Every year, communities mark Canada Day with events from pancake breakfasts to classic car shows, from parades to summer fairs. One event that will be found in towns and cities across the country will be citizenship ceremonies.
New Canadians will swear their oaths and received all the benefits of citizenship, including a Canadian passport and the right to vote and run for office.
Becoming Canadian is thought of as a one-time thing. You’re either born with Canadian citizenship, or you acquire it.
But perhaps this Canada Day, we should consider that becoming Canadian is an ongoing process.
We define what it means to be a Canadian, and what Canada means, when we are engaged in making our society a better place.
Canada has never been a homogeneous country. It’s built on Indigenous land that was, in general, not willingly given up. It was settled and seized by fisherman, fur traders, soldiers, and settlers. At the moment of Confederation, it was composed of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis Nations, and new arrivals that included a host of nationalities, including French, English, Irish, Scottish, and Black descendants of enslaved people.
The Canadian experiment has often been about how all those people, and all those who came after from all over the world, could live together, and that has been, and remains, a difficult process.
It has not been a perfect project, and a list of injustices would have to include residential schools, the Chinese head tax, and the Duplessis orphans, among others.
Which is one reason why the project of defining what it is to be a Canadian has to be an ongoing one.
We can look back with both pride and shame, and say, “We did many things right, we did many things wrong. How can we make amends for what was wrong, and improve on what was right?”
The most important rights we have in Canada are the ones that allow us to take part in the creation of better futures. We’re a diverse country, so that process will always be messy, one with a lot of argument involved.
But it can be done.
We have built institutions worth preserving and celebrating. We have more to do, but every day, new Canadians are born or made who can add their efforts to building a better nation.
– M.C.
