Source: The Conversation – Canada
Every year, Canada grants citizenship to hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Before most adult applicants can take the oath, they must first pass a test based on a government booklet: Discover Canada. For many newcomers, it is one of the few official accounts of the country they will ever read.
This citizenship study guide, which largely leaves out settler colonialism, the Indian Act and the ongoing legacy of residential schools, is nearly 17 years old. Ottawa has been promising to replace it for the last decade.
In the meantime, community educators are filling in the gaps and teaching newcomers about Indigenous Peoples, colonialism and reconciliation on their own, with little official support.
In a recently published study, I interviewed eight citizenship educators working in two large non-profit community organizations in Vancouver, B.C. Both organizations received federal funding to deliver citizenship test preparation courses. I asked the educators of these courses what it’s like to teach from a guide they know is incomplete.
The 2009 study guide
Discover Canada was released in November 2009 and has had only minor revisions since.
It has been widely criticized for erasing genocide and settler colonialism, omitting missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, misrepresenting Indigenous Peoples as immigrants, glorifying colonial exploration and downplaying Canada’s multinational character.
In separate research, a colleague and I found that the study guide actually never mentions the Indian Act. It frames treaties as historical land-for-benefits deals rather than ongoing relationships between nations.
Its brief passage on residential schools ends with the 2008 federal apology, which makes reconciliation sound finished. Truth and reconciliation appears nowhere else in the booklet.
A stalled promise
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action 93 asked Ottawa to revise its information kit for newcomers and its citizenship test to reflect “a more inclusive history” of Indigenous Peoples, including treaties and residential schools.
Since 2016, successive Liberal governments have said they would revise the guide. Ottawa consulted with more than 190 organizations and experts, including national Indigenous organizations and Indigenous historians.
Documents obtained through access-to-information requests show a draft guide, called Being Canadian, went to then-immigration minister Marco Mendicino for approval in April 2020. It was submitted by the department’s deputy minister. A follow-up memo that November, also by the deputy minister, called Discover Canada “outdated” and argued it “does not reflect Canadian society.”
In 2023, the new guide was “awaiting finalization.” By 2025, it was “near-ready for release.” Today, the government’s website notes only that “a launch date for the revised study guide, study materials and test has not been determined. Discover Canada remains the official study guide for the citizenship test.”
The government has never publicly explained the delay. However, one public servant I interviewed suggested there was little political appetite for the potentially contentious “profound conversations” a revised guide might provoke.
Educators left to improvise
One of the educators I interviewed told me about an instance during a citizenship-test preparation class just after a lesson on residential schools. A student in tears said to them: “I thought Canada was a good country.”
Everyone I spoke with for this study felt morally compelled to teach truth and reconciliation, even though the study guide doesn’t.
So they improvised. They read up on their own, invited Indigenous speakers and organized museum visits and walking tours. Some helped students write land acknowledgements. With no official guidance, they had to decide for themselves what to include. One asked:
“What parts do we teach? What parts do we leave out?”
As an international migration researcher who examines narratives of Canadian citizenship and immigrant naturalization, I call this “downloading.” Ottawa publicly backs reconciliation, then leaves educators in underfunded community organizations to make it work.
Educators know they can’t keep leaning on Indigenous leaders, whose time is already in high demand. Support depends on the organization. One educator couldn’t imagine coping alone at a small organization.
The emotional work is just as heavy. Students respond with shock and grief. Some ask how they can become citizens on land that doesn’t belong to the country granting them citizenship. Educators don’t shield students from these difficult questions, but they are afraid of getting the answers wrong.
In effect, they are tasked with explaining why reconciliation matters in a country that barely mentions it in its own citizenship story.
The teacher of the tearful student answered, “The thing about Canada is, we’re working on it.”
It was a kind reply, and no personal failing. But it shows how easily colonial harm slides back into a familiar story of past mistakes and steady progress. When a new citizenship study guide remains “near-ready” year after year, it sends its own message: the hardest questions can wait.
Read more:
This Canada Day, we need a new citizenship oath
Meaningful citizenship education
Citizenship guides are not neutral study aids. They teach people how to understand a country’s history, its institutions and its political community.
Given that many newcomers arrive in Canada with little exposure to truth and reconciliation, the stories a guide tells, and the silences it keeps, matter.
The fuller, more honest citizenship guide Ottawa has long promised is urgently needed. Still, a booklet alone cannot deliver reconciliation.
Citizenship education also needs support and funding at a time when Ottawa is cutting settlement budgets.
Newcomers have difficult questions about Canada, its history and our responsibilities. Answering them means moving past memorizing facts for a multiple-choice test, toward citizenship education that takes those questions seriously.
Until then, community educators will be left to bridge the gap between Canada’s stated commitment to reconciliation and the very different story Canada tells newcomers about itself.
Lisa Ruth Brunner receives funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund under the Migrant Integration in the Mid-21st Century: Bridging Divides research program. She also works for the Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC (AMSSA) as a Public Policy Consultant.