I'm in Savannah, Georgia right now. See above (iPhone) photo taken from River Street. My dad and I are road tripping from West Palm Beach to Toronto in order to bring his car back to the city. So why not check out a few, new, cities along the way? I have my Fujifilm with me, but I won't be posting any of those photos until I'm back in Toronto. Happy Canada Day weekend.

Happy Canada Day to the Canadian readers of this blog. Here is a picture that I took of the CN Tower a few weeks ago just after sunset from Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (YTZ). It also symbolizes Canada for me. 80mm f/1.2 in case you’re wondering.

In some parts of this country, July 1st has another, perhaps more laborious, significance: It is “moving day.” In 18th century Quebec it was forbidden for les seigneurs to evict farming tenants during the winter, a law that was simply inherited from France at the time.

As time went on, this evolved into a law – baked into the Civil Code of Lower Canada (1866) – requiring that all residential leases run from May 1 to April 30. May 1 was “moving day.”

In 1973, it was determined that May 1 was too disruptive to children in school and so an extension was granted on all leases, automatically pushing the date to July 1. It also meant moving in the summer, as opposed to in the spring when weather can be unpredictable in Quebec.

The requirement of fixed lease terms was also removed at this time (1974 onward), but tradition has persisted and July 1 remains known as “moving day.” This seems to me like a logistical nightmare and a highly impractical way of allocating resources, but perhaps I’m just missing some of the nuances.

In any event, whether you’re sitting on a dock reading the Canadian Constitution Act of 1867 with a Brickworks cider, moving all of your belongings (in what is a hot weekend), or doing something completely different, I hope you’re having a good one. Happy Canada Day.

Today is Canada Day. And I love my country. (If you’re reading this via email subscription, then: Yesterday was Canada Day.)

I recognize that not everyone who reads this blog is Canadian. In fact, 50% of my email subscribers and 36% of the users who read this blog on the web are actually from the United States. More Americans subscribe to this blog than Canadians.

But today isn’t your average Canada Day. It’s the sesquicentennial anniversary of Canadian Confederation. Canadians all across the country and world are and will be celebrating. 

The CN Tower will put on a pyrotechnics show this evening at 10:30pm and I’ll be watching. There’s even the world’s largest rubber ducky bobbing around in Lake Ontario. I’m missing the connection on this one, but a 6 storey rubber ducky is definitely worthy of an Instagram post or two. Perhaps we should have gone all out and staged a complete bathtub scene in Toronto’s inner harbor. That would have been fun.

But as much as 150 years of Canada sounds and feels great, I’d like to talk about a different moniker today: Canada 150(ish). And I have two reasons for saying this.

One the most effective ways to explain the difference between Canada and the United States is to talk about how we became independent.

In the U.S. it was a “decisive declaration” leading to war. Americans fought for their independence and July 4, 1776 has become a clear temporal marker. They were dependent before and independent after.

In Canada, our day of independence is less decisive. Instead of complete autonomy, it marks the beginning of a long and gradual process of becoming less and less British, one which arguably didn’t fully conclude until the Canada Act of 1982. 

So might we call today Canada 35?

One could also argue that this process isn’t fully complete. I don’t know about you, but our lingering connections to Britain – however benign they may be – actually weaken the Canadian story for me.

The second reason why I’m throwing out Canada 150(ish) is because I want to acknowledge the fact that there are people in this country who feel excluded from the solidarity that “Canada 150″ is trying to instil. Here is an excerpt from a New Yorker essay by Molly Worthen that was published early this morning:

Of course, the story of Confederation is largely a story of white men who mostly spoke English. This summer, the few Canadians who are eager to talk about history and reexamine the details of their constitution are those who feel excluded from the standard narrative of Canadian unity and progress: indigenous people and Francophone Québécois.

Now that I’ve gotten this off my chest, I’m going to get on with celebrating Canada 150 and this incredible place of democracy and opportunity. And for all of the Americans who read this blog, happy 4th of July.

Photo by Harry Sandhu on Unsplash

I'm in Savannah, Georgia right now. See above (iPhone) photo taken from River Street. My dad and I are road tripping from West Palm Beach to Toronto in order to bring his car back to the city. So why not check out a few, new, cities along the way? I have my Fujifilm with me, but I won't be posting any of those photos until I'm back in Toronto. Happy Canada Day weekend.

Happy Canada Day to the Canadian readers of this blog. Here is a picture that I took of the CN Tower a few weeks ago just after sunset from Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (YTZ). It also symbolizes Canada for me. 80mm f/1.2 in case you’re wondering.

In some parts of this country, July 1st has another, perhaps more laborious, significance: It is “moving day.” In 18th century Quebec it was forbidden for les seigneurs to evict farming tenants during the winter, a law that was simply inherited from France at the time.

As time went on, this evolved into a law – baked into the Civil Code of Lower Canada (1866) – requiring that all residential leases run from May 1 to April 30. May 1 was “moving day.”

In 1973, it was determined that May 1 was too disruptive to children in school and so an extension was granted on all leases, automatically pushing the date to July 1. It also meant moving in the summer, as opposed to in the spring when weather can be unpredictable in Quebec.

The requirement of fixed lease terms was also removed at this time (1974 onward), but tradition has persisted and July 1 remains known as “moving day.” This seems to me like a logistical nightmare and a highly impractical way of allocating resources, but perhaps I’m just missing some of the nuances.

In any event, whether you’re sitting on a dock reading the Canadian Constitution Act of 1867 with a Brickworks cider, moving all of your belongings (in what is a hot weekend), or doing something completely different, I hope you’re having a good one. Happy Canada Day.

Today is Canada Day. And I love my country. (If you’re reading this via email subscription, then: Yesterday was Canada Day.)

I recognize that not everyone who reads this blog is Canadian. In fact, 50% of my email subscribers and 36% of the users who read this blog on the web are actually from the United States. More Americans subscribe to this blog than Canadians.

But today isn’t your average Canada Day. It’s the sesquicentennial anniversary of Canadian Confederation. Canadians all across the country and world are and will be celebrating. 

The CN Tower will put on a pyrotechnics show this evening at 10:30pm and I’ll be watching. There’s even the world’s largest rubber ducky bobbing around in Lake Ontario. I’m missing the connection on this one, but a 6 storey rubber ducky is definitely worthy of an Instagram post or two. Perhaps we should have gone all out and staged a complete bathtub scene in Toronto’s inner harbor. That would have been fun.

But as much as 150 years of Canada sounds and feels great, I’d like to talk about a different moniker today: Canada 150(ish). And I have two reasons for saying this.

One the most effective ways to explain the difference between Canada and the United States is to talk about how we became independent.

In the U.S. it was a “decisive declaration” leading to war. Americans fought for their independence and July 4, 1776 has become a clear temporal marker. They were dependent before and independent after.

In Canada, our day of independence is less decisive. Instead of complete autonomy, it marks the beginning of a long and gradual process of becoming less and less British, one which arguably didn’t fully conclude until the Canada Act of 1982. 

So might we call today Canada 35?

One could also argue that this process isn’t fully complete. I don’t know about you, but our lingering connections to Britain – however benign they may be – actually weaken the Canadian story for me.

The second reason why I’m throwing out Canada 150(ish) is because I want to acknowledge the fact that there are people in this country who feel excluded from the solidarity that “Canada 150″ is trying to instil. Here is an excerpt from a New Yorker essay by Molly Worthen that was published early this morning:

Of course, the story of Confederation is largely a story of white men who mostly spoke English. This summer, the few Canadians who are eager to talk about history and reexamine the details of their constitution are those who feel excluded from the standard narrative of Canadian unity and progress: indigenous people and Francophone Québécois.

Now that I’ve gotten this off my chest, I’m going to get on with celebrating Canada 150 and this incredible place of democracy and opportunity. And for all of the Americans who read this blog, happy 4th of July.

Photo by Harry Sandhu on Unsplash