By Geoff Russ, December 9, 2025
A strange partition runs through Canada’s past.
One side contains all that we are encouraged to treat as innocently and unambiguously “Canadian.” This includes the “pony-tailed orphan with the spunky spirit” of Anne of Green Gables, in the words of the CBC. Alongside her are the romance of ice hockey and the vague ethic of polite kindness.
Across the divide are the things fenced off as “colonial,” such as the monarchy and the Anglo-Victorian world from which our institutions, traditions, and habits sprang. The first half of our inheritance is warmly embraced as our own by the official custodians and narrators of our past. The other is portrayed as something akin to a foreign occupation.
Creating and promoting this false, dishonest divide is destructive to Canadian society. There is no clear line between “good” modern Canada and “bad” colonial Canada, nor is it certain when or how the schism first occurred. The truth is, we have only one history, and our institutions should not cherry-pick bits and pieces of it to exalt while trashing the rest.
This schism cuts through Canadian politics, cultural discourse, and administration. Earlier this month, British Columbia Premier David Eby spoke of the need to correct the “original colonial mistake” regarding land use and Indigenous title. Many will hear this as an indictment of the entire order that made Eby’s position possible.
In this line of thought, anything prior to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or even the 1960s, is treated as an alien regime – a society of interlopers oppressing the Indigenous peoples of once harmonious and pristine lands.
This unfortunate double standard now officially shapes our history – it’s taught in our public schools and post-secondary institutions and held as sacrosanct in provincial and federal halls of power as well as by the courts. Today, legions of gatekeepers in politics, academia, and the civil service act as self-appointed arbiters of what is truly “Canadian.” Anyone who steps out of line with the “decolonizing” narrative is chastised, dismissed, or denigrated.
Indeed, the very Canadian cultural touchstones that we still deem acceptable – like hockey, Anne Shirley and the Maple Leaf symbol on our national flag – cannot be upheld while exiling the monarchy, Sir John A. Macdonald, and Victorian Canada.
A CBC Radio personality recently paid a warm tribute to Anne of Green Gables during a visit to Prince Edward Island. However, Antonio Michael Downing’s article ignores much of the historical world that inspired author Lucy Maud Montgomery. Avonlea, PEI, where the fictional Anne lives, is a staunchly Protestant outpost of the Victorian era at the height of the British Empire. She belongs to the same generation that sent volunteers to fight in South Africa in 1900, and hundreds of thousands to the Western Front in 1914. Fans of Anne often lionize the “spunky” orphan while shunning the “colonial” society that created her.
Ice hockey receives a similar treatment. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) has declared that the first organized match took place in 1875 in Montreal, then the largest city in the Dominion of Canada. The rules and methods of the game grew out of stick-and-ball games first played in the British Isles, such as bandy in England, or even hurling in Ireland.
Canada’s contribution so profoundly reshaped the game that by the early twentieth century, our rules had remade the sport. Our beloved national sport is a colonial hybrid, brought across the Atlantic, yet perfected right here. And yet, so many Canadians are ignorant of this fact, instead thinking that hockey was born of immaculate conception, or perhaps inspired by Indigenous sporting traditions.
Today, any positive comments about the Victorian Age and its impact on Canada are treated with suspicion at best, and outright hostility at worst.
This division is further exacerbated by the use of emotionally loaded terms like “settlers.” Writing in the Dorchester Review, John Robson noted in 2020 how the use of the term has metastasized from academia to widespread mainstream use by policymakers, activists, and popular media. Used as a catch-all for non-Indigenous Canadians, it carries elements of both implication and condemnation – that you don’t belong here, that you “stole” this land, and that hopefully someday, you will “go back where you came from.”
As Robson argues, you can’t simply claim that a Canadian born here “properly belongs to some other country.” Not only is it illogical, it’s also impossible, since many non-Indigenous Canadians can trace their ancestors back to states or regions that no longer exist on the map.
Universities have zealously embraced the decolonizing ideology. Writing in University Affairs, one academic described Canadian universities as devoted to an “ontology of hierarchy” linked to the “Euro-Western imperial and colonial ‘civilizations.’”
She asserted that the structure of senates, boards, and chains of authority makes it inevitable that they “will continue to be hostile and violent to Indigenous Peoples and knowledges” until these pillars are demolished and replaced with “relational and collectivist” forms of leadership.
Rather than highlighting specific injustices to address, she condemns the entire administration of the academy; as a product of a “settler” society, it must be dismantled and destroyed.
For a case in point, consider recent efforts by the University of Manitoba to “decolonize” its art collection by replacing older works with pieces chosen by an Indigenous student committee. “The university is ultimately a colonial institution that is designed to serve white people … and that needs to change,” the university’s registrar said in a 2024 CBC article.
Among the removed paintings was a nineteenth-century depiction of Upper Fort Garry (a Hudson’s Bay Company fort formerly located in downtown Winnipeg). The painting portrays the fort on one side of the Red River, and an Indigenous figure on the other. It seems like a rather straightforward depiction of a typical Red River scene – but not to the decolonizers at UManitoba. To them, the painting conveys a message of “we’re over here and they’re over there.”
The university also removed a sculpture of a buffalo hunt on anti-colonial grounds. Although historically accurate, the university said it was not crafted “from an Indigenous perspective” and might reinforce “harmful stereotypes” – namely the depiction of Indigenous peoples hunting for food.
In all these cases, the logic is the same: we must reject all institutions, art, or achievements that have been tainted by the “occupying force.” Denigrating our country’s shared history and traditions is necessary to achieve a “more just and authentic future” – even if we hollow out Canada in the process.
This is not the future that our founders envisioned when they built this country. Indeed, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier famously predicted that Canada would be the “new power” of the West. Instead, we are by the day diminished by those who seek to impose presentism on the past and view history as nothing more than hierarchies of victimhood.
We need to course-correct, and that begins with accepting that our Canadian identity was forged in the Victorian era. Queen Victoria’s 64-year reign coincided with the flourishing of Canadian democracy and the emergence of Canada as a confident, self-governing country that could build great railways and send armies abroad.
In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, historian Nigel Biggar writes that, notwithstanding injustices within the British Empire, it expanded the rule of law and the domain of representative government. These elements remain the gold standard for democratic societies.
It is naïve to pretend that the inheritances of the British Empire, including artistic and recreational creations, can be divided into “Canadian” and “colonial” categories. They are bound together in one history, one people, one country, and one culture.
Imperial Canada gave us Vimy Ridge, which we still commemorate, as well as labour reform and the idea that veterans and the poor ought to be provided for. These emerged from the same world that exalted the refrain “Rule, Britannia!” In fact, everything that made Canada into a materially and even spiritually desirable country emerged due to colonialism.
Everything from the rule of law, to elected governments in the Westminster fashion, the ideal of ordered liberty, the veneration of enterprise, and home ownership are British in their origin. Many of these concepts that we in the West take for granted are still alien and elusive in dozens of countries around the world. Would colonialism’s critics like to give all that up? Certainly not.
It is easy to armchair-quarterback the choices of the past. It’s much harder to view history with nuance and balance. We do not need to place past generations on a pedestal. But we also do not need to place them on perpetual trial for the common bigotries of their time.
Men like John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier were neither saints nor demons. They made hard choices based on the facts on the ground and the times in which they lived. Importantly, they created and shaped the country we enjoy today – one of the most diverse in the world, where our artists and storytellers can thrive. Anne of Green Gables and the first ice rinks of Montreal sit within the same imperial web, along with Confederation, voters’ rights, and the railways.
At any rate, let us discontinue the lazy habit of filing anything difficult as “colonial” and everything more cheerful as “Canadian.” Canada’s history, culture, and political traditions belong to all Canadians. We should gladly embrace Parliament, the courts, our universities, and the public service. These imperial offshoots are part of what makes Canada among the greatest nations in the world. These are ours, from a time when we belonged to an imperial family, and to treat them as foreign shirks our responsibility to that inheritance.
There is neither stability nor confidence in amputating our past.
Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment, and a contributor to the Macdonald Laurier-Institute, Modern Age, and the National Post.
