New Delhi: A video from a Canada Day celebration in Calgary has gone viral on social media that shows a woman confronting volunteers distributing free food over littering at a public park.
In the video posted on X, a woman named Veronica Lace tells a Sikh man at the Prairie Winds Park that she came to celebrate Canada Day with her daughters but was upset to see garbage scattered across the park.
As the man says that “you share your land with us”, Lace replies saying, “We share our land. We don’t treat our land like this. All of you should be ashamed,” before asking the people, mostly Sikhs and South Asians, to “pick up some garbage”.
Panning the camera to film mounds of trash at the park, the woman argues that one shouldn’t wait for the event to get over to clean up. “This is not how we treat Canada,” Lace says, requesting “everybody to bend over and pick up some garbage”.
Visibly agitated, Lace then takes a plastic bag from a food stall and starts collecting garbage with her daughters.
A Canada Day celebration in NE Calgary turned out to be a nightmare for a Canadian woman and her daughters. No one listened or helped her! So disgusting and painful to watch! 🤬
📍 Prairie Winds Park, Calgary AB pic.twitter.com/dSjwCjx0d1
— sammy 2.0 (@Sammy_canada2) July 3, 2026
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‘Nothing against the mission’
The incident took place on 1 July during a Canada Day event organised by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Calgary at Prairie Winds Park. In a Facebook post on 17 June, the community announced free BBQ and veg burgers for everyone at the park on 1 July.
The Guru Nanak Free Kitchen Calgary had also set up a stall at the park to give away free ice cream on Canada Day. After the confrontation started doing rounds on social media, the non-profit clarified in a Facebook post that the “paper plates, napkins, cups, and other food service items shown in the video were not from GNFK”.
The post added that it takes time to collect the garbage after such big events and that “volunteers from both Guru Nanak Free Kitchen and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community stayed behind after the event to help clean the park”.
GNFK also posted photos of people picking up napkins and plastic bags at the park.
In a separate post, the non-profit requested people to not argue with Lace over the video, adding that “she was clearly hurt seeing the trash”. They also invited her to one of their events.
Accepting the invite, Lace insisted that she had “nothing against the mission” and that “there is a better way to engage within the community”.