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Just yesterday, I mentioned that a variety of more rural Canadians that I met on my last visit to the area all expressed some form of concern about their "culture changing" with respect to significant immigration. I didn't have great examples, because I'm still mostly an outsider to them.
This morning, my wife shared this with me. The Moncton city hall has, for the last twenty years, displayed a large menorah around Hanukkah. That tradition ends this year. The city cited "separation of church and state" as the driver of their change of course, as if something in the legal landscape has changed in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. Spoiler: nothing in the legal landscape concerning separation of church and state has changed in Canada in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. The city is getting mostly derided in social media, and a common talking point is that they're putting out this claim while, at the very same moment, prominently displaying all sorts of Christmas decorations.
So what has changed? Here is where I have a little bit of insider exposure. I don't have public sources for this, and so I'm not actually even sure of how accurate it is, but it's the story "on the street". Basically, there's not that many Jews in the area, anyway, maybe a couple few hundred, but they've been there for a long time. Part of the community. Part of the culture. On the other hand, the sense was that circa ten years ago, there was almost no Muslim presence whatsoever. I was told that ten years ago, the only mosque in the area was really just a small house that had been repurposed. Since then, massive amounts of immigration from Francophone North Africa. They've come with a predominant religion and, well, different cultural understandings. This is what seems to have changed.
Obviously, the cherry on top of what's changed is October 7. It's tempting to think that that is the only thing that's changed, and even if they didn't have all the immigration in the past several years, the city of Moncton would have made the same choice. However, I can't help but be reminded of the old quote about how you go broke two ways: first, slowly, then second, all at once. It's hard to detangle the two.
EDIT: I realized after posting that I wanted to mention something else that was in my mind, but never figured out how to include it. It's that, culturally, they're bloody Canadians! Their culture is obscenely polite and accepting of others, other cultures, and multiculturalism generally. They're more than happy to let people do all sorts of their own cultural things, and general tolerance skews quite high. They're really of the "we can all get along" mindset. This is one of those things that seems to be cracking as they struggle with new situations that they find themselves in, and seems to me to be one of the reasons why they're so confused about these changes occurring in their own midst.
Maybe the motive was bad, but the removal of Hanukkah from public celebration makes sense. It’s a minor Jewish holiday, not one of the six mandated festivals in the Torah or one of the high holy days. It commemorates a small middle eastern nation defeating their enemy in war. There’s nothing morally or culturally interesting about it, either for humanity entirely or for Canadians specifically.
On the other hand, Christmas celebrates the birth of a new religion and ethical system, which was so important that it restarted our calendars and indirectly inspired developments like global abolition and the Magna Carta. All of the important founding Canadians were Christian afaik, which means they believed Christmas to be the most important day in human history. It’s poetically and symbolically beautiful even if you think it’s just a fable, and it was a mainstay of Western art and music for 1500+ years.
In addition to AshLael’s correction about Easter, I’ll note that any early Puritan or Presbyterian Canadian settlers would have been decidedly anti-Christmas. I don’t know enough about Canadian history to say how much of an influence they might have had, but I know at least one of the American colonies (Massachusetts) made it illegal to celebrate Christmas at all.
Canada did not have many British colonists until the mid 18th century, long after the time of the Puritans, though many of their descendants came during this period from the United States. It did have a lot of Presbyterians as there were a lot of immigrants from Scotland and Northern Ireland.
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