The surest way to make me treasure something is to take it away. So it was with Canada Day, whose annual appearance I’d once greeted with scarcely more excitement than the Ontario Civic Holiday and Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. Then came 2021, when the high priests of social justice demanded that we cancel Canada’s birthday celebrations, so that we might spend July 1 in morbid contemplation of our original sin. Not being one for rituals of confession and penitence, I instead began to think harder about why I love this country, despite its flaws — even if expressing such sentiments in public was now viewed as hate speech.