Best we forget?

What a difference a year makes. Just twelve months ago, it almost seemed reasonable to imagine Canada scrapping Remembrance Day altogether and tossing the poppy into the discard bin of colonial relics. A new Zeitgeist was emerging. According to the new secular catechism, those who fought and died for Canada were to be recast as hapless instruments of genocidal settler colonialism.

Implausible? Answer me this: When was the last time you met anyone who paused to commemorate the valiant Canadians of the Boer War, men who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep South Africa British?

Now recall how the Truth and Reconciliation had curdled into ritualized self-loathing. Canadians dutifully donned their Orange Shirts and lined up to chant the liturgy of guilt. Catholic residential schools were cast as the symbolic scapegoat—quite literally, in the Levitical sense: no differently than the Israelites’ high priest laying hands on the beast to transfer the nation’s sins before sending it off into the wilderness. Guilt expelled, national virtue restored.

Parenthetically, almost every detail of the Orange Shirt narrative is demonstrably false, but we digress.

Now fast forward to 2023, when Kimberly Murray, Canada’s Independent Special Interlocutor, delivered her final report. A close reading of this document leaves one with the distinct impression that Canada and former South Africa are not very different. Negotiations between Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian state, she insisted, must occur on a nation-to-nation basis in order to dismantle existing colonial structures. Indigenous Peoples, she argued, are not and never were subjects of the Crown.

Translation: if your father’s family tree doesn’t include an Indigenous branch, you are a long-term squatter with an unpaid debt, and shame on you.

So, has anything changed since? Ah, yes: last year’s polls. The Liberals were headed for electoral disaster, and as Samuel Johnson famously observed, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. With Trump as a cardboard bogeyman, the Liberals re-embraced swaggering, performative nationalism: elbows up, flags unfurled, and behold a sudden revival of suppressed patriotism.

No more mention was made of Justin Trudeau’s earlier pontifications, "There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,'' and consequently that "makes us the first post-national state.

But before we again all put on poppies while momentarily forgetting last year’s Orange Shirt hectoring, we should pause and ask: what, exactly, is Canada?

We are unable to answer that question with clarity because we remain caught in a loop, toggling between performative guilt and opportunistic patriotism. Like the sheep in Orwell’s Animal Farm, Canadians are urged to bleat whatever slogan is handed down from above.

A reality check is in order. We must focus our inquiry: Was our nation indeed built on stolen land?

Many scholars point out that migration and territorial movement are constants of human history, true even for Aboriginal peoples long before the first Europeans appeared. To brand Europeans as invaders simply for arriving on North American shores is to assume a small population had the authority to call dibs on an entire hemisphere, just because they arrived first. Some imagined perpetual ancestral right to an entire continent is not a true reckoning with history; it is a rejection of the entire arc of human existence.

In a different display of cognitive dissonace, Canadians have somehow forget the heroism of Indigenous veterans. Some 12,000 Aboriginal men and women served in the World Wars and the Korean conflict, with hundreds making the ultimate sacrifice—for Canada. These were not hapless dupes of a colonial enterprise. They fought shoulder to shoulder with non-Indigenous comrades as proud patriots, inspired by the shared civic ideals of duty, service, and sacrifice learned in the very Residential Schools viewed solely now through the lens of condemnation.

So, the deeper question remains: What is Canada?

Is it, as progressive orthodoxy insists, a nation born in sin, a land taken unjustly, and stained beyond repair? A place where pride is suspect and history is something to be apologized for rather than remembered?

Or is it a country like most others, imperfect and evolving, shaped by hardship, heroism, and a shared belief in something greater than grievance? A nation built not only on conflict but on common purpose, where pride and reckoning can live side by side?

Until we answer that plainly, we will drift between self-loathing and jingoistic patriotism, never certain whether to bury this country or celebrate it.