Actress Kandyse McClure and crew during production of the 2016 Viola Desmond Heritage Minute/Historica Canada

By Anthony Wilson-Smith

June 26, 2025

A frigid October in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, commemorating the great artist Kenojuac Ashevak.

An abandoned warehouse in Vancouver transformed into a 1940s Hawker Hurricane production plant for the tribute to pioneering engineer Elsie MacGill.

A national park in Nova Scotia that was a real-life home for Acadians – until it became their forced exit point.

A church basement in Calgary that served as stand-in for the legendary Winnipeg Falcons hockey team dressing room before its players went off to war.

A ballpark in Vancouver and a small town in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, where members of the Asahi baseball team went from triumph to internment.

And so many more locations, all with one common thread: pivotal events in a country’s life were re-lived in each.

These are just some of the places that have served as sets for Canada’s iconic Heritage Minutes over the past 13 years. The Minutes are produced by the charitable organization Historica Canada, which I serve as president. The Minutes tell stories of people and/or events that have shaped the country in which we live. Starting with the first releases in 1991, there are well over 100 Minutes: I have been responsible for more than 20.

For those of us who work on them, each brings two valuable experiences: a new awareness of the story being told, and a chance to see parts of our country that we likely would not have seen otherwise.

For this Canada Day, after a year of unprecedented focus on who we are and who we are not, Historica Canada has produced an extended Minute; a tribute — with an assist from the Tragically Hip — to just some of the Canadians who’ve made our history, and all the qualities they embody that define us as a people.

If you see enough of Canada — and I’ve been to all our provinces and territories, along with more than 35 other countries — you realize that many of the clichés about this place are not true. One is the notion that we’re a young country. In constitutional terms, we are older than Germany (created in its present form in 1871) and only six years younger than Italy (1861).

If you begin with our Indigenous Peoples, our history goes back too many thousands of years to calculate. Either way, we’re fully formed. Similarly, it’s past time to get rid of the line that we define ourselves by who we are not — meaning that we’re not British or French or, most of all, American.  With every passing day, the number of Canadians with no roots in any of those countries increases.

With respect, it’s also a misnomer to suggest — as former prime minister Justin Trudeau did – that Canada is on the verge of becoming the “first post-national state’ with “no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Trudeau meant that in a positive way — that Canada is a place where people can feel comfortable without having to fit into a national stereotype.  But that overlooks the powerful pull of history and heritage at so many levels. Our past shapes our communities, and our communities shape us.

Canadians have always been simultaneously united and divided by the sheer size and scope of our country. I’ve lived at various times in Montreal, Quebec City, Moscow, Ottawa (twice) and am now on my second turn in Toronto. When I visited the Saskatchewan town of Ogema (pop. 413) twice two years ago for Minutes shoots, my first thought was that the Prairie landscape was most reminiscent of a foreign country, Ukraine, where I went several times as a Moscow-based Maclean’s correspondent. But when I met Ogema’s locals, within minutes I felt at home.

Politics aside, we constantly re-invent ourselves as a country, starting with the ever-changing nature of many of the communities in which we live.

The same has been true on trips everywhere from Deer Lake, Nfld., to Kinngait, to Chibougamou, Que., to High River, Alberta, to Coquitlam, BC.  We spend a lot of media airtime talking about the things that divide us, but when Canadians meet face to face, we connect through the qualities that bring us together.

History is baked into each community. Consider the cenotaphs in most municipalities: we couldn’t live the way we do without the sacrifices of those whose names are etched on those memorials. Or regional identities: A ‘post-national’ community wouldn’t reflect the fierce pride Newfoundlanders have for their home, even when circumstances are challenging.

Albertans have grievances with their treatment by Ottawa — but when the Edmonton Oilers played their first home game of the Stanley Cup final this year, the roar of the crowd singing the national anthem could be heard many, many blocks away and then beyond, all across the country.

Visit small Quebec communities like Amqui or Sayabec on the province’s Gaspé peninsula, and you hear French filled with age-old expressions and an accent quite unlike the big cities. But language aside, the conversations and concerns expressed in rural Quebec are not that different than those felt in small towns across the country.

Historically, we have often made life difficult for new arrivals. Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans spent part of the First World War in internship camps; so did people of Japanese origin and other ethnicities in the Second World War. Chinese immigrants paid a discriminatory ‘head tax’ for many years that was not applied to other countries. If you were living in Toronto and Roman Catholic, right up until the 1960s, certain establishments wouldn’t consider you for jobs.

The same was even more overt and true for Jews. Anti-Black racism did not stop at the 49th parallel. The only real career open to many Black Canadians for the first half of the 20th century was a life riding the rails as porters. We have also made life difficult for those who came before us – the treatment of Indigenous Peoples is epic in itself.

But other historic truths about Canada, taken together, are important to what defines us. Few countries anywhere provide an easy landing for people of different cultures: increasingly, some rebel against allowing outsiders of cultures different from their own. By contrast, Canada’s history reflects a continuously growing openness and demonstrable improvements in legal and human rights for all. Strains periodically emerge – as is the case recently – but the overall arc is steady.

Ideally, a country is like a very good friend: you love it for its strengths, and also feel comfortable pointing out its flaws. Understanding what we’ve done well – so many things – provides pride and impetus to move ahead. Understanding how and when we’ve failed teaches humility and enables a perpetual path to improvement. To that end, we continue to have work to do, and likely always will.

My favourite line about our country comes from former Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, who said: “Canada is a country that works better in practice than in theory.” Politics aside, we constantly re-invent ourselves as a country, starting with the ever-changing nature of many of the communities in which we live.

The past is always part of the present, both for those who were born here and those newly arrived. The challenge for Canadians if we are to move ahead together is for each of us to decide which parts of our pasts to keep – and which to leave behind.

Anthony Wilson-Smith is President of Historica Canada and former Editor-in-Chief of Maclean’s magazine.