Canada Day

Today, July 1st, is Canada Day, a perfect summer day embellished by the presence of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (a.k.a. Will and Kate). The national day of celebration shows every sign of being the biggest and best ever. After 41 1/2 years residence in Canada and 35 years as a Canadian citizen, I still feel partly Australian, so to celebrate the day I'm wearing my lapel pin with the Australian and Canadian flags upon it. Already before midday more than 100,000 people have congregated on Parliament Hill where Prince William, Duke of Cambridge is addressing the crowd, kicking off an afternoon and evening of entertainment.

Now I'm finishing off this post on Monday evening, July 4, the lavish American counterpart of Canada's national birthday. Ultimately over 300,000 gathered on Parliament Hill for this year's birthday celebrations, which culminated in a splendid display of fireworks (our tax dollars at work). David drove up from Kingston, Desre flew in from Toronto and we three went out to Rebecca and Richard's for a barbecue supper, after which David and Desre came back to my pad. I thought they might watch the fireworks from my balcony but they walked up to Parliament Hill to mingle with the throng and saw the fireworks from there. I watched quite a lot of the day's festivities on TV and comparing it with past Canada Days when Wendy and I biked to the Hill, mingled with the crowd, and watched the festivities close up, I thought this year's celebrations were almost as good as those we saw way back then in the days of Pierre Trudeau. One year we rubbed shoulders with him - literally - and I took close up photos of him air-borne when he was on a trampoline. That year the celebrations were the most spectacular in my experience, mainly because of the emphasis on the mosaic of multiculturalism, with wonderful displays of traditional dancing and singing by groups from about 20 of the ethnic and cultural communities that make up the aptly named Mosaic of Canadian Multiculturalism. That must have been 30 years ago, and multiculturalism still flourishes despite the pessimists and nay-sayers who said it wouldn't last. Far from it. Now they are mixing and mingling in multicultural marriages that are producing wonderful rainbows of children in the next generation. I look at them all playing happily together in the playground at First Avenue school (a French immersion school) a couple hundred meters from my condo, and it gives me hope for the future to see how irrelevant skin colour, facial features and hair texture are to these youngsters. They are all Canadian, no matter what they look like on the outside, chattering away mostly in English in the playground, or in Hindi, or Mandarin; then they go into the classroom where all the education is conducted in French. And that seems to me to be one or two or more of the things that make Canada such a wonderful place to live.