First Freedoms Foundation — Canada Day, July 1, 2026
There is a story told about this country now, mostly from lecture halls and newsrooms, that goes something like this: Canada was founded on theft and cruelty, its history is a record of oppression, and the flag we fly on the first of July is something to apologize for rather than celebrate. I reject that story. Not because our history is spotless, no nation’s is, but because it is not honest. It leaves out the men and women who built this country, defended it, and widened its freedoms, often at great personal cost. On Canada Day, I want to tell some of that other story.
Start with the man who is now treated as the villain of Canadian history: John A. Macdonald. Macdonald inherited a scattering of colonies divided by language and religion, with no shared government, and in 1867 he stitched them into one country. That alone was a feat of persuasion, not conquest. But the achievement I keep coming back to is the railway. Macdonald promised British Columbia a rail line linking it to the rest of Canada within ten years, and British Columbians, who privately expected far less, took him at his word and joined Confederation in 1871. Fourteen years later, on November 7, 1885, the last spike was driven at Craigellachie, and Canada had a steel spine running from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Historians still call it his National Dream. He built a country where none was guaranteed to exist, largely by convincing skeptical, self-interested colonies that they would be better off together than apart. That is not the record of a man who hated the place he built.
Then there is Wilfrid Laurier, our first French-Canadian prime minister, who took office in 1896 in a country still raw from the language and religious battles of the previous decade. Laurier’s answer was what he called “sunny ways,” a phrase borrowed from Aesop’s fable of the sun and the wind. The sun got the traveller to remove his coat through warmth, not force, where the wind had only made him grip it tighter. Laurier told the House of Commons in 1900 that if he had given his political life to anything, it was to promote “unity, harmony and amity between the diverse elements of this country.” He believed English and French, Protestant and Catholic, could share one house without either side being made to kneel. That belief, that Canadians could disagree deeply and still choose conciliation over coercion, is as Canadian an idea as we have ever produced.
And then there is John Diefenbaker, who gave us words that still belong on a wall in every Canadian school. On July 1, 1960, Canada Day itself, Diefenbaker spoke about the Canadian Bill of Rights he had fought to pass, and he described what it meant to be Canadian in a way nobody has bettered since:
“I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who shall govern my country.”
Read that again. Free to speak without fear. Free to worship God in my own way. Those are not abstractions to First Freedoms Foundation. They are the whole of our mission, spoken by a prairie lawyer who never forgot where he came from.
None of that freedom was free. Between 1914 and 1918, roughly 61,000 Canadians died in the First World War, out of a country whose entire population was then under eight million. At Vimy Ridge, over four days in April 1917, four Canadian divisions fighting together for the first time took a ridge the French and British had failed to take in years of trying. It cost 3,598 dead and more than 7,000 wounded, on what remains the bloodiest single day in Canadian military history. Historians still point to Vimy as the moment Canada stopped being a colony in its own mind and became a nation. A generation later, roughly 42,000 more Canadians died in the Second World War. On June 6, 1944, some 14,000 Canadian troops stormed Juno Beach; the Queen’s Own Rifles alone lost half their number in the first minutes on the sand, and by nightfall Canadian forces had pushed further inland than any other Allied army that day. These were not old men sending other people’s sons to die. These were young Canadians: farm boys, clerks, schoolteachers, who crossed an ocean to fight for the idea that free people should not live under tyranny. They did not die so that their great-grandchildren would be taught to be ashamed of them.
That sacrifice is not abstract to me. My maternal grandfather, William Gordon Dawe, was number 97 of the First Five Hundred, the men Newfoundlanders still call the Blue Puttees. He signed up at seventeen and turned eighteen on the ship to England. On July 1, 1916, his regiment went over the top at Beaumont-Hamel on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. Of the roughly 800 men who advanced that morning, only 68 answered roll call the next day. My grandfather was one of them. He lived, but by every account I heard growing up, something in him did not come home from that field.
This is why, in Newfoundland, July 1 has never been only Canada Day. Newfoundlanders began marking it as Memorial Day the year after Beaumont-Hamel, and until Newfoundland joined Confederation in 1949, it was a day of mourning alone. Even after union with Canada, the province never let the celebration replace the remembrance. Growing up, I marched every July 1 morning in the Memorial Day parade as a member of the Church Lads’ Brigade, and only in the afternoon did we turn to the flags and festivities of Canada Day. That order still feels right to me. You do not arrive at the celebration without first walking past the grief.
This is why First Freedoms Foundation exists, and why I think about these men on Canada Day. We advocate for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the inviolability of the person: the idea that your conscience, your voice, and your body belong to you, not to the state, not to a mob, and not to whichever institution currently holds the most power. Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights put the first two into law. The soldiers at Vimy, Juno, and Beaumont-Hamel paid for the right of this country to keep them. Macdonald and Laurier showed that a nation built on compromise rather than conquest could hold together across every difference that might have torn it apart. That is the actual record. It is more complicated, more human, and far more admirable than the flattened morality tale we are handed today.
None of this means looking away from the parts of our history that were wrong. A mature country can hold both things at once: gratitude for what was built, and honesty about what was done badly. What we should not do is let the second erase the first, because a people convinced their country is fundamentally rotten will not defend it, and freedoms that are not defended do not last. That is the vigilance First Freedoms Foundation asks of you: not blind flag-waving, but the clear-eyed kind of pride that knows exactly what it is protecting and why.
So today, fly the flag. Tell your kids about Vimy and about the boy from Saskatchewan who became prime minister and told the world he was free to worship God in his own way. Be honest about the hard chapters, and just as honest about the men who built a country out of scattered colonies and the men who died defending it. We have every reason to be proud of Canada. Happy Canada Day.
— Barry Bussey, First Freedoms Foundation
