, because I believe in looking at the world with a critical eye, and being able to hold two ideas in your head at one time: I think it is okay to celebrate the good things a country has done while continuing to criticize the bad things it has done. I also think it's important to recognize that a place is more than its government. Americans know just as good as anybody how it is to love your country but not really care for the people running it, or the things happening it. Similarly, Canadians are a lovely, diverse people who I admire on the whole, and while we all share some responsibility in righting the wrongs of the past for a better future, we can also acknowledge the contributions of great Canadians to society.
And so, with that...
Observations about the day
- So I crossed the border from New York to Ontario on Canada Day, July 1. My assumption was that the border crossing would be quite busy with Canadians rushing to return home to celebrate their holiday. I found the opposite to be true. In fact, as I was driving by, I saw a somewhat surprising amount of Canadians heading south to America. I can't come up with a reason for this and maybe my Canadian readers can tell me what the draw to the U.S. on Canada's national holiday could be.
- Some people have told me that I am surprised by things like this because as Americans, we read too much into patriotism. It's true that most people I know would find it quite odd for Americans to celebrate the Fourth of July by...leaving America...some would probably even be offended by that. Canadians, on the other hand, (I'm told) don't read into symbolic things like this very much, or rather, they simply don't take patriotism as seriously. I do find this to be somewhat true in practice: Americans often turn holidays like the Fourth of July into solemn occasions with military-type ceremonies and some of the more serious people I know even look down on people who celebrate the holiday with frivolous family barbecues rather than remembering the "reason for the season." Americans also have a bad habit of saying things like, "I don't care what you do; it's a free country! No judgment here!" and then immediately proceeding to judge people who don't do what they do.
- This line of thinking about the "seriousness" of the holiday doesn't always track, though. For example, I thought that if Canadians didn't take Canada Day very seriously, then most businesses would be open on July 1, and in the United States, most businesses would be closed on July 4. I found that the opposite was true. On July 1, most every place I saw was closed. Anticipating this a little, I ended up buying groceries and alcoholic beverages to celebrate at the duty free store located at the border crossing, which was one of the few places I found to be open. On the other hand, nearly everything in New York was open on the Fourth of July, save for the government offices and banks which were forced not to be. I have never paid much attention to things like this before, but for some reason I feel like this is not the norm for the Fourth of July. I'd be interested to hear your recollection of business hours on summer holidays.
- Because July 1 was a Friday, many Canadians logically waited until the next day to celebrate. This gave me an opportunity to go to the dollar store to buy some Canada goodies. One thing that Canadian stores are very good about year-round is having Canada-themed merchandise. Knowing that Dollar Tree and Dollarama normally have not one but several aisles of Canadian flags, clothes, hats, stickers, trinkets, etc., those were the first places I went. While there was still some selection of these goodies, there was noticeably less than there would have been any other time of year, owing probably to people having bought them all up already.
- At the same time, though, I was the only one buying this stuff, as I seemed to be the only one gearing up to celebrate. I expected there would be a hustle-bustle of people out and about buying things for "Canada Day parties." You know, a kid running in to buy hamburger buns because their dad forgot them, or families getting lawn chairs or ice cream, or pyromaniacs buying sets of sparklers and Roman candles, or loud music bumping outside everywhere. But really, there was none of that. At four stores, I was the only one in line buying anything even holiday-related, let alone Canada-themed. So either Canadians are just well-prepared in advance of their holiday, or they weren't as jazzed up about celebrating it. Had you just dropped in with no prior knowledge, you would have had no idea that the day before was the biggest holiday of the summer.
- Speaking of pyromaniacs, there weren't any, really. I couldn't find any laws about purchasing fireworks that were specific to Ontario province, but I got the gist that beyond sparklers, they are either illegal for consumer purchase or use, or just difficult to get, as I didn't see or hear them anywhere for sale, or being used. In New York, I've seen a trend that more and more people are buying fireworks for personal use in their yards. When I was a kid, almost nobody I knew had their own Fourth of July fireworks, but nowadays I see families going to public fireworks displays less and less and lighting at their own parties more and more. I didn't find this to be the case in Canada, where the entire weekend was quiet after 10pm, just like any other.
- Even the public fireworks displays I did see were toned down quite a bit. For the Fourth of July, I am used to every community, big or small, having its own fireworks display, and for bigger cities, multiple ones. This year in the Syracuse area there were less displays listed than there normally are, but there were still no less than a dozen over the course of a weekend. In Kingston, Ontario, on the other hand, there was one, and, let's just say it left a bit to be desired. It is worth mentioning that Kingston is a smaller city, and that bigger cities like Ottawa or Toronto surely had more fireworks. But for reference, the city of Altoona, Pennsylvania, which is a similar size to Kingston, had six Fourth of July firework displays this year.
- It's not a competition, though, of course, and in fairness, you only need to see one good fireworks display to make the holiday experience memorable. And I did! The local campground we stay at in the Kingston area has its own private fireworks display for its campers, and this year's was really quite impressive. It was more impressive than the city-sanctioned Canada Day fireworks, but it was also more impressive than a lot of the Fourth of July fireworks I've seen as well!
Final thoughts
But I think Canada Day is a great example of how celebrations of one's country don't have to be this way. In a way, Canada is an underdog story, and an embrace of mediocrity. Like, "sure we don't always have all the things that America has, and we don't always get it right, but look at how much there still is to be proud of." Canada means so many things to so many different people that if you don't identify with Canadianness in one way, you might in another, and your celebration of the day might look different than somebody else's, but it never has to go too far or become about something else to prove a point. I also think that Canada Day's tameness lends itself to not really being tied to any mythologized creation story vision of Canada, unlike the Fourth of July's backdrop as a sort of anti-establishment, independence-declaring, do-whatever-the-hell-I-want-because-we-fought-for-this-country day, and while that may seem like a drawback because there's less meaning to it, it gives people the opportunity to create their own meaning, and form a healthier, more grounded relationship with their country.
I often think about the "Freedom Convoy" that took over Downtown Ottawa a few months ago. This was when a group of protesters that were opposed to Canada's Covid-19 restrictions occupied downtown in tractor trailers, waved Canadian flags, and blared their horns for several weeks, to the nuisance of local residents. Though there were some alleged ties of the participants to right-wing extremists, which are still being investigated at the time of writing, the protest never turned violent and just sort of fizzled out after awhile with minimal police involvement.
Now, while I still to this day find some of Canada's Covid restrictions egregious (they were some of the strictest in the world at one time and evidence suggests that some rules were more motivated by politics than public health), I also do not identify with any sort of conspiracy theories or anti-scientific rhetoric these protesters were spouting. I also think their behavior was reprehensible as they started their protest at a time when Covid restrictions were already ending, and they didn't really have a clear policy goal in mind for how to balance protecting public health with individual liberty. Nonetheless, while I disagreed with their protest, I thought that they had a right to do so. The other citizens of Ottawa, though, wholeheartedly disagreed, decrying them as the worst, most "un-Canadian" people in the country. A lot of Ottawans said that the Canadian flag and national anthem were "tainted" by them, and that seeing the protest made them less proud to break out the maple leaf swag this Canada Day. I get that the protest is a bit of an embarrassment and not exactly cause for celebration, but canceling a whole holiday because a few bad apples had a three-week temper tantrum?
Before I make this short story too long, I bring this up because I think Canadians have a really interesting view of what it means to be patriotic. To me, protesting has always meant patriotism. For better or worse, protests are as American as apple pie, and because the Ottawa protests were mostly peaceful and situated outside government buildings, I really saw little issue with them, even though I personally disagreed with them. People would bark to the news, "But they're so loud and frightening and disturbing the peace!" I was a little confused by this because, yeah, protests are supposed to intimidate and disturb the peace. That's the point. But to people around here, patriotism doesn't mean donning maple leaf imagery and megaphones to prove a point. In the world of Canadian-American relations, you'll often hear that America is founded on the principles of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but Canada's Constitution contrastly enshrines the principles of "peace, order, and good government."
I find Canadians are often inclined to care about matters that are less personal to them, whether it be standing in solidarity with indigenous mourners even when they themselves are not indigenous, or even just dealing with their whole country being written in two languages even though only 20% of the population speaks the other one. Peace, order, and good government. Protesters and other troublemakers, on the other hand, don't exactly embody peace and order. As we have seen, though, the argument can also be made that the actions of the Canadian state don't always embody good government, either.
Canadians: what do you love about Canada and do you think Canada Day is an appropriate way to celebrate it, in light of all that is going on in the world? Americans: have your opinions about patriotism and what it means to be American changed over the years, and what role do you think the Fourth of July plays in being proud of America? Have you ever celebrated both holidays, and what do you think about them?