Disclaimer: Uncommon Sense is where I think out loud. The views here are my own — they don’t represent any organization, board, or business I’m affiliated with. Personal opinions, offered to be argued with.
I already know how some of you are going to read this: there goes someone who hates fun, doesn’t care about the country, wants to ruin the one night people get to celebrate. So let me put that to bed before it starts. 𝑰 𝒖𝒔𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝒍𝒐𝒗𝒆 𝒇𝒊𝒓𝒆𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒌𝒔. Genuinely. Then I actually looked at what they cost — to wildlife, to pets, to people — and I couldn’t unsee it. This isn’t the take of someone who never enjoyed them. It’s the take of someone who did, and grew out of it.
And here’s the part that flips the whole “patriotism” argument on its head: What exactly are we celebrating our country with, if the celebration terrorizes the country’s own inhabitants?
Loving your country and caring about what actually lives in it — the wildlife, the land, the water, the animals, the people — those aren’t opposites. That’s the same thing. There is nothing more patriotic than giving a damn about the creatures and the citizens who share the place with you. A twenty-minute light show is not the flag. The living country underneath it is.
Consider who’s actually flinching while everyone else says “ooh”:
The veterans — the ones we claim to be honouring — for whom those concussions overhead land like incoming fire, not celebration.
Ask one. The people with PTSD and sensory conditions bracing in their own homes. The dogs and cats bolting in blind panic, which is why shelters brace for a spike in lost pets every single year. And the wildlife that has no context for any of it — birds panicked off their roosts into the dark, parents abandoning nests and dens, animals bolting into roadways. Researchers in Bulgaria documented hundreds of birds, most of them juveniles, killed in a single night when fireworks startled them into a fatal panic; they estimated the full die-off ran past a thousand.
None of them know it’s a party. They only know the fear.
So no — pointing that out doesn’t make me anti-celebration, and it sure as hell doesn’t make me less proud of where I live. It makes me someone whose pride extends past the twenty minutes of noise to the living things standing next to me during it.
You can celebrate. Just celebrate in a way that doesn’t make the voiceless pay for it. Public and professional shows over backyard mortars. Drone and light displays where your community offers them. A little awareness for the vet next door and the dog under the bed. Care about the inhabitants of your country and the ground it stands on. That’s the most patriotic thing there is.
Hope everyone had a good Canada Day — and that you’ve still got all ten fingers to scroll past this with.
Uncommon Sense – July 6, 2026