HAPPY BIRTHDAY CANADA! Are you being wished many happy returns?

Today we celebrate the birth of Canada. Usually a birthday isn't considered a day for hurling insults, it's usually reserved for compliments and good wishes -- but not for Canada on July 1st 2020.

On early morning radio detractors start the day by explaining why they don't celebrate Canada's birthday, and others, who do, apologizing for it. (How Canadian can you get? Maybe that IS the celebration.)

One commentator says Canada is "racist", another that it's "colonialist", which seems to amount to the same thing in current social justice-speak. It's interesting to deconstruct the word "colonial" however: a colony is but a collection of people who live, work and share resources for mutual support in what may be a hostile environment. (Even ants and beavers do it.) The Canadian climate and wilderness was certainly hostile for the first farmers, traders, communicators, town-builders, arts-creators and social service providers who settled here. 

"Social services" meant orphanages, hospices, food charities and such as provided by women from backgrounds where "care and share" philosophies were valued (Quaker, evangelical, communitarian, convent-based or whatever). The "communicators" used written words and felt it was worth setting up schools to teach young people to read and write them. 

Gradually these early settlers joined up their colonies up into a nation (note for those who don't read history: we haven't been a colony for quite some time) in which prosperity and voting rights were eventually made available to everyone, constitutional equality and freedom of conscience were protected, and all without a single bloody national Revolution. Tolerance, accommodation, learning to adjust to irrational or resentful criticisms of other citizens were part of the colonial equipment -- and still are. 

So Happy Birthday Canada, and congratulations for being born! No wonder millions of immigrants from all over the world clamour still to settle within your boundaries.

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