Two Years In, And Canada Still Has My Heart
On Canada's 159th birthday, one Ugandan-Canadian family reflects on what home actually means when you choose it.
Two Years In, And Canada Still Has My Heart
Two years ago, we packed our lives into luggage allowances, said goodbyes that still sit heavy somewhere in the chest, and boarded a flight toward a country we had studied but not yet lived.
Today, Canada turns 159.
We have been here for two of those years. I know this because I have now filed two sets of Canadian taxes — which, as any newcomer will tell you, is a rite of passage that makes the citizenship oath look like a casual Tuesday. You know you’ve arrived when the CRA knows your name.
I want to mark this birthday the way I mark most things that matter: honestly.
The Thing About Choosing a Country
Most people do not choose where they are born. They inherit a country the way they inherit a last name — without negotiation, without comparison, without a visa application or a biometrics appointment at 7:30 AM on a Wednesday.
My family did something different. We looked at the world, we looked at what we wanted for our children and for each other, and we chose Canada.
That choice carries weight. When you are born somewhere, gratitude is optional. When you choose somewhere, gratitude is structural — it is built into the decision itself. Every morning I drive to work through an Alberta sky that still catches me off guard — the way it just goes on, uninterrupted, like someone forgot to put a wall up — I am aware that this is chosen. We are here because we decided to be here.
That never gets old.
Alberta, Specifically
Canada gave us the country. Alberta gave us the community.
I want to say that plainly, because I know Alberta takes some heat in national conversation. From the outside, the province can sound like a personality conflict waiting to happen. From the inside — from two years of actually living here — it is something else entirely.
The people are direct. They say what they mean and they do not take an hour to say it. I find this restful in a way I did not predict. Where I come from, communication carries layers — protocol, hierarchy, what you say and what you mean can live in different rooms. Alberta stripped that down. Not rudely. Just practically.
The space is something I have not stopped noticing. Open land, open sky, roads that go straight for so long you start to wonder if the horizon is teasing you. My children look out of car windows and see things I never saw at their age. I do not know yet what that will make of them, but I suspect it will make them larger in some internal way.
And the cold. Nobody warned me about the cold with the appropriate level of gravity. Back home, “cold” means you put on a jacket. Here, “cold” is a philosophical position. Minus 30 is not a temperature — it is a personality test. The fact that Albertans walk outside in it, without drama, and say things like “not bad for this time of year” is either the most impressive thing I have ever witnessed or evidence of collective memory loss about what warmth feels like. I have not decided which.
But here is what Alberta actually gave my family: it received us without ceremony and without suspicion. Nobody asked us to prove ourselves before treating us like neighbours. Nobody made us earn the benefit of the doubt. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.
What My Family Looks Like Now
My wife has adjusted in the way she adjusts to everything: with more competence than the situation required and less complaint than the situation invited. She found her footing, then helped others find theirs. That is who she is. Canada did not change that about her; it just gave her new material to work with.
My children are doing what children do in new countries — they are absorbing. Language, habits, the social codes of Canadian school playgrounds, which apparently involve a great deal of hockey talk from people who have never laced up a skate. They correct my pronunciation of certain things now, gently, in the way children correct parents when they are still being kind about it. My daughter recently informed me that “schedule” is pronounced “SHED-ule” here, and that saying it the other way makes me sound like I’m from somewhere else. I told her that is because I am, in fact, from somewhere else. She was not persuaded.
This country is, in some ways, theirs more than mine. They will carry it in their voices.
I think about what home means for them. For me, home has two addresses. For them, home will be this one. I watch them settle and I do not grieve the other place so much as I hold it. Uganda is not lost to us. It is just not where we are.
The Honest Part
Immigration is not a smooth story. It has edges.
There are forms that make no sense — forms asking for the same information in slightly different ways, as though the government suspects you may have changed your address between page 2 and page 4. There are systems that talk to each other only reluctantly, like colleagues who have a complicated history. There are winter months in Alberta that are not so much cold as they are a referendum on your life choices.
There are also moments of being in a room and knowing, without anyone saying anything, that your presence is being processed. Most people here are kind. Some people are not sure what to do with you. Those two things coexist, and I have made my peace with that, the way you make peace with the weather: not by pretending it isn’t happening, but by dressing appropriately and going outside anyway.
What I have not made my peace with — because it does not require peace, only acknowledgment — is that this country is still figuring itself out. 159 years sounds long. For a nation carrying the complexity that Canada carries — its history with Indigenous peoples, its ongoing negotiation between French and English, its project of multiculturalism that is more aspiration than achievement on some days — 159 is still early work.
I find that honest rather than troubling. A country that knows it is unfinished is a country that can still improve. That is a better condition than certainty.
What Nation Building Actually Is
Canada Day tends toward the celebratory, which is appropriate. But I think about nation building differently now that I am a small participant in it.
Nation building is not a government project, or not only that. It is what happens in the school drop-off line when two parents who share no language figure out how to communicate about a schedule change, mostly through gestures and the universal human expression of mild panic. It is what happens when a neighbour shovels your walk without being asked and without expecting anything back — and then apologizes for how they shovelled it, because they’re Canadian, and apologizing for acts of generosity is apparently part of the culture.
It is what happens when a country makes it possible, through its systems and its laws and its general disposition toward people arriving with luggage and hope, for a family from Uganda to come here and feel that they belong to something.
That is what Canada has done for us.
Not perfectly. Not always smoothly. But with enough consistency that it counts.
A Personal Note to This Country
Canada, you were not my first country, but you are my chosen one.
You have given my family safety, opportunity, community, and winter — a great deal of winter. You have given my children an education in a language they are now correcting me in. You have given me a sky I still do not take for granted and neighbours I did not deserve to find so quickly.
You are an honest country. You know you have not always lived up to your ideals and you say so, which is more than most countries manage while also hosting a very good July long weekend.
I hope my family contributes to you over the decades ahead. I hope my children grow up to be the kind of Canadians who make this place better — not just in their professional lives, but in the small daily ways that actually build a country. The held door. The genuine “how are you” that waits for an answer. The willingness to carry two cultures without letting either one diminish the other.
On your 159th birthday, from one Albertan immigrant family: thank you.
We chose you. We’d choose you again.
One more thing, since we are celebrating: I grew up playing soccer. It was the first sport I understood, the one that made sense before anything else did. Uganda did not qualify for this World Cup. Canada did — and not just as a host nation collecting the automatic bid, but as a team that went out and earned something on the pitch. A 6–0 win over Qatar. Jonathan David’s hat-trick — the first by a host nation player since 1966. A Round of 16 spot, secured yesterday, on the day before Canada’s birthday. I watched some of those goals in this country, cheering for this country, in the game I grew up with. There is something in that I am still finding words for. My childhood game. My new country. Making history together on a birthday weekend.
#GoCanada. #GoOilers.
Brian Ssennoga is a Ugandan-Canadian writer and strategist based in Edmonton, Alberta. He writes about family, culture, faith, and the ongoing project of building a life in a new country. He has filed two Canadian tax returns and considers this sufficient proof of citizenship in spirit.
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