Canada Day 2025 Brought Out The Best In Us As A Country
A Brief Commentary by Doug Draper
Posted December 29th, 2025 on Niagara At Large
I’ve never cared much for making a big show of waving the national flag.
It always seemed to me to be a fairly hollow gesture unless you are also willing to stand up openly, with strength and determination, for the values and freedoms that the flag represents.
That has not so much been the case in recent years where, all too often, we have seen our Canadian flag flying on cars and trucks covered with bumper stickers and makeshift signs – many of them opposing vaccines, denying the climate crisis, hurling ‘F’ bombs at one national leader or another, and advocating for leaders more like Donald Trump.
It was beginning to look like our maple leaf flag, which I remember feeling so proud of the first time it was raised in 1965, had been hijacked by a Canadian version of divisive, angry, fear-mongering and conspiracy peddling bunch of Trump-like extremists.
Then in early in 2025, something began to change.
The Donald Trump that many of these anti-just-about-everything people worshipped so much slammed us with punishing tariffs and threatened to turn Canada into a “51st state,” bringing millions of us – regardless of any difference we have – together in support of our country, our workers and our local businesses.
Canada Day 2025 saw our flag flying proudly in neighbourhoods and parks across our communities like nothing I had seen since my childhood during Expo ’67 and the celebration of ‘Canada’s 100th birthday as a nation.
We, the people, had finally taken our flag back from the agents of division, anger and hate and one of my biggest hopes for 2026 is that it stays that way.
Yes, I know that we face some difficult challenges here in Canada. There are pressing issues in this country, in this province and across our own region that we all need to be working together to address.
But whatever our problems and imperfections are, they pale against the mess we see getting worse by the day south of the border.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t feel blessed to live in one of the best countries in the world and I hope you feel that way too.
Let’s pledge to work together even harder in 2026 to make and keep Canada strong and free.
Finally, I will leave you with what I think was one of 2025’sbest pro-Canada videos in the face of Trump’s threats. To hear and watch it, click on the screen immediately below –
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