What we celebrate when we celebrate Canada Day

But for a growing group of others, expressions of national pride and satisfaction are more subdued, tempered by acknowledgments of this country’s historic failures and contemporary shortcomings.

For others still, any celebration of Canada is entirely unthinkable, so shameful and broken a place our country has seemed to become.

To be sure, realistic self-appraisal is healthy. Seeking to atone and do better is laudable. There is always — in nation-building as in personal development — the imperative to strive for better.

Still, as more than 40 million of us observe the 157th anniversary of Confederation, in a world troubled by wars and inequity, a planet threatened by climate change, established orders challenged by mass migration, Canada has much for which to be grateful.

Recent rankings by various think-tanks and global organizations and media report Canada as the fourth best country in the world in which to live, the safest in which to travel and the 15th in world happiness, second in that category among G7 nations.

We regularly score well in the crucial democracy measures of transparency, civil liberties, and areas such as economic freedom, education levels, gender equity and public services.

Of course, there are no utopias here on Earth.

Without question, Canadians face serious and pressing challenges, especially in housing affordability and health-care services.

We have slid in some categories, including livable cities. Of particular concern, and requiring urgent response, are findings that Canadians under 30 report being far less happy than their elders.

The young — here as elsewhere around the world — have been shortchanged by an economy that is far less generous to them than it was to their parents. Moreover, the problems they face — access to housing and health — are the kind of fundamental necessities on which contentment, security and quality of life are often based.

And then, of course, there is the persistent shame of the injustices done to Indigenous people in this country, both historically and to this day, as we take the first long overdue steps along the path of reconciliation.

It does no service to Canada to turn a blind eye to our many and serious flaws, to pretend away the plight of all those who have been left out of or let down by the Canadian promise.

Nor are we well served by those among us, including ambitious political leaders, who are all too eager to portray the country as a hellscape, characterizations almost Trumpian in their duplicity and opportunism.

Those who seek political advantage savaging this country are guilty of both scapegoating and peddling the delusion that there are easy fixes to complex problems.

As the late U.S. congressman John Lewis said, the struggle for social justice and the business of building a better country is “not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year; it is the struggle of a lifetime.”

That struggle is made harder by the divisions that increasingly mark this day. Year by year, particularly since the pandemic began, the chasm has grown between those with radically different views of what this country is and should be. This is of course a symptom of a larger divide, a profound polarization.

The inability to see one another across that divide is a threat to democracies around the world. But maybe we are better placed than most countries to find a way forward together despite our differences. After all, Canada is a country built on precarious compromise, not tethered across our vast geography and diverse communities by language, blood or soil. Canada Day is a reminder, then, not only of how divided we are, but also of what can be achieved when, despite our differences, we find common cause, common values, the comfort of community and mutual support, the collective will to strive to be better.

It is those things — what they have built in this country, what they will build as we grow — that we celebrate on Canada Day.