‘Everything that I never had at home is here’: celebrating Canada Day in Toronto, and across the country

Canada Day is Anne-Marie DeSouza’s favourite holiday — next to Christmas — which explained her festive getup, complete with Canadian flag-themed sunglasses, face paint, and red-and-white balloons in her hair. How, and whether, to celebrate Canada Day has become a recurrent debate as the country reckons with its colonial legacy and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. But in the downtown core itself, hundreds of people packed a 12-block route for the city’s first Canada Day parade since 2019. In Toronto — where celebrations took place in muggy temperatures pushing 30 C — Jacqui L. said she came to Canada from Grenada in 1990. The pair had just been talking about Toronto singer Jully Black’s performance of ‘O Canada’ at the NBA All-Star game earlier this year.