As a Quebecer, I have always had an ambivalent, if not uneasy, relationship to Canada. The province’s deep sense of being distinct, of speaking a language most of the rest of the country doesn’t always bother to understand, marked me. Even as much of my early life in my family’s Montreal home was lived in Italian, we often consumed culture in French. After school, I watched Passe-Partout, Bobino, and a series starring a glum clown called Sol. My father, who arrived in the city in 1967, was never fully comfortable in English, and preferred his blockbusters dubbed. That meant Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts talking in a joual that never quite matched their faces.
The layered experiences I grew up with shaped how I understood belonging and nationhood. Quebec seemed to possess a dense, confident cultural identity; Canada’s, by contrast, felt thin, synthetic, and, borrowing Mavis Gallant’s term, “dull.” As a literary critic, I came to regard nationalism as a suspicious framework for judging books. Mistaking representation for quality, it insisted on seeing excellence where it didn’t exist.
But while I didn’t always feel part of Canada, I knew I belonged to it. That much was clear. Quebec’s second major brush with separatism—the 1995 referendum, narrowly turned back—shook me. I felt a surge of connection, of collective identity I hadn’t known I carried. Canada felt fragile, and suddenly precious. However reductively territorial the idea of the country seemed, however ersatz some of its achievements, it was something I wasn’t ready to lose. I say that as someone belonging to a community whose men were hauled off to internment camps during the Second World War. That trauma lives close—passed down in family stories, in silences. Yet I’ve resisted the idea of Canada as irredeemably flawed. Its promises have always been unevenly distributed, often withheld entirely. But they are real.
Our cover story is about the political moment forcing us to confront that truth anew: Donald Trump. Not the man, exactly, but the peril he embodies. In a sweeping and sobering essay, national security expert Wesley Wark urges us to abandon the illusion that our sovereignty is secure. He calls for a wholesale rethinking of how we gather intelligence, fund our military, and structure our economy. This isn’t a policy upgrade, but the basic condition for self-preservation in a world where the United States may no longer see us as a partner, but as a prize.
Wark doesn’t offer comfort. He brings clarity. And with clarity come questions. What does it mean to be Canadian? What do we owe each other across provinces, histories, languages? What exactly are we trying to hold on to? Quebec taught me to be wary of shallow patriotic narratives. But as someone from a province that twice nearly walked away, I know what it means to stand at that edge. I also know what it means to step back from it. The idea of Canada—messy, unfinished, plural—starts to look like something rare. And maybe that’s enough.
The post I’m Not Ready to Lose Canada first appeared on The Walrus.
