Dominion Day and Canada Day
Yearly celebrating the coming-into-force of Acts of Parliament that few celebrating have ever read or thought about.
I decided to head into downtown Ottawa to see what was happening on July 1st.
I was on the line 1 train from Bayview, and there were two young people (a white male and a brown female) where the male was talking about how “unfair” it was that Indigenous and other marginalized people might get a higher priority in hiring at some organizations than he might.
He was making arguments I’ve heard all my life. He was of Irish descent, and I’m of Scottish (mostly), Irish, and a tiny bit of French descent. I know the stories we are told, about how the Irish (and Scottish, and French, and …) were marginalized – by the British, and how the British were supposedly marginalized by the Romans, and how everyone does it to everyone.
I believed these things when I was younger, and I blindly believed what I was told by government run educational institutions, and by other Canadian subsidized cultural, news and other industries – and by the “adults” around me who had been brought up with the same stories.
The problem is, the stories that “everyone does it to everyone” are simply not true.
A social hierarchy (later incorporated into the social construct of “Racism”) was formed from the unique history of the Mediterranean (Western Asia, Northern Africa, Southern/Western parts of Europe). This social hierarchy formed the basis of relations in that specific part of the world, and how those peoples interacted with the rest of the world. It is simply false to believe that “everyone does it to everyone”, and it is itself a Western Eurocentric notion to believe that the cultures that grew out of what became called the “Western world” are somehow “human nature”.
This person spoke specifically about Indigenous peoples, and how they should just “get over it”, and put the past in the past.
After having to listen to this loud commentary for several stops, I added myself to the conversation. I started by explaining how I have a similar background but learned past what I had been told. I was wearing my “Dish With One Spoon” hat and suggested he look into it.
I suggested he look into multi-generational wealth and multi-generational trauma, and how the myth of “equality” that he believed should be the basis of hiring decisions has never existed under Canadian governments.
In order to ensure “fairness” we need to account for those multi-generational impacts that place people like he and I ahead of most people AT BIRTH. That it is not our individual merit that put us ahead, but the luck of what demographic traits we were born with and multi-generational policies which still today advantage us.
They got off at the University of Ottawa train stop, the brown female doing a bit of a dance and thanking me for my intervention. I’m pretty sure the young white male didn’t appreciate it, but there is no way to know if this may spark interest to learn more.
I find it a little concerning how younger people (primarily but not exclusively White males) are facing backwards in time. In my day it was the older generations that were saying these things and the younger generations trying to share newer ideas, and now we had a situation where a retired person was trying to share “modern thinking” with what I believe was a university student.
It is unfortunately common for those who think in terms of individualism to think in extremely short time periods. It is not “fair” for a peoples to carry out atrocities against other peoples for centuries, claim to stop, and say “I haven’t done anything bad for a whole month, lets just pretend nothing happened and treat everyone equally from this moment forward”.
The harm being caused by Canadian settler-colonial policy to other peoples is ongoing. In order to get to a point where treating everyone the same is fair there needs to be a full Truth and Reconcilliation process to repair the damage.
Truth and Reconcilliation isn’t about “other” people getting over the past, but for loyalists to the settler-colonial racist/mysogynist/etc institutions and culture to learn the Truth of those institutions/culture and move forward. It is those who are loyal to these foreign worldviews and institutions who are stuck in the past, not Indigenous peoples.
The things which are celebrated on July 1’st (British North America Acts, Canada Act 1982 — essentially, the Eurocentric Canadian Constitution and Canadian Charter of Eurocentric Priviledges) that represent the past, and need to eventually be put into the past.
Having a few Canadian companies include a few multi-generational impacts in their own hiring practices is far below the bare minimum, and yet we have people still in 2025 being indoctrinated to believe that is somehow “unfair”.
We didn’t have a chance to talk about the day. When I was growing up, July 1st was known as “Dominion Day”, and it celebrated the coming into force of British North America Act 1867, the first of 11 British North America Acts passed by the British parliament that created and maintained the Dominion of Canada governments.
Dominion Day was rebranded as Canada Day, which was to celebrate the coming into force of Canada Act 1982.
I wish more people would read these acts of the British parliament that they are celebrating, and asked some critically important questions.
When was “Canada” born?
What did these Acts of Parliament create?
Is Canada the name of a place, or is “Canada” the name of something else?
Is “Canada” a democracy?
Over recent years I have written my own thoughts on these questions, for anyone else who has read the Acts of British Parliament that are celebrated on July 1st.
