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........

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