It’s easy to talk abstractly about cancelling Canada Day—to share tweets and hashtags and Instagram graphics—but more useful to actually take action. The large-scale conversations we’re having about the holiday’s relationship with colonial violence are long overdue: many Indigenous people have been spearheading them for years, and it shouldn’t have taken the discovery of so […]
cancel Canada Day
Posted inArts + Music
Why Canada Day should be cancelled: your guide to music, film and writing of the truth
This year, there will be no fireworks slashing the sky above Halifax Harbour. There will be no spots on the Common where concert crowds have trampled the grass to death. While the city’s official website says that COVID-19’s third wave in Nova Scotia is what stopped HRM from planning Canada Day programming, many of us […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Why I *still* choose not to celebrate Canada Day
Barbara Kentner. Colten Boushie. Tina Fontaine. Joyce Echaquan. Rodney Levi. Chantel Moore. These are the names of only a fraction of the Indigenous people who Canada and its systems have let down since 2015, when my first article about July 1 came out in The Coast. The magnitude of each of their names should weigh […]