O Canada

The story

The Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, Théodore Robitaille, commissioned the song for the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony of 1880. Calixa Lavallée composed the music, and the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier then wrote French words for it, as a French Canadian patriotic song for the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society. It was first performed on 24 June 1880 at a Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day banquet in Quebec City. At the time Routhier's "Chant National" was popular among Francophones as an anthem, while "God Save the Queen" and "The Maple Leaf Forever" had competed since 1867 as unofficial national anthems in English Canada. The first known performance outside Quebec came in 1901, when schoolchildren sang it for the tour of Canada by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, later King George V and Queen Mary. The musicologist Ross Duffin has argued that Lavallée built the melody from passages of Mozart, Wagner, Liszt and Matthias Keller. The original manuscript has been lost.

English versions followed. In 1906 the Whaley and Royce company of Toronto published the music with the French text and a first English translation by Thomas Bedford Richardson, and in 1908 Collier's Weekly held a competition for new English words, won by Mercy E. Powell McCulloch, whose version never gained wide acceptance. The most popular version was written in 1908 by Robert Stanley Weir, a lawyer and Recorder of the City of Montreal; it was not a translation of the French. Weir himself changed a line in 1913, a fourth verse of a religious nature was added in 1926, and a slightly modified version, published for the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation in 1927, gradually became the most widely sung.

The song was taken to be the de facto national anthem after King George VI stood at attention while it was played at the dedication of the National War Memorial in Ottawa on 21 May 1939, following a precedent set by his brother Edward, the previous king, at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France in 1936. Local practice still varied: Toronto used "God Save the King" or "God Save the Queen", Montreal "O Canada". In 1964 Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson said that one song would have to be chosen, and Parliament approved a motion making "O Canada" the national anthem and "God Save the Queen" the royal anthem. A special joint committee of the Senate and House of Commons, appointed in 1967 on Pearson's advice by Governor General Georges Vanier, recommended on 12 April 1967 that Weir's 1908 English words be used with a few minor changes. In 1970 the Crown bought the rights to the words and music from Gordon V. Thompson Music for $1.

The National Anthem Act made "O Canada" the official national anthem on 1 July 1980, the Dominion Day (today Canada Day) of that year. It changed two repeated phrases of the English words, as the committee had proposed, which was controversial with traditionalists; for several years many people still sang the older words. The French words have never been altered. The English words were later debated: in June 1990 Toronto City Council voted 12 to 7 to recommend two changes, and Senator Vivienne Poy introduced a bill in 2002, both to make the words gender-neutral; in the late 2000s secularists criticised the religious references of both versions. A plan announced in the speech from the throne of 3 March 2010 was dropped two days later. Mauril Bélanger's bill of 2014 was defeated in 2015; reintroduced as Bill C-210 in 2016, it passed the House of Commons by 225 votes to 74 in June 2016 and the Senate on 31 January 2018, and received royal assent on 7 February 2018, the third revision of Weir's words.

The anthem is played before sporting events involving Canadian teams, and the major North American leagues play both the Canadian and American anthems when teams of both countries meet. Singers often mix the English and French words. The words have been translated into Inuktitut, Ojibwe, Cree and Mi'kmaq, and there is a trilingual version in English, French and Inuktitut; Daniel Tlen sang it in Southern Tutchone at the opening of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, and in February 2007 Akina Shirt became the first to sing it in Cree at a National Hockey League game. Several provinces require it to be played daily in public schools.

What it says

A solemn patriotic hymn of love for the country and a promise to protect it. The French words of 1880 and Weir's English words of 1908 are separate poems, not translations of each other; both contain religious references.

The words