As the sun rises on the Dominion of Canada, from Bonavista to Victoria to Iqaluit, families across the country are preparing to spend their day with friends and family at cottages and cabins or around barbecues and backyard decks. Others will crowd with strangers in familiar downtowns, enjoying the early Canadian summer and waiting for fireworks.
Some days, it may seem frustrating or impossible to love our home and native land, but on others, it’s laughably easy to appreciate all of the work that’s gone into making this mostly welcoming land one of the world’s great nations.
Today here at Build Canada, we are celebrating our relationship with this imperfect but lovable place, for what it has given us, and for the future we that beckons for our children.
Building that future, and ensuring that it is prosperous, strong, and free, is our mission here at Build Canada, and it is one that we will be pushing with renewed energy and creativity in the months to come.
To our fellow Canadians who have joined us on this journey, we are blown away by your commitment and your ambition for this place. All we could ever hope is that together, we can keep building the prosperous nation that is our privilege.
Happy Canada Day everyone.
From the closing passages of Donald Creighton’s epic The Young Politician, the first of his two-volume biography of Sir John A Macdonald:
By nine o’clock, the public buildings and many large houses were illuminated all across Canada… When true darkness had at last fallen, the firework displays began; and simultaneously throughout the four provinces, the night was assaulted by minute explosions of coloured light, as the roman candles popped away, and the rockets raced up into the sky.
In Ottawa, long before this, Monck and Macdonald and the other ministers had quitted the Privy Council chamber; and Parliament Hill was crowded once again with people who had come to watch the last spectacle of the day. The Parliament buildings were illuminated. They stood out boldly against the sky; and far behind them, hidden in darkness, were the ridges of the Laurentians, stretching away, mile after mile, towards the north-west.
Just in time for Canada Day. The highly requested merch shop is once again open after a brief inventory outage. Looking to grab something for those summer days by the water? Head over to 🛒: shop.buildcanada.com
Build Canada@build_canada
Just in time for Canada Day 😉🇨🇦 Our merch store featuring our classic items is back at shop.buildcanada.com! 🛒
11:54 PM · Jun 30, 2026 · 2.67K Views
1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 27 Likes
The Canada I landed in was generous before it was anything else. I want it to stay generous. But it can’t be generous if it has nothing left to give. Canada must get as ambitious for itself as it’s always been for the people it takes in. A country that dreams and builds the way it welcomes: without hesitating, without apologizing.
Lucy Hargreaves@lucyhargreaves4
I emigrated to Canada in the summer of 1987. I was 8 years old and had only ever visited once before. My idea of what Canada was came from a brief trip a few years earlier. My family had visited relatives in London, Ontario, went to Ontario Place, did an Easter egg hunt at the
11:19 AM · Jul 1, 2026 · 6.49K Views
16 Replies · 12 Reposts · 200 Likes
Charles Pachter has spent six decades turning the most Canadian things imaginable — the Queen, the moose, the flag, the barn, the butter tart — into pop art. Born in Toronto in 1942 and trained at the Sorbonne, the University of Toronto, and Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy, he scandalized the art world in 1973 with his “Queen on a Moose” series, and never really stopped: a 1981 glimpse of a flag rippling on his farm north of Barrie sparked a lifetime obsession with the maple leaf, whose paintings now hang in the Prime Minister’s residence, Parliament, and the Canadian Embassy in Washington. His Hockey Knights in Canada mural still watches over commuters at Toronto’s College subway station.
James McIntyre
Hail Britannia’s noblest daughter,
Who is surrounded by the water
Of many a lake and broad sea,
Land of beaver and of maple tree.
Her lofty brow is wreathed with smiles,
For from the far Atlantic isles
In pomp have come their delegates,
All seeking to unite their fates.
With Canada great northern queen,
And now throughout the land is seen,
High festival and stately dance,
Triumphant nuptials to advance.
And soon shall Red River valley
And distant Vancouver rally,
To form this Empire gigantic
From Pacific to Atlantic.
James McIntyre (1828–1906) was Ingersoll, Ontario’s “Cheese Poet” — a Scottish-born furniture dealer and undertaker whose earnest, gloriously clunky verse celebrated Confederation, dairy farming, and Canadian pride in equal measure.
From Andrew Potter, “Bring a bigger flag”, a short memoir of what we can learn from the Canada Days of the 1980s.
How Ukrainians share the soil with Indigenous Canadians, from the Counteroffensive newsletter.
“The State or the United States”: A warning from Dan Gardner about the dangers of letting go of Canadian culture.
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