in 2017 in honor of a hundred and fifty years since Canada's Confederation The Globe and Mail released an article and in this article they asked Canadians to describe their perceptions of Canada and what they thought the perceptions of Canada was in other parts of the world the respondents said Canada is an open egalitarian society with a healthy respect for personal freedoms the rule of law and the environment many people in this article use words to describe Canada like multicultural and accepting and diverse and progressive truly sparing a slim number of kampf of of complaints which are really not complaints they were mostly about the cold and those are the weak Canadians we know this article truly painted a picture of how lovely a country Canada is how proud people are to live here and how nice Canada's national identity is just two days later the globe released another article again for Canada 150 but this time it was reporting on indigenous accounts of this country the indigenous people in this article said and I quote the reality is the past 150 years has been a horrible history Canada is kind of like an abuse of relative it's someone you may have memories with but at the end of the day what they've really done is just mess you up over the years the people in this article recounted stories of abuse and violence perpetrated against themselves and their communities and no person in this article felt that Canada was good enough to really warrant any praise or celebration this piece painted a very different picture of the Canada than the article before it much less nice for the past three or so years I have had the privilege of being able to travel Canada and meet people from coast to coast to coast and I did this in part to try and better get a better grasp on this issue of Canadian identity from doing this I can attest that there are deeply contradictory perceptions of this country and they exist well beyond the pages of the globe ordering Canada sake celebrations they exist in every province and every territory and they have for over a hundred and fifty years I have become convinced that the way that we frame our identities and the way that we think about our country has profound impacts on all of our lives for the better and for the worse it is because of these profound impacts that I feel it is very important that we all try and make a conscious effort to try and understand where do our perceptions about our country come from and how could those impact our lives and the lives of others earlier last year I was at a conference here in Toronto actually we were talking about youth service in Canada and at one point during this conference a group of us we got together and we were having a discussion about why we would or would not volunteer for certain organizations or work for them and I had said personally that I would not very eagerly volunteer or work for a government organisation in Canada like the people in the second globe article I hold my reservations earlier that year actually I had rejected a summer position with the government organisation iMac indigenous and northern Affairs Canada and it was an excellent job it was by all accounts but I rejected it and I rejected it because in the days leading up to my offer deadline I could not stop thinking about my grandparents my grandparents were both residential school survivors residential schools for those of you who don't know or may not know was a government initiative that began in the 1870s and they forcibly removed indigenous children all across this country from their communities and for their families they placed them in boarding homes and schools sometimes hundreds of kilometers away and in these schools these children suffered incredible abuses they beat them they starved them they medically experimented on them and this led to thousands of deaths and trauma and repercussions that still affect people today the last residential school closed in 1996 after I told this story the other indigenous people in the group that I was speaking with they nodded and they wound and they were called similar sentiments of conflicting feelings working for the government and as this was going on I noticed this one woman who had been sitting there the whole time and she was non-indigenous and she looked quite shocked and she explained that she was a daughter of immigrants and that she was so grateful to this country for giving her a life and giving her family a life that just wasn't accessible in the country from which her parents came and she seemed quite disappointed that we all had such unfavorable views of Canada and she said very earnestly she asked us do you all not like Canada and her seriousness and the passion and gratitude in her story really made me pause I pause because I was thinking maybe I'm not recognizing how beautiful my life is here and it is especially when you look at the state of the world these days I am so grateful to be a woman who can access an education and I know that I'm lucky beyond belief to have never experienced war or natural disaster and in truth I would choose no other place to live but despite all that I also remember when I was child and I lived on a reserve in northern Canada and I remember the mold growing in our house as it doesn't so many others in my community and those like it all across this country I think the earliest memory from from my life actually is me brushing my teeth in a cup of boiled water because there was no clean water coming from attack and so despite how nice my life is now how nice it is for that woman from the conference and how nice it is for I'm sure many of us in this room today I can't say that Canada is a good country and I can't forget those memories because those memories are still realities for so much of my immediate family and people living in this country from coast to coast to coast moreover I know that those inequalities I'm describing aren't random everywhere in the world has people who don't live high quality lives for one reason or another unfortunately but being quality inequality we see in Canada and the magnitude that we see it in especially for indigenous demographics was created deliberately by Canada and it is sustained by Canada through underfunding racist and discriminatory legislation and policies and colonial power so even if we can acknowledge this divide in perceptions of Canada it is still hard for people to reconcile this negative perception with the positive one that they relate to and they know last spring I was in Stockholm Sweden I was invited to give a keynote at the World Forum on gender equality and talk about feminism in Canada and as soon as I got there I realized as I have in many spaces before that people in this space felt far more positively about Canada than I did what really hit it home for me actually without the conference I was trying to get food and order a drink and it was a very frustrating exchange because I don't speak Swedish and this woman didn't speak English and so we were trying to get it happening I was apologizing profusely and finally she handed my stuff to me and she said American in a tone that was so sassy but he told me everything I needed to know about how this woman felt about Americans and I said no actually I'm here from Canada and immediately her body language changed and a smile came across her face and she was like oh the good Americans needless to say everyone felt very pleased with Canada and then I gave my speech and I did talk about feminism and women's issues I talked about violence against indigenous woman and murdered and missing indigenous women and girls for those of you who might not be aware about this crisis indigenous women are paid less for their work they make only 67 cents to every non-indigenous man's dollar and that is lower than any other demographic of women indigenous women make up only about 4% of the entire female population in Canada but they make up about 33% of all women serving federal prison sentences indigenous women are five times more likely to go missing or to be murdered in every statistic speaking to areas of inequity indigenous women are over-represented I knew that this was very much not the message that the people in the audience were expecting to hear about Canada the same Canada who has gained international praise for the prime minister who says he's a feminist and that we have a feminist government people in that audience were going through a reckoning of sorts of Canada and of Canadian identity they were forced to reconcile that the Canada they thought they knew and the Canada that I was showing them were two very different places afterwards a couple of people came up to me and they asked me questions or they offered me comments and three women in particular have really stuck with me the first woman she was from the United States and she came up to me and said oh my god I didn't know things were so bad in Canada but I mean hey at least you're not us right the second woman she was from Sweden but from what I gathered she had worked with Canada on feminist policies and she was not pleased with me she said that by only talking about the negative I was doing a disservice to all of the good work that Canada had been doing and I was painting the wrong picture in people's minds of this country and she didn't know if the things that I were bringing up were as relevant as the policy and as the progress but the third woman who I believe was from Pakistan she came up to me and she said I had no idea and I am so sorry that I didn't know but now that I do know please tell me what I can do to help who do I call what do I read who do I have to tell those first two women they stuck with me because their reactions are so commonplace they are so commonplace that I'm sure many people listening to this talk today might be thinking something along those lines of you know are you really going to complain when you live in Canada and we have Justin Trudeau who despite his faults like him or not isn't Donald Trump I have heard people say to me often you know I get it but like maybe you should be a little bit more grateful that you don't live in Saudi Arabia or something maybe and while I do not negate that there are atrocities happening in other countries to always deflect to be sort of phrases when confronted with an uncomfortable reality is a scapegoat and it is a violent one that allows us to be complacent when in justices are happening in our own backyards furthermore the comments like you know you're always really negative and things aren't really as bad as you're making them out to be don't you think with those comments are actually doing is minimizing the legitimate struggles of those who are being mistreated and those who are being oppressed and simultaneously they are undermining the advocacy and the activism of those trying to counter this mistreatment and oppression for those of us who live in Canada we are inundated every day with examples of the good and the nice of this country Canada's niceness has been reinforced through our history textbooks in our media and by our peers Canada truly has like the best PR like it's so good but that has never been the Canada for all only those who are lucky enough to land on the winning side of history in this country we have a history of turning a blind eye to injustice is happening within our own borders and we cannot turn a blind eye anymore we cannot continue to erase the existence and the struggles of those who suffer in this country in this country when we call it good though they live here too Eva's not easy to kind of abandon all of these ideals we hold so dear about Canada it's not easy but it is necessary because clinging on to this idea that Canada is a good country is not what makes it so what makes a good country is all of us waking up every single day in deciding to build that good country with our words and with our actions even after today and even after this talk many people probably won't go out and actively build that good country and maybe it's not even because they disagree with me maybe it's because we too often believe that changing something as fundamental as an identity or the direction of a country is an insurmountable task so why should we bother to try but people forget that Canada is so young and if just over a hundred and fifty years ago people didn't think it was too crazy to build a country why is it so radical to believe that we could change ours to this point author James Baldwin is perhaps the writer of my favorite quote about identity he says identity is the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self it is best that that garment be loose through which one's nakedness can always be felt and discerned because that trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes this talk is not an invalidation of the gratitude you feel towards a country that very well may have given you the beautiful life that you your loved ones your community members olive this talk is a challenge for you to try and expand the boundaries of your community to include all of those who history has and continues to try and erase I am asking you to look at Canada not as a country that you live in but truly as a community of which you are only one member of and I then encourage you to stay in my community I believe in a justice against any of us is an injustice against all of us I am asking you to unlearn to reimagine and to change your robes accordingly I don't believe that I have the authority to say what Canada's identity should be that is a different TED talk that'll be after the break yes I only know that believing it is truly good it's more of a goal than it is a reality and I do hope and think that we can achieve that goal for future generations but I know but the only way we achieve that goal is not with deflection it is not with defensiveness it has to begin like it did for that third woman who I met from Pakistan who when confronted with examples of injustice cast aside whatever her previous associations with Canada were and instead chose to ally herself with the marginalised we cannot feel guilty for pest actions or past wrongs all we can do is feel responsible for correcting them and making sure that they don't happen again to make Canada a good country we have to believe that we can create an identity that serves us all it starts by saying to yourself today Canada has done good things and I have a good life here but that doesn't make Canada a good country I'm going to do my part so that maybe one day it can be I hope that we can build that country together