On Canada

And why we care that it endures.

In January 2025, after some words from a U.S. politician, I drove my six-year-old son to the hardware store in a -25°C cold snap. We bought a Canadian flag and a flagpole and mounted it to the side of our house, where it has remained since.

I do not generally recommend waving a flag in anger. But that evening, like so many other Canadians, I wanted to mark a line. Not against another country or another people, but in defence of something I had often taken for granted and that felt very tangible at that moment – Canada, and my Canadian-ness.

Canada is often described through its programs or symbols: health care, the Charter, hockey, geography, peacekeeping, a flag. Each of these matters. None of them, on its own, explain what Canada is, the pull of Canada, or why moments of instability elsewhere can make that pull feel urgent.

A country is an accumulation of habits, expectations, and shared understandings. It is built slowly, practiced daily, and noticed most clearly in contrast, or when they are absent. It is an environment – political, economic, and cultural – in which certain assumptions hold.

That environment does not have sharp boundaries. The view of what is within and without the national character of a country can be blurry. Sometimes even, as I believe is the case with Canada, that blurriness is intentional, and a virtue.

Everyone, especially at the margins of the definition of Canada, will have a different view. But Canada matters, Canada is special – more special than we sometimes realize – and Canada is worth defending.

Shaped by geography and first peoples

Canada’s character is inseparable from its land and from the peoples who learned how to live on it first. It has a natural beauty – second to none. It’s also dangerous.

We live here, we have built comfortable lives here so it’s easy to forget how hostile the land can be or how unusual it is to live in a place like this. But when an American says it is freezing outside, they mean it is below zero degrees. When a Canadian says it is freezing outside, we mean without proper clothing you will be unconscious within minutes.

This is a vast, cold, sparsely populated country. Nature is not forgiving. Much of the land resists easy settlement, rapid extraction, or tight control. Survival and prosperity here have always required planning, cooperation, and respect for limits.

Long before Confederation, Indigenous nations developed systems of governance, stewardship, and responsibility suited to this reality – practical frameworks for living in places where carelessness had consequences.

European settlement did not replace those realities; it collided with them. Over time, the state that emerged was shaped by the contradictory forces of constraint and ambition. With our size and resources, opportunities were and are endless. But you could not govern Canada through force. The land was too large, the communities too dispersed, the costs of failure too high. Authority had to be mediated, delegated, and justified.

This produced habits that still define the country: federalism instead of centralization; negotiation instead of decree; accommodation instead of uniformity. Geography made absolute control impractical. Indigenous presence made legitimacy conditional.

Resource abundance reinforced this logic. Canada is wealthy not because extraction is easy, but because of coordination – between regions, governments, workers, and communities. Development here has always been slower, more contested, and more procedural than elsewhere. That friction is often frustrating. It is also stabilizing.

Indigenous stewardship continues to materially shape how Canada functions today. Duty to consult, co-management regimes, Indigenous protected areas, and modern treaties place real constraints on state and corporate power. They slow decisions. They also make them more durable and more thoughtful.

The result is a country oriented toward patience over spectacle, process over force, and legitimacy over speed. Compromise here is not a moral pose. It is a survival strategy learned from the land and from those who knew it first.

We are a northern people, and caution was taught.

A national restraint

There is an understatement to the Canadian project. We are one of the largest, wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world. Even saying that can sometimes feel funny, wrong, or embarrassing to Canadian ears. Despite our size and resources, we are more comfortable with balance than bravado.

Years ago, the CBC’s Peter Gzowski ran a contest to find the Canadian equivalent of the phrase “as American as apple pie.” Listeners were asked to complete the sentence “As Canadian as…”, with the winning entry being “as Canadian as possible – under the circumstances.”

It was funny because it was true. Everything has limits here, even having limits. We believe, often implicitly, that freedom is strengthened – not diminished – when rules are applied fairly. We believe that rights matter, but that rights carry obligations. We believe that there are always exceptions.

Europe can war over ideological impurity. The United States can state inalienable rights. We have the Oakes Test.

Markets exist, but are not worshipped. Freedom is prized, but understood as fragile. Power is constrained, but not because we distrust the state – we distrust concentration, public or private. Progress is expected, but abrupt rupture is treated with suspicion.

Canada is shaped by restraint, balance, and a comfort with what others might dismiss as ideological impurity. We do not require perfection. We accept a certain level of contradiction. We avoid absolute solutions or extreme speed. We work through, without wide swings, and we do so together.

A global heritage

Modern Canada is not a replica of any single tradition.

We inherited market economies and personal freedom common across the Americas – a comfort with risk, mobility, and individual ambition. We inherited institutional restraint, social obligation, and procedural legitimacy from European political traditions. Further waves of immigration brought us eastern and African cultural inheritances. And we live on land shaped by Indigenous systems of stewardship, continuity, and responsibility that predate the state itself.

But Canada is not a blend in the way a compromise is a blend. It is not European norms diluted by North American dynamism, nor American freedom softened by Old World caution. Over time, something else emerged – a civic culture that is more distinct and more than the sum of its parts.

We live with multiple loyalties – regional, linguistic, Indigenous, immigrant – without insisting that they compete for dominance.

Canadians, and our ancestors, come from everywhere.

In addition to contributing to a distinct basket of values, it pushes the Canadian instinct to cooperate beyond our borders. We have deep connections and amicable relations with most everyone. This shows up in the prosaic (we are the only G7 country with trade deals with every other G7 country) but also in our cultural festivals, our diplomatic outreach, and our commitment to global systems and global action.

A collective sense of responsibility

Canada sees a civic role in launching people – in giving them a fair start, helping them reach their potential, and enabling them to contribute. When people stumble, we do not treat that as moral failure. We see value in helping them back into the race.

For Canadians, this is not about guaranteeing outcomes or insulating anyone from effort or consequence. It is about refusing to waste people. You survive the winter together.

Education, health care, public infrastructure, social insurance, and immigration are not acts of charity in this view. These things are the great levellers of opportunity. They are investments in shared capacity – and in a country that works better when more people can fully participate.

This is both a moral and an economic proposition. Countries that sideline large portions of their population are poorer, less resilient, and more brittle. Countries that widen participation are stronger – not despite the cost, but because of it.

Canada’s social architecture reflects a belief that a broad middle, shared risk, and accessible opportunity are sources of national strength.

This is reflected in outcomes. America is wealthier than Canada. The United States’ GDP per capita is US$89,600 compared to Canada’s US$55,000. That’s a 63% difference¹.

But Canadians are wealthier than Americans. Median wealth in Canada is US$152,000 – 23% above America’s US$124,000².

Why the difference? The rich in America are very rich. In Canada, what we have is spread more evenly, and the average Canadian is better for it.

An individual sense of opportunity

We often speak as though globalization is flattening difference – as though countries are converging toward a common model of politics, markets, and culture.

In practice, many societies are polarizing. Some are embracing maximalist ideologies; others are hollowing out institutions in favour of personality, spectacle, or force. The space for pluralism without fracture is narrowing.

Against that backdrop is Canada. It is an open place where liberal democracy, social obligation, historic tradition, plural identity, and economic openness coexist without any single one claiming supremacy, and where those things are available to the vast majority, not an elite few.

This distinctiveness is easy to miss because it is not loud, and it does not announce itself as exceptional. It is felt instead in the absence of fear – fear of the state, fear of neighbours, fear of instability, fear of tomorrow. It is felt in the confidence that the next days will be better but they will resemble today closely enough to plan a life.

In Canada, we expect institutions to matter. We expect courts to constrain abuses. We expect elections to be decisive and losing sides to accept the result. We assume governments will justify themselves, that rules will apply broadly, and that authority will be exercised judiciously and with explanation rather than spectacle, and that we will be free to live our lives. That none of these expectations strike us as noteworthy is noteworthy. Most of the world does not live under such conditions.

A project unfinished

Every day in Parliament, we begin with a prayer that gives voice to this responsibility. We give thanks for the blessings of freedom, opportunity, and peace – and ask for the wisdom to preserve them for the benefit of all.

Those words assume that what we have is neither accidental nor guaranteed. They frame Canada not as something we possess, but as something we are responsible for. They frame our advantages as something to be shared.

Canada is imperfect. Its history is unfinished. Its promises are unevenly realized.

But a country worth defending is not one that claims perfection. It is one that commits to improvement, to repair, to inclusion and to opportunity. One that understands itself as a project, not a trophy.

A friend of mine who immigrated to Canada speaks about taking the oath of citizenship. About how emotional it was. About a room full of people from different backgrounds, many of them tearing up. She observed: the idea of a nation with Canada’s virtues can seem abstract – but they mean so much when you’ve seen the absence.

That observation stayed with me. For people who have lived without stable institutions, without basic trust in the rule of law, without the expectation of peace, a country like Canada is freedom, opportunity, and peace – experienced daily.

That January evening, standing in the cold with my son, I was not making a statement about identity. I was acknowledging obligation.

Canada has shaped me. It will shape him. And it is shaped, in turn, by whether we are willing to take responsibility for it.

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1. IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2025

2. UBS Global Wealth Report, 2025