Transcription
Happy Dominion Day.
When people say Happy Canada Day to you, what exactly are we celebrating? It sounds like a simple question. Canada Day comes every year. We put on red and white. We wave the maple leaf. We watch fireworks over lakes and cities. But if you ask the average Canadian what it means to be a Canadian and what we are celebrating on Canada Day, you would struggle to find a concise and coherent answer.
We're told Canada is about diversity. We're told it's about multiculturalism, the mosaic. We're told that Canada is a new type of country, a post-national state. We're told that our history is something to be forgotten and reinterpreted rather than honored. But none of that explains why a nation deserves to exist and what it actually is. A country is more than just an economic zone or a health care policy and its geography. A country is a people, a civilization, a shared inheritance stretching across generations. That is what Dominion Day is supposed to be all about.
The name itself tells us something, not Canada Day, Dominion Day. Sir John A. Macdonald and the Fathers of Confederation deliberately chose that word to describe our country. It comes from scripture. "He shall have dominion also from sea to sea." It is that idea, that passage from scripture that would become our founding national motto. Amari Usque Admari, from sea to sea. It's in our code of arms. A vision of a country not defined by its size or its bureaucracy, but by continuity, a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
And before the Maple Leaf, there was the Red Ensign. It flew over Parliament, over government buildings. It flew on ships crossing the Atlantic. It flew at Vimy and Normandy. It flew wherever Canadians were called to defend something larger than themselves. And look at the shield it carried. England, Scotland, Ireland, France. The civilizational foundations that shaped Canada's institutions. Parliamentary democracy, common law, civil law, traditions, ordered liberty, the idea that freedom is preserved not by accidents but by careful and intentional stewardship. Those symbols defined our inheritance as Canadians as well as our founding Christian moral values.
For more than a century, this country had a collective understanding of who we were and what we are. People came from many countries. They brought languages and customs and traditions. But the expectation was clear. They were choosing to become part of a common national identity under one flag under one political system all in one country.
And before Canada became a country, there were the explorers who crossed into an unknown continent. Champlain, McKenzie, David Thompson, Simon Fraser, the voyagers and trappers who followed rivers no map had drawn. Men who endured harsh winters and extreme conditions that most of the world could not survive. Canada was built by those people from nothing. It was built with axes and rail lines through farms carved out of dense forest and prairie by miners working deep underground. Built by early settler communities surviving isolation, distance, and cold that defined our land. It was built by people who accepted that hardship because they believed they were building something that would last.
And when our country was threatened, Canadians defended it. In 1812, British regulars, Canadian militia, French Canadians, and indigenous warriors resisted invasion at Queenston Heights, Chrysler's Farm, and Chateauguay. Moments that ensured Canada would not be absorbed by the revolutionary republic, unrooted by the historical traditions that Canadians loyally devoted themselves to defending. Those battles shaped our borders today and defined Canada's place in the world. And of course that pattern continued at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele and Juno Beach, the skies over Europe, Cap-Yong and Afghanistan, a country that would again and again step far beyond its size in the world stage.
And yet somewhere along the way, we began to struggle to define this inheritance to ourselves. We moved away from the single unifying Canadian story into this pluralistic mindset. Canada would officially embrace state multiculturalism as official state policy in the early 1970s under Pierre Trudeau. Building on previous work from the Pearson era, this included the adoption of the Maple Leaf and the elimination of the Red Ensign. The changes were designed to reflect a changing country, a new Canada, and it did. But that new Canada identity came at the expense of Canada's true identity. Increasingly, Canada would come to recognize itself not as having one identity, but adopting the cultural mosaic as its defining symbol. Diversity would become the defining principle of Canadian identity.
Now, the man responsible for Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald, who had the willpower and the sheer ambition to build one of the greatest countries in the world, is today seen as the chief villain of Canadian history by our institutions. His name is being erased. His statues have been toppled. He is no longer, in the eyes of Canada's most powerful individuals, seen as worthy of any genuine praise. But you simply cannot celebrate Dominion Day without honoring and celebrating the achievements and tireless work of Macdonald. Without Macdonald, you don't have Canada.
The question we should be asking ourselves is, what actually holds a country like Canada together? Our nation cannot just be sustained on geography alone and increasingly out of touch institutions. It requires us to embrace something we all share. Our shared national story, our shared symbols and the heroes of Canadian history. A vision of Canada and who we are that we can actually understand and define because without that there is no nation to preserve.
Dominion Day once reminded Canadians of what we actually are and who we are. It was renamed to Canada Day in 1982 and over time the older meaning had faded. We slowly stopped remembering what we were celebrating and instead focused on the trivial aspects of Canada. Now, Canada has made mistakes. No serious country is without them. But if all we are being taught and told about is what we have done wrong in the past, many people will continue to conclude that there is nothing worth defending anyway. And it must be known that a nation that will not defend itself in memory will not defend itself in reality.
So what should we do with this inheritance? We should strive to become once again a people who understand what they are part of and who we are. That is what Dominion Day was. That is what Canada is and that is what must remain.
Happy Dominion Day.