I n my formative years, I was a nationalist in the make and mould of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Liberals. Hey, I was a kid, alright? I was drawn to grand national narratives, the promise of a land that could do and be good, a place hewn from the toughest stuff—hard work, that is, but hewn nonetheless. It was like living in a Stan Rogers or Gordon Lightfoot song. Then I kept reading and listening—the history you don’t get in elementary or high school, or at least didn’t when I was growing up.
That was the history of violence and dispossession, of squatting on Indigenous land, of killing Chinese migrants to build the railroad that connected and made the country possible, of interning Japanese Canadians, of domestic mining companies off on heinous foreign misadventures, and more. Later, it was the history of retrenchment, of a social welfare state starved and neglected. I was disabused of a jejune nationalist commitment to Canada (call it pride or patriotism if you wish) and left with something rather colder and more distant—a view of the country seen as one might see data on a spreadsheet: this column is the good, that one the bad, the long one in the middle an in-between. Lots in that middle one.
