True Left

A major Canadian city and at least one First Nation have formally cancelled Canada Day because they don’t want to honour “attempted genocide” against Indigenous peoples. 

The decision follows Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s discovery of 215 undocumented children, including some as young as 3, buried under a former Catholic-run residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. There are likely many more sites like it across the country.

“The history of our country’s genocidal relationship with First Nations has been once again revealed in a way that is painful,” Victoria mayor Lisa Helps wrote in a motion, following consultations with Indigenous leaders.
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Victoria city council announced Thursday it voted unanimously to cancel its planned virtual celebration. The city will instead hold an event in September to highlight Indigenous stories and histories.

Keewaywin First Nation in Ontario also declared on Thursday that it will no longer recognize Canada’s birthday.

“Keewaywin First Nation calls on the federal government to carry out exhaustive investigations of all former residential school grounds across the country,” the First Nation’s statement says. “Until then, Keewaywin will mark Canada Day as a day of mourning.”

According to the statement, July 1 will be used to pay tribute to residential school student and their families and to “acknowledge the role the Canadian government and the churches played in the attempted genocide of Indigenous people.”
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It’s hardly the first time people have called on  government officials to cancel Canada Day. In 2017, as Canada geared up to celebrate the country’s 150th birthday—the official celebration in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, costing upwards of $500 million—Indigenous folks all over and their allies abstained from celebrating.

“The fact that half a billion dollars was found to throw the party is no surprise—however it does come as a shock to those communities without drinking water who have been historically told infrastructure is just too damn expensive in remote communities,” writer Ryan McMahon wrote at the time.
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Way back when Canada Day was still “Dominion Day,” Chinese people referred to it as “humiliation day” and boycotted the event because it landed on the same day that the exclusionary Chinese Immigration Act, which banned most Chinese immigration, passed in 1923.

Instead of Canada Day, Idle No More, an ongoing Indigenous justice movement, has announced several rallies taking place across the country to honour “all of the lives lost to the Canadian State—Indigenous lives, Black Lives, Migrant lives, Women and Trans and Two Spirit lives—all of the relatives that we have lost.”

“We refuse to sit idle while Canada’s violent history is celebrated,” Idle No More’s site says.

The reigning monarch is Queen Elizabeth II, who is also monarch of 15 other Commonwealth countries and each of Canada's 10 provinces. The person who is the Canadian monarch is the same as the British monarch