OP-ED: What it means to be Canadian right now

Anger has become the background noise of modern life. It hums constantly, sharpens easily, and corrodes quickly. Outrage travels faster than context. Certainty is rewarded more than curiosity. If the 1920s were remembered as the Roaring Twenties, the 2020s may well be recalled as the Raging Twenties—an era shaped by algorithms, saturated with distortion, and marked by a steady erosion of patience and trust.

In this environment, division no longer feels exceptional. It feels routine.

And yet, every so often, Canada reminds me who we are.

After a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, the country was pulled into a moment of collective grief and unease. School shootings remain, by any credible measure, a predominantly American phenomenon—tragically common there, mercifully rare here. When one occurs in Canada, it does more than frighten us. It unsettles our sense of self.

Living beside a superpower whose culture, media, and political temperature we absorb daily, Canadians are often forced to ask what separates us, and whether those distinctions still hold. In moments like this, the border feels less like a line on a map and more like a fragile idea—something that must be continually reaffirmed.

What followed offered an answer.

Two political opponents stood together in public mourning. They did not debate. They did not posture. They did not perform outrage. They held hands—not as rivals, not as symbols, but as human beings acknowledging a loss that eclipsed ideology.

The image lingered not because it was dramatic, but because it was quietly radical. In a culture increasingly shaped by spectacle, it reminded us that some moments demand restraint rather than reaction, dignity rather than dominance.

That moment captured something essential about Canada.

Canada has never been defined by unanimity. We are defined by restraint—by a shared instinct to hold the line without turning on one another. When “elbows up” resonates here, it is not a call to aggression. It is a signal of collective resolve: protecting what matters while refusing to abandon civility in the process.

Canada is often described by what it is not. Not American. But that framing, while convenient, misses something deeper. Unlike the United States, Canada does not have a single founding mythology that anchors national identity. There are no Founding Fathers, no civic scripture that functions as national religion.

Canadians do not look backward for certainty. We negotiate forward.

Our identity is not branded. It is regional, relational, provisional. It shifts depending on where you stand—coastal or prairie, urban or rural, francophone or anglophone, newcomer or many-generation resident. We know, deeply, that we are different across this country. What binds us is not sameness, but a shared commitment to living with difference without letting it tear us apart.

Those values—restraint over excess, compromise over domination, pluralism over purity—are not static. They are tested, repeatedly.

Canada contains long-standing tensions about language, region, and belonging. Those tensions predate Confederation itself. For many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, Canada is not a unifying idea but a contested one — shaped by dispossession, broken treaties, and the legacy of residential schools. Truth and Reconciliation reminds us that questioning who belongs, and on what terms, is not divisive — it is foundational to understanding this country honestly.

Quebec’s separatist movement and Alberta’s growing alienation are not signs of a failing country, but one actively negotiating who it is—and who it intends to be. I lived in Quebec in the 1990s, when the question of whether the country would remain whole felt immediate rather than abstract. The discomfort was real. So was the work required to keep talking, listening, persuading.

That friction does not weaken Canada. It reveals something fundamental about us: our democracy is unfinished by design, and a muscle we need to exercise regularly. It survives not because it is simple, but because we keep choosing engagement over erasure.

As a relatively young country beside a global superpower, Canada could easily be absorbed—politically, culturally, economically—into something larger and louder. That we are not is not accidental. It is earned, again and again, through vigilance and a refusal to be reduced. 

So where does that leave us now, in a moment defined by volatility and fatigue?

It leaves us with a choice.

When Canada’s sovereignty has been challenged in recent years, Canadians recognized the moment for what it was. We did not panic. We did not posture. We stood our ground. We understood that vigilance was not weakness and restraint was not passivity. With our elbows up, we held the line. Together.

This moment calls for the same resolve, but aimed inward.

We cannot afford to become passengers of systems designed to provoke us. We must refuse the role that constant outrage assigns: loud, reactive, divided. Holding our ground now means resisting the urge to perform anger, choosing complexity over slogans, and care over contempt.

It means deciding—deliberately—how we will speak, listen, and disagree without hardening ourselves in the process.

Canada has never been held together by myth or uniformity. It has been held together by choice—made daily, imperfectly, by people willing to reach across differences even when it would be easier not to.

Elbows up does not mean clenched fists. It means standing firm without closing off. It means protecting what matters without losing ourselves. It’s a rallying call for a team of different players with different strengths but shared goals.

If there is a defining task for Canadians right now, it is this: to refuse contempt, to insist on common ground, and to remember that our unfinished, negotiated democracy survives only if we keep choosing one another.

Elbows up. Hands open.