Why Should Westerners Celebrate Canada Day?

Canada Day Was Never About All of Canada.

Source: Adobe Stock

Author: Caitlyn Madlener

Each year on July 1st, Canadians take a day off to celebrate our country. Flags are waved, fireworks lit, and maple leaves adorn every nook and cranny.

Of course, for most of Canada’s history, this day did not exist.

Dominion Day, as it was previously known, commemorated the 1867 union of the United Canadas (Ontario and Quebec) with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into a single dominion under the British Empire. Therefore, the appropriate name was chosen to commemorate the day’s historical events.

You may note, however, that the map of this historic celebration bears little resemblance to what Canada looks like today. In fact, it is missing the majority of the country we are currently familiar with.

How did a day that originally symbolized the union of just four of Canada’s ten provinces evolve into a celebration embraced by the entire nation?

Surprisingly, the answer has to do with separatism.

Quebeckers, naturally, never felt the same sense of pride in Dominion Day as the rest of the country. Over the 1960s and 1970s, the cultural differences between Quebec and the rest of the country started to flare up. As provincial pride grew, many in the province rejected Dominion Day and chose to celebrate their province, rather than their country, on St. Jean Baptiste Day.

Of course, as time went on, separatist sentiments grew, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau saw himself as the man to repair the divide with Quebec.

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One of the ways Trudeau attempted to alleviate discontent among Quebeckers was to rename Dominion Day to Canada Day and paint over its British origins in favour of constructing a more generic and mundane holiday.

So, on Friday, July 9, 1982, at 4:00 P.M., as the House of Commons emptied in anticipation of the weekend and only 13 of 282 Members of Parliament remained in the chamber, the Liberal Party brought forward a private member’s motion to rename Dominion Day to Canada Day. Before the Conservative opposition had even realized what was happening, the motion passed with “unanimous” consent.

The national holiday we celebrate today was therefore born not through some thoughtfully debated national consensus, but through a remarkably slimy parliamentary maneuver that erased a piece of Canadian history with little more than 13 lazily muttered “ayes.”

It requires a unique form of arrogance to name a day as if it represented the formation of the entire country, when in reality, it commemorates the union of less than half the provinces that now make up Canada.

You have to give the Americans credit: at least the name of their celebration accurately describes the event being celebrated. While Canada shies away from its past, Americans embrace the circumstances of their country’s founding with Independence Day, rather than some silly “America Day”.

Since the first Liberal Prime Minister, Liberal governments in Ottawa have sought to invent new national symbols in an attempt to manufacture a shared Canadian identity - one that mostly reflects Eastern priorities over Western ones. It seems the Liberal Party’s sole purpose is to concoct meaningless events or symbols in an attempt to find the ever-elusive “Canadian identity”.

The Canadian Flag itself is perhaps the clearest example of Eastern appeasement. Adopted in 1965, the flag was similarly passed in greasy fashion during a 2:00 A.M. sitting just ten days before Christmas. In searching for a symbol that supposedly represented the entire country, Ottawa ultimately chose the leaf of a tree found almost entirely in Ontario and Quebec. (Naturally, the Liberals also supported changing the original blue bars on either side of the maple leaf, intended to represent the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to Liberal red).

Imagine if the American flag featured a Chesapeake Bay oyster; it would be utterly ridiculous and not exactly relatable on the plains of Texas or in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

It becomes obvious the longer one looks that Ottawa’s approach to Canadian identity is forcing the rest of the country to embrace Eastern history, symbols, and identity as universally Canadian. Even their geographical terms are slanted towards the East, with Laurentians preferring the term “Central Canada” for a region about 1,700 kilometres east of the longitudinal centre of Canada.

It all begs the question: Why should Westerners celebrate Canada Day?