National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
Canadian holiday - National day of remembrance on September 30th for the victims of the Canadian Indian residential school system
The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (sometimes shortened to T&R Day) (NDTR; French: Journée nationale de la vérité et de la réconciliation), originally and still colloquially known as Orange Shirt Day (French: Jour du chandail orange), is a Canadian day of memorial to recognize the atrocities and multi-generational effects of the Canadian Indian residential school system. It occurs every year on September 30.
As of March 2023, NDTR is a statutory holiday for:
federal government employees and private-sector employees to whom the Canada Labour Code applies;
provincial government employees in Alberta, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.
all workers in British Columbia, Manitoba, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Prince Edward Island, and Yukon.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to document the effects of the residential school system, ran from 2008 to 2015, and concluded that the attempt to forcefully assimilate Indigenous communities was a cultural genocide.
The residential school system was created as a civilizing mission to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Euro-Canadian culture.
Orange Shirt Day was first established as a day of observance in 2013. The use of an orange shirt as a symbol was inspired by the accounts of Phyllis Jack Webstad, whose personal clothing—including a new orange shirt—was taken from her during her first day of residential schooling, and never returned. The orange shirt is thus used as a symbol of the forced assimilation of Indigenous children that the residential school system enforced.
The day was elevated to a statutory holiday for federal workers and workers in federally-regulated workplaces by the Parliament of Canada in 2021, and named "National Day for Truth and Reconciliation", in light of the claims of over 1,000 unmarked graves near former residential school sites.
The public source identifies “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation” as canadian holiday - National day of remembrance on September 30th for the victims of the Canadian Indian residential school system. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around National, Truth and Reconciliation.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q42378086. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2008, 2015 and 2013.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.