Canada Day: July 1
6th July 2010 by Andrew Needs, Ottawa | No Comments
Canada Day fell on a Thursday this year, perfect placement for a public holiday for many to take advantage of the summer weather and extend the weekend out to four days. Bronwyn and I, however, had both July 1 and 4 firmly in our diaries as days to be in Ottawa. We celebrated Canada’s 143 rd birthday on the lawn in the front of Parliament. The Queen and Prince Philip, Prime Minister and Mrs Harper were centre stage and almost 100,000 others packed into the Parliamentary Precinct – estimates for total numbers in the down town core exceeded 300,000.
The speeches were short and the music was loud. My evolving sense of Canada Day is one where self-effacing Canadians literally and metaphorically nail their colours to the mast. From what I followed on the news, it is a Canada-wide spectacle and certainly not confined to the nation’s capital or main centres of population.
American Independence Day followed hard on its heels and in the same Canada Day long-weekend. It is, historically, such a massive event and has been immortalised in song and movie to the extent that it is etched on the collective consciousness. While Canada doesn’t mark the day, it is closely linked to its own evolution as a nation, not least as a result of the loyalists who fled across the St Lawrence River into what is now Canada.
This year in Ottawa, US Ambassador David Jacobson, a native of Chicago, celebrated his nation’s birthday on his own ‘front lawn’, with 4,000 guests. My understanding is that this is one of the biggest July 4 celebrations outside of the US. And to highlight the ambassador’s Chicago roots, deep dish pizza, all-beef hot dogs and pirogies were the order of the day.
Ambassador Jacobson is a regular blogger. I must check out his take on how the day went.
