The Canada That Immigrants Built—And Still Believe In
For Canada Day 2025
There’s a quiet but growing hostility toward Canada Day—heard in classrooms, whispered through HR departments, declared with certainty in university offices and activist circles. This hostility isn’t just about history; it’s about legitimacy. A creeping narrative insists that Canada is not merely flawed, but fundamentally illegitimate—a “settler project,” a colonial construct, an experiment gone wrong.
But here’s the inconvenient truth no one dares shout on July 1st: millions of immigrants still believe in Canada—and not because they’ve been duped, but because they’ve lived without it.
These are not people who arrived with maple leaves in their eyes or dreams shaped by multicultural brochures. Many came from chaos, censorship, persecution, and state collapse. They did not inherit Canada—they chose it. And the belief they hold in this country, even as elites tear at its foundations, is perhaps our last great source of national renewal.
Gratitude Is Not Submission—It’s Moral Clarity
The activist class loves to mock the “grateful immigrant.” But what they call naivety, many immigrants call perspective. They know what tyranny smells like. They’ve walked past bodies left in ditches, kissed sons goodbye at secret airports, or buried friends whose only crime was dissent. They’ve seen theocracies burn women alive for dancing and watched failed states cannibalize their own people.
And so when they arrive in Canada—however imperfect, however bureaucratic—they feel something that’s become rare in this country: conviction. They don’t worship Canada. They critique it, fight to improve it, and know full well where it falls short. But unlike the well-fed nihilists born into freedom, they understand something essential: Canada is not a given—it is an achievement.
Gratitude is not the same as submission. It’s not a silencing tactic. It’s the moral clarity to know that freedom is precious—and fragile.
The Immigrant as Founder, Not Just Guest
We love to talk about immigration as a contribution. But that’s too small a word. Immigrants didn’t just contribute to Canada—they helped found it.
The country we inhabit was carved by hands that didn’t belong to the British elite. Chinese labourers bled into the tracks of the CPR. Black Caribbean nurses filled our hospitals when no one else would. Portuguese and Italian stonemasons laid the foundations of our cities. Somali-Canadians built thriving businesses in Toronto. Ismaili refugees fled Uganda’s terror and rewove their lives into the civic fabric of Alberta.
They didn’t just bring food, colour, or “vibrancy.” They brought resilience, sacrifice, and civic renewal. They gave this country something our institutions have forgotten: belief.
In 2024, you could still find Afghan teens enlisting in the Canadian Armed Forces. Ukrainian refugees waving the flag not as kitsch but as gratitude. Iranian dissidents who name their Canadian-born daughters after murdered protesters back home. That’s not performative multiculturalism. That’s civic commitment.
When Belief Is a Radical Act
In today’s progressive circles, expressing belief in Canada has become subversive. The Canadian flag is now a “colonial symbol.” Canada Day, we are told, is a “trigger.” Public institutions stumble over themselves to issue land acknowledgements and reparative hashtags, while refusing to defend the basic idea of Canada itself.
And yet—outside the corridors of CBC panels, DEI workshops, and downtown campus lounges—you will find ordinary immigrants who still believe. Not in a myth. But in a country where your past does not dictate your future. Where the rule of law, however sluggish, still holds. Your daughter will not be arrested for walking alone. Where your son can protest the government without disappearing.
These things aren’t abstract to the immigrant—they are concrete, visceral, and often generational. That’s why you don’t find many newcomers crying for revolution. They know what comes after revolution—and it usually isn’t democracy.
Civic Patriotism Is Not Optional—It’s Necessary
Canada is more than a parcel of land. It is a civic promise: that people from irreconcilable pasts can build a shared future. You do not have to erase your heritage to belong, but you must commit to the civic project in return.
This idea is under siege—from the woke left, which sees Canada as inherently illegitimate, and from the identitarian right, which sees newcomers as permanent outsiders. Both reject a civic nation. Both prefer a nation of blood or grievance.
But immigrants—the ones who see themselves as Canadians, not as hyphenated visitors—reject this false binary. They know that the nation cannot survive on policy alone. It needs belief. It needs buy-in. It needs citizenship not as paperwork, but as a duty.
And that duty must be reciprocal. If we ask immigrants to invest in Canada, we must defend Canada as something worthy of investment. Not perfect. Not sacred. But salvageable. Fixable. Worth it.
Why the Elites Have Lost the Plot—and Immigrants Haven’t
There’s a generational disconnect here that no one wants to admit.
Too many Canadian-born intellectuals have inherited liberty but treat it like trash. They confuse freedom with fragility. They take civic peace for granted because they’ve never seen its opposite. Their radicalism is unearned. Their dissent is indulgent.
Meanwhile, the immigrant knows how rare Canada really is. She knows that stable institutions, peaceful elections, bilingual ballots, and equal rights don’t fall from the sky. They’re not inevitable. They’re inherited, protected, and paid for—often in silence.
So when she sees mobs tearing down statues or schools cancelling Canada Day or journalists mocking patriotism as outdated, she doesn’t feel radical. She feels betrayed.
Canada Day Belongs to Believers
This Canada Day, the country will once again be split between those who celebrate and those who seethe. The media will amplify voices calling for reflection, silence, or abolition. But there is another voice—quieter, prouder, grounded in sacrifice and memory—that still whispers: This country gave me a second chance. This country is worth defending.
It’s the voice of the single mother who sends her child to school in a flag t-shirt even when the teacher scowls. The father who installs a flagpole in front of his Brampton duplex not to boast, but to honour. The grandmother, who can barely speak English, votes in every municipal election because she never could back home.
These aren’t optics. They’re acts of loyalty.
They are the invisible backbone of a country too embarrassed to name its own virtues.
Time to Listen to the People Who Chose Canada
Canada is not a settler myth. It’s not a shame to be managed. It’s a real country, built by real people, many of whom had the option to go elsewhere—and didn’t.
They chose Canada. And they still do. At a time when political trust is collapsing across the West, and when many Canadians born here are turning toward despair, immigrants remain some of the last believers in the Canadian project.
Not because they’re naive. But because they remember what it’s like to have nothing to believe in at all.
This Canada Day, if we want to know whether this country is still worth celebrating, don’t ask the professors or the professional activists.
Ask the people who chose it.