A love letter to Canada, with eyes wide open.
What does it mean to be Canadian?
Every year on July 1st, Canadians gather for Canada Day. Fireworks, flags, barbecues, poutine. A collective exhale into summer, a shared moment of pride in the country we call home.
And every year, I find myself sitting with a question that doesn’t have a simple answer: what are we actually celebrating?
I ask this not with cynicism, but with love. The complicated, clear-eyed love you can only have for something you know deeply, something that has given you so much and that you also wish would do better.
I am Canadian. I am proud of that. And I think being proud of something means being honest about it too.
What Canada has given me
Let me start with gratitude, because it is real and it is enormous.
I carry a Canadian passport. That small blue booklet has opened the world to me in ways I don’t take lightly, especially when I’ve watched others go without. I’ve seen friends with Argentinian passports refused entry to countries I walk into without a second glance. I’ve watched my family in Tunisia navigate humiliating visa processes just to visit France or Canada, countries that would welcome me without question. The passport I was born into is not a neutral document. It is a privilege, and I know it.
Beyond the passport: I grew up with access to education. Real education, accessible to anyone regardless of income. I have never had to choose between going to school and eating. I have never been turned away from a hospital because I couldn’t pay. In Canada, you can arrive at an emergency room with nothing in your pocket and still be treated. That is not nothing. That is extraordinary, actually, when you hold it against the reality of most of the world.
I love that children are protected here. That you will never see a child sleeping in the street, that systems exist, however imperfect, to catch the ones who fall. I love that when human rights are threatened, Canadians go into the street and demand better. That dissent is not just tolerated but expected. That people here believe, genuinely, that things can be more just than they are.
And I love poutine. Some things are simply true.
The land that welcomes everyone
Canada is, at its best, a country that says: come. Whoever you are, wherever you are from, there is room for you here.
I have lived that promise. My family came from Tunisia and built a life in Montreal. I grew up between two cultures, two languages, two ways of understanding the world, and Canada held all of it without asking me to choose. That generosity of identity, that particular Canadian willingness to let people be complicated and multiple, is something I love deeply about this country.
Canada is one of the most diverse nations on earth. Walk down any street in Montreal or Toronto and you are walking through the whole world. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because somewhere in the founding idea of this country was the belief that more people, more cultures, more ways of being human, make us richer rather than smaller.
I believe that too. I have lived it.
But whose land is this?
And yet.
The land that welcomes everyone from everywhere has a much harder time welcoming the people who were here first.
I have spent time living and working in Inuit communities in Nunavik and Cree communities in Eeyou Istchee in northern Quebec. And what I encountered there, what I carry with me still, is not what most Canadians know about their own country.
I encountered wisdom. A profound, embodied understanding of the land, the seasons, the cycles of the earth that most of us have entirely lost. Inuit and Cree don’t just live near nature. They live inside it, in genuine symbiosis with it. They understand its language in ways that can’t be learned from a book or a weekend in the woods. They know when the fish come and when they don’t. They read the ice, the wind, the sky. They carry knowledge passed down through generations that has kept people alive in some of the harshest conditions on earth.
And Canada has spent much of its history trying to erase that.
The residential schools. The Sixties Scoop. The ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Drinking water advisories that are still active today in communities across this country. The lack of access to the same quality of healthcare, education, safety and shelter that southern Canadians take for granted. These are not ancient history. They are happening right now, today, on Canada Day, while the fireworks go up.
So what are we celebrating?
Sedna, goddess of the sea
Let me tell you a story. One I first heard while living in Nunavik, told to me by a woman who knew it the way you know something that belongs to your bones.
Sedna was a beautiful Inuit girl who lived with her father. Vain and proud, she refused every hunter who came to marry her. One day, her father, desperate for food, told her she had no choice. A well-dressed hunter arrived at their camp, his face hidden, and Sedna was placed in his kayak against her will. When they reached a desolate island of bare rock and cliff, the hunter revealed himself. He was not a man but a raven in disguise. Sedna’s new home was tufts of animal hair and cold stone. Her only food, raw fish.
She cried for her father, and eventually he came. They fled together in his kayak, but the raven pursued them, flapping his wings over the ocean until a violent storm rose up. Terrified, Sedna’s father did the unthinkable. He threw her overboard to save himself.
She clung to the side of the kayak, fingers grasping the wood. He beat her hands with a paddle. Her frozen fingers broke off and sank to the bottom of the sea, where they transformed into seals, whales and the creatures of the deep. Sedna sank with them.
But she did not perish.
Sedna became, and still is, the goddess of the sea. The seals and whales are her companions. Her fury at what was done to her is what stirs violent storms. Hunters respect her deeply. Shamans must dive down to her and comb her long tangled hair to calm her, and only then does she release her creatures so the Inuit can eat from the bounty of the sea. To this day, after a hunter catches a seal, he drops water into its mouth as an offering, thanking Sedna for allowing him to feed his family.
This is one story. One. From one of the hundreds of Indigenous nations that have called this land home since long before it was called Canada.
Why don’t we know these stories? Why are they not taught in every school, told around every campfire, honored the way we honor the stories that shaped Europe? That is a question worth sitting with today.
What you can do
Reconciliation is not only a government project. It is a personal one.
This summer, if you want to do something that means something, here are a few places to start:
Go to a Pow wow. They happen across the country all summer long, and they are open to everyone. Go with respect, with curiosity, with your whole self. You will not leave the same.
Visit an Indigenous community if you have the opportunity. Listen more than you speak.
Buy art from an Indigenous artist. Their work is extraordinary, rooted in cosmologies and traditions that stretch back thousands of years, and your purchase goes directly to them and their community.
Learn one story. Sedna. Coyote. Raven. Nanabozho. Pick one and go deeper. Let it change something in how you see this land.
There is so much to be proud of in Indigenous culture across this country. The art, the language, the ceremony, the relationship with the earth. Canada is richer for it. We would do well to act like it.
What I wish for Canada
I wish for a Canada that is as generous with its First Peoples as it is with the rest of the world. That extends to them the same dignity, access and care that it extends to the immigrants it proudly welcomes. That listens to their wisdom about the land, because that wisdom is desperately needed right now, by all of us.
I wish for a Canada that reconciles, truly, not as a political gesture but as a lived reality.
And I wish for a Canada that keeps asking the hard questions, the way I am asking them today, not because the asking is comfortable, but because the countries that ask are the ones that grow.
Happy Canada Day. Canada is only as strong as the people who cared for it for thousands of years.
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