Canada Day is in jeopardy. No holiday?
Instead of celebrating Canada Day with holiday cheer, Indigenous representatives are calling for the country to hold a day of mourning, reckoning and solidarity on July 1.
What prompted this decision?
Indigenous people are asking all other Canadians to "put aside pride" and cancel the nationwide holiday in 2021. Minority representatives say they feel great sadness after investigations into unmarked graves at former boarding schools uncovered preliminary evidence of the remains of 215 more children in British Columbia and 751 in Saskatchewan.
Native Canadian Justine Deschenes (aka Algonquin Anishinabe) plans to participate in a march under the hashtag #CancelCanadaDay across the Ottawa River. In her opinion, the slogan does not detract from the message of unity of the nation and empowerment of Indigenous peoples in times of mourning, "I don't understand why #CancelCanadaDay is a bad thing. The whole country is built on genocide. I don't understand why it's celebrated every year," she said.
Cancel Canada Day
The hashtag #CancelCanadaDay was launched on Twitter in early June. It was triggered by the discovery of the remains of Native American children near a boarding school in Kamloops, British Columbia. This sad event was followed by another: a fatal attack on a Muslim family in the city of London, Ontario.
Throughout June, there has been an ongoing debate in the broader Canadian public on the question of whether Canada Day is really necessary! There has been a lot of talk online and in the media that this is not the time for patriotic chest-thumping. That it is time to speak out against the racism to which Indigenous peoples are subjected. And also against Islamophobia.
Sabrina Ghaffar-Siddiqui (Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Sheridan College in Toronto) in an interview The Toronto Star made this statement: "Canada Day should become a day of mourning, not celebration. I don't think we should abolish Canada Day entirely. But we shouldn't celebrate it the way we do now, proudly proclaiming, 'We're Canadians! We're better than the rest of the world. Americans — they're racists. And the British took over and colonized the world. But we Canadians, we are a multicultural people and we welcome immigrants!" Statements like this are beginning to reek of stench. We're beginning to realize that none of this is true.
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