Almost Canada Day Bash 2026 spans six HEMA divisions in Ontario

The small Ontario card carried outsized competitive value because it put singlestick, basket-hilted broadsword and smallsword on the same bill. Almost Canada Day Bash 2026 in Alexandria drew 97 fighters across six divisions, giving younger entrants, veterans and Division A competitors a single stage to test weapons that do not often share the spotlight.

The structure told the story immediately. The event split into mixed singlestick for under-18 fighters, mixed steel basket-hilted broadsword for Division A, mixed steel basket-hilted broadsword for veterans, mixed steel smallsword for Division A, mixed steel smallsword for under-18 fighters and mixed steel smallsword for veterans. The largest sections were the Division A broadsword and smallsword brackets, each with 10 fighters and 28 fights, while the U18 singlestick and U18 smallsword fields each drew 6 fighters for 17 and 19 bouts respectively. Veterans also had meaningful lanes to compete, with 6 fighters in basket-hilted broadsword for 21 fights and 3 veterans in smallsword for 8 fights.

That spread made the event more than a local one-off. HEMA Ratings listed Almost Canada Day Bash 2026 as created and last updated on June 18, 2026, but still inactive while it waited for organizer validation, even though the tournament date sat at June 13 in Alexandria, Ontario. HEMA Scorecard carried the same competition as “(Almost) Canada Day Bash Charitable Tournament 2026” and marked it unpublished on June 13, underscoring that the card had already been staged even as the ratings side of the sport waited for the administrative finish.

The weapons themselves added another layer of significance. The HEMA Alliance describes HEMA as a family of historical arts rather than a single martial art, with traditions that include rapier, sword and buckler and military saber. It also notes that lower-mass weapons such as smallsword and singlestick can be used with less protective gear than higher-impact weapons, which helps explain why they often work well in developmental and entry-level formats. That is exactly where this Alexandria event found leverage: singlestick and smallsword gave younger and newer competitors a practical way into the sport, while the veterans’ brackets kept the older guard in the mix.

The historical range was equally broad. Wiktenauer places basket-hilted broadsword in the 17th and 18th centuries, smallsword in an 18th-century fencing manuscript by Salomon Christoph Müller, and singlestick in 19th-century manuals by H. A. Colmore Dunn. Packed together in one Ontario tournament, those traditions turned a modest regional card into a useful snapshot of where HEMA competition is growing: not just in size, but in depth, variety and visibility across weapons that rarely get a full stage.