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The Men’s World Cup will be a unique sporting event for Canadians — and not merely because it’s being co-hosted on Canadian soil or because soccer is now the most-played youth sport in Canada.
The Canadian men’s national soccer team has the unique opportunity to forge a different vision of Canadian national identity — one that looks quite different from what hockey has historically offered.
This tournament will be especially unique when compared to recent sporting events including the Four Nations Faceoff, the Milan Cortina winter Olympic Games and the Toronto Blue Jays’ World Series run last year.
The difference lies not in the sport itself, but in who is wearing the Canadian jersey and the stories they carry onto the pitch.
In Canada, hockey has historically been the sport used to symbolize Canadian national excellence and foster collective identity. However, it’s also an expensive sport that has long reflected a white, European conception of Canadian identity.
The National Hockey League employs a workforce that is 84 per cent white across players and team staff, a reality reinforced by the composition of Canada’s men’s hockey team at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.
The Toronto Blue Jays’ extraordinary run to the 2025 World Series was a moment that genuinely galvanized the country around baseball in ways not seen since the back-to-back championships of 1992 and 1993. The 2025 World Series prompted the entire country to root for “Canada’s team.”
Canadians rallied enthusiastically behind a team that played in Canada and wore the maple leaf, something their owners were happy to emphasize throughout the Jays’ run.
Yet the Blue Jays presented their own identity puzzle. The team that Canada adopted as “Canada’s team” had only one Canadian player on its World Series roster: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — who was born in Montréal and whose father played for the Montreal Expos — in a majority-American lineup.
A lot of the national enthusiasm was likely stoked by Canada’s tense trade relationship with the United States and not Blue Jays players being directly representative of the lived experiences of most Canadians.
Canada’s men’s soccer team presents a different image: a racially diverse squad whose players embody stories of immigration, offering a more inclusive vision of what Canadian identity can look like.
No player embodies this more than Canada’s team captain, Alphonso Davies. Born in the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana to Liberian parents who had fled the civil war, he arrived in Edmonton at age five through Canada’s resettlement program. He is now a Champions League winner and a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador.
But it goes beyond Davies. Head coach Jesse Marsch, who took over from John Herdman in 2024, has made the recruitment of dual nationals an explicit priority.
He recruited players like Tani Oluwaseyi, who could have declared for Nigeria; Niko Sigur, who played for Croatia at the under-21 level; Marcelo Flores, who competed for Mexico at various youth levels; and Alfie Jones, an English-born centre-back who learned the Canadian national anthem from a teammate before taking his citizenship oath at training camp.
The result is a squad built largely from immigrants and dual nationals who were actively courted to represent Canada, reflecting a vision of the country shaped by multiculturalism rather than ethnic homogeneity. This carries historical resonance: Canada’s past policies once explicitly favoured white, European immigrants, provoking a countervailing push toward official multiculturalism.
It is precisely this multicultural framework that’s made the squad possible and given Canada unprecedented strength and depth.
National sporting events are powerful vehicles for building shared identity. When people connect to sporting events in ways that make their sense of belonging to a country feel personal, sport becomes something more than entertainment.
This World Cup arrives at a politically charged moment, with the United States — a co-host alongside with Mexico — planning to involve immigration enforcement in tournament security. Canada’s multicultural squad offers a counter-narrative in a tournament already shadowed by debates about immigration and belonging.
For the millions of Canadians who immigrated to Canada or who carry their family’s immigration story as a major part of their sense of identity, the men’s national soccer team offers something that the men’s Olympic hockey squad and the Toronto Blue Jays never quite delivered: the possibility of seeing themselves in a more complete representation of Canada’s team.
That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the realization of the full potential of sport in building Canadian national identity.
Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In Hanau, Germany, on Feb. 19, 2020, after Vili-Viorel Pǎun witnessed the beginning of a mass shooting and tried to stop the gunman by chasing him down with his car, he called emergency services three times. No one answered, and Pǎun was shot dead.
Later, Pǎun’s father overheard police officers using a common racial slur while commenting on the supposed impossibility of a Roma person showing civic courage. This was not an aberration; it was a part of the same systemic racism that’s left the victims’ families without true justice six years later.
As sensory studies scholars who focus on racism and migration, we argue that racism is not only interpersonal or even simply structural, it’s also multi-sensory. It shapes how minorities see, hear and move through the world, with consequences that extend from everyday interactions to life-or-death institutional failures.
The gunman , a firm believer in the “Great Replacement” theory, scouted out places where minorities were thought to gather — shisha bars, youth centres and kebab shops — to carry out his attack.
And on that day, Vili-Viorel Pǎun, Ferhat Unvar, Hamza Kurtović, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Kaloyan Velkov, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Sedat Gürbüz and Gökhan Gültekin lost their lives. All were ethnically either Turkish, Afghan, Romanian, Bulgarian or Bosnian.
The aftermath and investigation into the event revealed how in Germany the devaluation of minority lives that drove the gunman’s worldview is also present in the way justice, media and politics operate.
What happened at the Arena Bar & Café, the final site of the attack, serves as another example for the families of the victims who argue that the racism in this tragedy is also evidence of systemic issues within policing. The exit had been illegally locked to facilitate police raids, largely driven, investigators found, by racial profiling linking hookah bars with criminality.
The London-based research agency Forensic Architecture, which uses architectural techniques and digital technologies to investigate human rights violations, revealed that five of the nine victims could have escaped through the emergency exit and survived.
There were questions about why it took hours to apprehend the perpetrator, even though his location was known. The special forces stood by his house and waited, which gave the perpetrator time to kill his mother and commit suicide. They never offered a reason for their delayed intervention.
Other investigations later revealed that some of the special forces were members of a chat group sharing right-wing extremist ideologies.
These failures create a reminder of how the racism faced by minorities feeds back into societal structures that can cost lives and obstruct justice.
Our research shows that racism is a multi-sensory experience that transforms the ways in which minorities feel and interact with the world. Qualitative research and statistics confirm that people face a loss of trust and the development of health issues when faced with institutional discrimination.
Multi-sensory racism can present through a visual categorization based on skin colour — the discomfort of entering predominantly white spaces, for example. It can manifest through olfactory perception such as comments on “smelly” foods.
It affects everyday social interactions like how and where people choose to safely socialize — and why they may prefer to spend their time within their own communities rather than “integrating.”
These experiences culminate in how institutional behaviour sets up or fails to sanction individual racism.
In the case of Hanau, the failure by politicians and police to acknowledge the ubiquity of the racist worldview that motivated the perpetrator and made his violence possible has prompted survivors and their families to begin a multi-pronged anti-racist effort.
Most prominently, the survivors founded Initiative February 19 Hanau to create a platform that pushes for social action and solidarity for the victims of racist violence. Guided by the principles of remembrance, investigation, justice and accountability, the initiative calls for state responsibility while embracing the notion of #SayTheirNames.
The hashtag underscores the importance of naming those who have been murdered as an act of resistance against racism and systemic violence.
Both Said Etris Hashemi — who still carries shrapnel from the perpetrator’s ammunition in his body — and Çetin Gültekin, brother of the murdered Gökhan Gültekin, released memoirs that deal with the inherent racism of German society and situate it within a broader political struggle of growing far-right movements and their popularity in Germany.
The 2025 documentary Das Deutsche Volk follows the lives of the survivors and their families over the years and captures the ongoing fight for a memorial in Hanau’s city centre.
At one point, Çetin Gültekin suggests a landmark that showcases the deceased as pillars encircling the Brothers Grimm National Monument. The indifference that follows this suggestion has been interpreted by advocates as a lack of recognition for dignified remembrance.
The Hanau attacks, and the ongoing struggle for recognition of migrants’ experiences in a system where German institutions often treat them as third-class citizens, expose a troubling fallacy. It was captured by the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2015 non-fiction book Between the World and Me: “Race is the child of racism, not its father.”
In societies where race is still treated as a biological fact — rather than a colonial construct used to place people into arbitrary hierarchies — and where structural inequalities are only beginning to be acknowledged, there is still limited understanding of racism as a multi-sensory reality that shapes the everyday lives of minorities.
The work of addressing racist injustice requires sustained, long-term institutional and social change.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
SINGAPORE: A former investigation officer (IO) with the Singapore Police Force (SPF) has been jailed for forging statements and signatures in active police criminal investigations, after internal checks uncovered irregularities across multiple case files.
S Vikneshvaran Subramaniam, 36, was sentenced on May 12 to 42 weeks’ jail after pleading guilty to four forgery charges, with five more taken into consideration. The case spanned about 18 months, from June 2021 to February 2023, while Vikneshvaran was attached to the Jurong Police Division as an investigation officer, Channel NewsAsia (CNA) reported (May 12).
Court proceedings revealed that he forged acknowledgement forms, witness statements, and accused persons’ statements across several investigations. Some interviews were allegedly conducted over the phone before being turned into documents falsely presented as official in-person statements. One forged document even carried a fake signature of an accused person.
The offences came to light after a supervisor checked Vikneshvaran’s desk in January 2023 and found a duffel bag containing unreleased case exhibits. A deeper review of the cases he handled later uncovered more irregularities.
One incident involved an NRIC that should have been formally disposed of after a court case ended. Instead of applying for a fresh court order after the owner declined to collect the old card, Vikneshvaran signed the acknowledgement form himself to make it appear the item had been returned. The card was later found inside the duffel bag discovered at his desk.
Another case involved a victim who provided information over the phone. The statement was later recorded as though it had been formally taken at a police station, but the document remained unsigned.
The defence argued that Vikneshvaran had been struggling mentally after his father’s sudden death. His lawyer, Gino Hardial Singh of Abbots Chambers, told the court that the former officer suffered from prolonged grief disorder and major depressive disorder.
A report from the Institute of Mental Health said there was a contributory link between his mental condition and the offences due to impaired self-control. The defence also argued that mounting work pressure and accumulated case backlogs worsened his condition. No financial gain was involved in the offences.
Still, the court took a stern view. District Judge Ng Cheng Thiam said police officers are expected to uphold the law with complete honesty and integrity, adding that public confidence in institutions can be damaged when officers themselves break the law.
The judge also said the case had tarnished the SPF’s reputation and weakened confidence in the criminal justice process. The prosecution sought between nine and 10-and-a-half months’ jail, while the defence asked for five to six months. The final sentence landed between both positions.
SPF previously said affected cases were re-investigated and fresh statements were taken. Final case outcomes weren’t affected by the forged documents, according to the force.
The case also revealed how internal audits and supervisory checks remain key safeguards within Singapore’s law enforcement system. SPF said officers showing signs of underperformance are monitored more closely, while irregularities trigger immediate investigations and case reviews.
Cases involving misconduct by enforcement officers do tend to attract strong public attention in Singapore because they directly affect institutional credibility. The justice system depends heavily on public confidence that records, statements and evidence are handled properly from the start.
When shortcuts enter that process, even without personal profit, the damage goes beyond paperwork. Mental health struggles and workplace pressure may explain how someone reached that point, but they still don’t erase the consequences.
This case also reinforces the point that high-pressure public service roles require both accountability and stronger support systems to prevent burnout from leading to misconduct.
This article (Ex-SPF investigation officer jailed for forging witness statements and signatures) first appeared on The Independent Singapore News.
Chief Financial Officer Makoto Shibuya said regions connected to southern China, including Laos and Cambodia, were among the areas the company viewed as having strong potential for future development.
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