Civic Holiday: What We're Really Celebrating

What We Inherit

In Ottawa, the first Monday in August has a name that belongs to this city: Colonel By Day. We mark the person who led the construction of the Rideau Canal, that immense work cut through forest and rock almost two centuries ago.

What stays with me in that story is not only the man. It is the idea. The canal was dug by thousands of labourers — Irish and Scottish immigrants, and French Canadians. As many as a thousand of them died doing it, most of them taken by malaria. They did not choose this as their legacy. But the city we live in was born out of their work.

That is often what building is: one generation's labour becomes the ground the next one walks on, without giving it a thought.

Education works the same way.

In May 1975, my parents were waiting for their first child in a small apartment on rue Chabot in Montreal. They had come from Haiti during the second wave of the brain drain. They had married in Thetford Mines a year earlier. They had arrived with almost nothing, but with one certainty that would become my inheritance: education would be my key. Before I had taken my first breath, they were already building for me. In that sense, their work was not so different from the work done along the canal.

At twelve, I was taken to live in Port-au-Prince. I resisted it. I held tightly to my Canadian identity, and school there felt heavy to me. I was capable, but I felt boxed in by a rigid system that valued memorization more than critical thought. It was also there that political instability taught me the fragility of systems and the importance of civic engagement. A system can look permanent until the day it is not.

When I came back to Montreal for secondaire 5, Quebec would not recognize what I had learned in Haiti. I had to fight to be placed in advanced math. I gave up my Saturdays for a physics course. I had to abandon chemistry altogether. That bitter taste of bureaucratic injustice stayed with me. It is why I care, in a very concrete way, whether a school system truly serves the child standing in front of it, not only whether it looks correct on paper. Today, I am the one building for what comes after.

What We Build

The French-language Catholic school system we sometimes take for granted did not appear on its own. It exists because Franco-Ontarian families organized, challenged, insisted and kept going, often for decades, often without seeing the full result of their efforts. The right to an education in our language, governed by us, is a recent gain. It is also a fragile one.

Today, that work continues in other places: in budget decisions, in board policies, in the ability of a school to offer the services a child needs. It is less spectacular than a canal. It matters just as much.

That is part of why I am running to serve Zone 6 as a school trustee for the CECCE, the Conseil des écoles catholiques du Centre-Est, the French-language Catholic board serving Ottawa and eastern Ontario. Election day is October 26, 2026, but the deeper work is not only about one date. It is about what we choose to protect, repair and pass on.

So enjoy the day. The barbecue, the sun, time with family. That is exactly why we build.

Happy Civic Holiday and Colonel By Day to all the families of Zone 6.