Madam Chair, I think you would be misinforming your daughters if you told them that was the case, and so would their teachers, because as I said fairly clearly in my opening remarks, the words “thy sons” are not exclusive in the context of our tradition.
It may be that in schools nowadays, people are not taught much about that deeper tradition, and when they see O Canada they think, “Hang on here, there's something wrong with this. This is sexist. This is not gender neutral.” That is simply a lack of well-rooted education in our culture and history. The equality of women and men is extremely important, but if this change is supposed to advance equality, it won't do much.
How much will it accomplish? In fact, nothing, because if we look at 500 years of our literature—in English, again, because we're talking about the English version—we're talking about poetry, and the word “sons” has in this type of context never referred only to men.
I quoted Handel's Joshua and other texts, which used to be extremely familiar to Canadians. If Canadians are not familiar with them now, that's unfortunate, and it explains why a superficial change like this could be seen to be meaningful when it isn't. It's merely making inferior poetry, lower-quality poetry.