July 1st, Canada Day. A time to celebrate the nation whose current prime minister doesn't believe it is among the finest countries in the world. It  may not have started out that way, but over the years it has achieved that status. My parents were children in their early teens when they arrived as refugees; my father alone, picked up on the street of Warsaw, an orphan sent along with other street children by a Jewish philanthropic society to a new life in Canada. He started that new life as an indentured farmhand not far from Toronto, until he paid off his passage, then struck out on his own.

My mother, at age 12, arrived with her older sisters to begin their new lives in Canada, leaving the Pale of Settlement in Russia, as a result of the upheaval during the Russian revolution between the White and the Red factions; imperialists versus 'socialists'. Her older brother, a supporter of the Reds, was the target of a bomb thrown into their home one day, killing father and brother, wounding all others. My parents met through membership in a social club, married, and by 1936 their first child was born, and that child was me.

Though young when they arrived in Canada, neither attended school, both went immediately to work in factories, my father at Fashion Hat & Cap in central Toronto, my mother on Spadina Avenue, at  a garment factory. When I was 13 my mother took me to that same factory when summer arrived and school was out, to earn something to help the family. My formal education stopped after Grade 10, again to find work to help support the family.

In the intervening years we understood quite clearly how fortunate we were to live in Canada, far from the Europe that became Nazi-occupied busily rounding up its Jews to be sent to slave-labour camps, concentration camps, death camps. At a too-young age I learned how Jews were perceived in society and to keep my identity as a Jew out of sight. Even so, neighbourhood people knew, and their children often shouted after me: "Christ killer!". At too-young an age I discovered something unspeakably horrible was happening to my people on the far-off continent of Europe. 

All these years later, we live in a country that nurtured us, gave us opportunities to become educated, to dream about our futures, to find one another, to raise families and to appreciate life while mourning the horrors of the recent past. A country whose possibilities enabled us to prosper in every sense of the word and however the imagination might roam. 

Today we roamed in familiar territory, located close to where we live in a comfortable home, enjoying the pleasures of living well, not worrying about our safety, or the ability to put food on the table, where we are surrounded by neighbours whose own backgrounds reflect countless origins, cultures, languages and experiences. They too, like us, live comfortable lives, and like us are fortunate to be able to do so.

This country has its own background of discrimination and oppression reflecting the tenor of the times. None of which will disappear entirely because suspicion of the other is endemic and ingrained in humanity. But there are standards and values and a general acceptance of accountability and accommodation of others. There will always be social misfits in any society and Canada has its share. Which does nothing to diminish our confidence in the country and its mission as a nation to be all that it can to those within and responsible in part for the well-being to those without.