Canada Has No Right to Exist
As a Canadian, I know Canada is an illegitimate settler colonial state built on stolen land and a history of apartheid and genocide against the indigenous people of Turtle Island.
Canada is a settler colony built on invasion, expropriation, and the systematic destruction of Indigenous societies. Canada’s celebrated image as a gentle human‑rights champion and multicultural success story functions as a screen for a long and ongoing history of racialized violence, dispossession, and genocide. My Canadian values compel me to require that from sea to sea, Canada must be free of all colonial settlers and their complicit descendants.
From invasion to occupation
The official myth starts with the French and British “discovering” a vast empty wilderness, as if the Mississauga, Haudenosaunee, Cree, Inuit and countless other Indigenous nations were a mere backdrop for European destiny. In 1534, French “explorer” Jacques Cartier sails – on the Feast Day of Saint Lawrence, a 3rd Century Christian martyr – into the “Gulf of St. Lawrence”, plants a cross, mumbles some words in French, and suddenly Paris imagines it “owns” millions of hectares of land it had literally never heard of the year before.
England and France did not “discover” Turtle Island; they arrived uninvited on already‑inhabited land to which they had zero historical, religious, or ancestral claim whatsoever. Obviously, Zionists are the world’s worst colonial settlers. But whataboutism cannot distract from the truth. And unlike Jewish claims to “the land of Israel”, (which are at least based on continuous religious memory, scripture, liturgy, and presence over millennia), imperial France and England turned up on the shores of Turtle Island simply as foreign powers seeking territory, resources, and strategic advantage.
Cartier’s 1534 landing at Gaspé, which I as a Canadian schoolchild learned as a proud origin story, was in fact a shameful assertion of European sovereignty over Indigenous lands that were home to complex Indigenous polities. The very act of “claiming” this territory for France was a brazen declaration that Indigenous political orders did not count, inaugurating centuries of Royal (later, Parliamentary) doctrines that treated Indigenous nations as obstacles to be managed, removed, or absorbed.
Genocide: physical and cultural
The current Canadian state, “the Dominion of Canada”, was created – for the white European colonial settlers – in 1867 by the British North America Act, an act of the imperialist British parliament sitting in London, without any consultation of the land’s Indigenous people. Just as the odious British Mandate for Palestine came about solely due to British military victory over Ottoman Turkish armies in World War I, British colonial rule over the lands north of the United States came about solely by virtue of its military victory over French colonial armies on Quebec’s Plains of Abraham in 1769. Before that, both of the current Canadian regime’s imperial predecessors attacked Indigenous existence on multiple fronts: through direct violence, the deliberate exposure of communities to disease, forced religious conversion, and the calculated dismantling of cultures and families. Epidemics of smallpox, tuberculosis, and other diseases ripped through Indigenous communities under colonial regimes that subordinated Indigenous lives to European settlement, trade, and military goals, with appalling death rates.
After the British Empire created “the Dominion of Canada” (the term “Dominion” drawn from King James’ Genesis 1:26, a testament to the Christian Biblical roots of the white occupation), residential schools formed the core machinery of cultural genocide: over 150,000 Indigenous children were taken forcibly from their families into a network of 130 church‑run, state‑funded institutions between the 1870s and 1990s. Abuse was endemic: children were beaten, shackled, humiliated, sexually assaulted, starved, and punished for speaking their own languages, with thousands dying from disease, malnutrition, and neglect; the system’s purpose, (as even Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded), was the destruction of Indigenous cultures and the seizure of land and resources, and was just the most obvious articulation of Canada’s genocide.
Reserves, resource theft, and ongoing apartheid
After killing and displacing Indigenous peoples by war, disease, and forced conversion, Canada corralled surviving communities onto reserves, on the least fertile, least resource‑rich land, while appropriating vast tracts of territory for settler agriculture, mining, timber, and urban expansion. This is not a closed historical chapter. Most Canadian “Indian reserves” (so defined by Canada’s 1876 Indian Act, still in force in 2026) to this day experience chronic poverty, overcrowded housing, contaminated water, and restricted economic opportunities while the Canadian state and corporations profit from neighboring lands and resources that were never freely ceded. “Treaties” in which ancestral lands were “released, surrendered and yielded up” were often signed by indigenous collaborator leaders with nothing more than an “X”. Large parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and western Ontario were “acquired” this way, lands that today house millions of Canadian settlers.
The result is a stratified legal and spatial order that is apartheid, pure and simple: distinct legal regimes, fragmented territories, and segregated communities. For example, under the Indian Act, legal title to reserve land is held by the Crown “for the use and benefit of a First Nation.” Since individual Indigenous people living on reserves are forbidden from owning land, Canadian banks will not give them mortgages. As a result, Canadian “Indian reservations” are basically remote rural slum neighborhoods, akin to refugee camps, impoverished, afflicted with every form of social dysfunction and ruled by nepotistic band leaders in cahoots with the Canadian regime. Even so, Indigenous jurisdiction is continually overridden when it conflicts with settler interests, particularly around pipelines, dams, and resource extraction. When Indigenous communities assert land rights or oppose development, they meet police raids, injunctions, and criminalization, exposing how thin the rhetoric of “reconciliation” becomes whenever capital and control are at stake. To confront Trump in his tariff war against Canada, the current Canadian regime under PM Mark Carney has launched a nationalistic campaign of building environment-destroying pipelines, mines and infrastructure that will only accelerate this land theft and oppression.
Multicultural myth and rainbow‑washing
To hide its apartheid and genocide, Canada markets itself internationally as a human‑rights leader and multicultural haven. This “we are a liberal democracy” self‑portrait functions as a form of whitewashing (or “rainbow‑washing”) of Canada’s racist settler colonial essence. Official multiculturalism, diversity branding, and queer‑friendly “pinkwashed” imagery present Canada as modern and inclusive, while hiding the underlying reality that the entire state is built on stolen land and fraudulent treaties, and is therefore illegitimate from the outset.
Even the symbols which Canada exploits to identify itself were appropriated from their true Indigenous owners. The line “a Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe” suggests the canoe is something prototypically “Canadian”. But the phrase deliberately obscures the indisputable fact that the birch bark canoe was invented by the Indigenous people. Every bottle of maple syrup, a prototypical “Canadian” souvenir sold in Canadian airports, purposely hides the fact that it was the Indigenous who discovered how to harvest and process maple sap into syrup, long before European settlers invaded. Even the maple leaf, which features not only on the jerseys of the Toronto hockey team, but on the Canadian flag itself – the symbol par excellence of Canadian identity – is a blatant appropriation of Indigenous peoples’ connections to the once pristine nature of Turtle Island. For First Nations, the maple tree had cultural and spiritual importance, connected to its life-giving sap and to spring renewal. Given the racist genocidal nature of the colonial settler crime that is Canada, superimposed on the Canadian flag’s blood-red maple leaf should be a black swastika.
What about “reconciliation”? Land acknowledgments before films, conferences, and cultural events are nothing but ritualized performances meant to assuage white guilt, without any intention of land return, or the dismantling of settler privilege. Declaring that one stands “on the traditional territory” of specific nations while continuing to occupy, police, and profit from that same territory is a treacherous gesture that normalizes the very dispossession it names.
The only solution: decolonization
The solution is clear and obvious to anyone with a moral conscience. From the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Sea, Canada should be free of everyone who arrived after Cartier’s 1534 voyage. This is the ONLY just and final solution to the crime of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide. The expulsion of all non‑Indigenous Canadians – sending descendants of the original settlers back to England or France, and sending immigrants and their descendants back to their countries of origin, where they belong – is the only way to achieve true justice for the REAL “Canadians”, the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. (Special exceptions might be allowed for the Metis.)
As a Canadian myself, I have come to recognize that ALL Canadians must – like myself –abandon the comfort of a self‑image built on selective memory and liberal myth. Anything short of decolonization is a betrayal of the Canadian values which we, as Canadians, so highly value.
The only good Canadian is one who lives outside of Canada and publicly declares that Canada has no right to exist. “Progressive” Canadians, who still insist on keeping their settler privilege, who try to weasel out by saying they are “committed to reconciliation”, or who claim it would be unjust to expel millions of people who were born in Canada, should be exposed and rejected as the enemies of decolonization and historical justice that they are.
We call on allies around the world to join in this liberating decolonization: environmentalists who oppose the rape of the environment, as white colonial settlers continue to build sawmills on sacred rivers, and pave over hunting grounds for shopping mall parking lots; anti-capitalists who oppose the capitalist superstructure imposed on the collectivist egalitarian Indigenous people who lived peacefully in harmony with nature; to all those who oppose US racism and imperialism, since Canada is totally complicit with the US, not only actively engaging in capitalist trade but sharing a common language and an environmentally wasteful consumerist popular culture seeped in racial superiority.
What is to be done?
Until the expulsion from Turtle Island of every last colonial settler and their complicit descendants, what can those of us who are committed to global social justice DO?
We can start with boycott, divestment and sanctions. Canadian writers like Margaret Atwood, who hides her white racial supremacism behind a mask of liberal niceties, should be banned from literary festivals. Canadian musical artists like Drake should be cancelled from international performances.
And we should not forget our economic power. Few people know that Burger King, Tim Horton’s coffee and Popeyes are owned by Restaurant Brands International, a Canadian company. Those fast-food outlets are indirectly complicit in the ongoing structural genocide of Indigenous people and should be boycotted. Lululemon is a Vancouver-founded athletic apparel brand whose products reach into international markets. We should strive to make Lululemon pants seen for what they are: badges of an apartheid regime. And did you know that banking giant “CIBC”, listed on NYSE as “CM”, actually stands for “Canadian IMPERIAL Bank of Commerce”? They use initials to hide Canadian imperialism. Like the ROYAL Bank of Canada, which also trades on the NYSE, shares in these imperialist monarchist entities are widely held by pension funds and university endowments. They should be divested.
We as individuals cannot directly cause the expulsion from Turtle Island of post-1534 settlers and their descendants. However, I think it is fair to say that anyone calling themselves progressive who does NOT support these boycott, divestment and sanction efforts is complicit in Canadian settler colonialism apartheid and genocide and should be exposed and condemned as a Canadio-Nazi.
Any presence of the settler collective is illegitimate. Canadian history is a single arc of uninterrupted oppression. Settlers eager to protect their privilege try to bring up nuance, or claim that “the problem is complex”. But Canada is not complicated at all. It is a tale of pure victim and pure villain. The only solution is demographic purification: expulsion, forced return, or some other mechanism of “undoing” the settler presence.
Apologists for the illegitimate colonial settler regime – even committed anti-Zionists – try to argue that decolonization should not apply to Canada. They whine that millions of ordinary Canadian people – children, mixed families, communities with generations of rootedness – cannot simply be “sent back” somewhere, because there is no morally straightforward, non‑violent way to do that. They try to argue that history here is messy: colonizers and Indigenous peoples are entangled, many settlers arrived as refugees, and justice will require negotiation, compromise, and shared futures, not fantasies of erasure.
But we have already proven that “Canada” is an artificial country, whose liberal multicultural facade is a mask for a totally illegitimate racist settler colonial state built on apartheid and genocide and nothing short of Canada ceasing to exist would be just.
I want to end by emphasizing that I am NOT anti-Canadian; I am anti-Canadaism. I am in fact totally opposed to discrimination against individual Canadians, so long as they live outside of Turtle Island, and publicly recognize that because of the racist and genocidal crimes of the colonial settler regime, Canada has no right to exist as a sovereign state.
