The Holidays Act gives July 1 one sentence: it is "a legal holiday" to be "kept and observed as such throughout Canada under the name of 'Canada Day'." The name in that sentence used to be Dominion Day.
Parliament made July 1 a legal holiday named Dominion Day by an Act that received royal assent on 15 May 1879, and renamed it Canada Day by an Act that received royal assent on 27 October 1982. The date itself comes from a royal proclamation of 22 May 1867 that brought the union of three provinces into effect.
On Friday 9 July 1982, private members' business in the House of Commons opened at four o'clock. The record's closing line that afternoon reads "At 4.05 p.m. the House adjourned without question put." The bill that made July 1 Canada Day cleared the Commons in the gap between those two marks.
Bill C-201 was read a second time in that window, went through Committee of the Whole, was reported and passed third reading. Five minutes, and the Commons was finished with Dominion Day. The name itself did not change until royal assent, on 27 October.
The holiday is much older than the name it now carries. Its sentence in the statute book dates from 1879. What that sentence marks did not change at all.
DEALS & OFFERS
Canada Day ran on July 1. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
The first official call to celebrate July 1 came in 1868, a year after the union itself. Governor General Lord Monck's proclamation of 20 June, published in the Canada Gazette and countersigned by John A. Macdonald, appointed "WEDNESDAY, the FIRST day of JULY next".
Getting it into the statute book took longer. A bill to make Dominion Day a public holiday was debated in May 1869 and withdrawn after members objected. Senator Robert Carrall of British Columbia sponsored the effort that worked, and royal assent followed on 15 May 1879.
The first statutory Dominion Day had no official programme. Under the headline "Our National Holiday", the Ottawa Citizen of 2 July 1879 reported that "No public demonstration was arranged."
In 1958, at Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's urging, Secretary of State Ellen Fairclough organised a Dominion Day celebration on Parliament Hill. The Canadian Encyclopedia records his aim: to "revitalize awareness of Canada's British heritage and reverse a recent trend of phasing out the use of the word Dominion."
It did not work. Government institutions effectively stopped using the word by the early 1960s, though bills to change the holiday's name kept failing after the Second World War. The holiday's name was the last hold-over.
Then the Constitution came home. The Constitution Act, 1982 came into force on 17 April that year. Its Schedule renamed the British North America Act, 1867 as the Constitution Act, 1867.
Six months later Parliament took Dominion out of the holiday. Secretary of State Gerald Regan had offered on 3 June to pass the bill "in all stages during one day", in time for "the year of the patriation of the Constitution".
The Commons did not reach it until 9 July, after that year's July 1 had gone by. Hal Herbert, the member for Vaudreuil, moved that Bill C-201 be read a second time, and a parliamentary secretary, Mr. Smith, sought unanimous consent to take all stages that day.
The House agreed, and the bill passed. Mr. Smith then asked for unanimous consent "that the clock now read five o'clock", and got it. Royal assent came on 27 October 1982, and July 1 officially became Canada Day.
TIMELINE
In celebrating our new holiday called Canada Day we should at least take a holiday of 55 minutes this afternoon.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
A union under the Crown, not a break from it.
The Constitution Act, 1867 is a United Kingdom statute whose preamble sets out the provinces' desire to be federally united into one Dominion "under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland". Legislative authority moved in two later steps. The Statute of Westminster, 1931 lifted the bar on altering United Kingdom statutes "except in respect of certain constitutional documents". The Canada Act 1982 ended the United Kingdom Parliament's power to legislate for Canada.
Three days after the vote, Gordon Taylor of Bow River told the House he questioned "the propriety and the legality of a law passed by fewer than 12 members out of 282". The Speaker looked at the record, found that nobody had called for a quorum, and ruled that the quorum therefore existed.
Canada Day is one of the ten general holidays defined in section 166 of the Canada Labour Code for federally regulated employees. The same list runs from New Year's Day to Boxing Day and includes the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, observed on September 30.
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GOOD TO KNOW
July 1 is also Memorial Day here. The province's 2026 advisory has the Premier and Cabinet at a solemn ceremony at the National War Memorial in St. John's for the Newfoundlanders and Labradorians who served and sacrificed, including those who fought at Beaumont-Hamel on July 1, 1916, and at Canada Day events at Signal Hill.
July 1 is moving day across the province, and it is not part of the holiday at all. The housing tribunal explains why: most Quebec housing leases end on June 30, so many people move on the same date.
The capital's celebrations were virtual in 2020 and 2021. Since 2022 the main stages have stood at LeBreton Flats Park and around Ottawa-Gatineau rather than on Parliament Hill, because of the Parliament renovations.
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Test your knowledge
Yes. Section 2 of the federal Holidays Act makes July 1 a legal holiday throughout Canada, and it has been a statutory holiday since 1879.
COLOPHON
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