Canada is living through one of the most consequential periods of change in its modern history, and I don’t believe we’ve fully come to terms with what that means.
Our population has changed. Our economy has changed. The nature of work is changing. The cost of building an ordinary life has changed. Our politics has become more polarized, our institutions are showing their age, and a generation of Canadians is beginning to wonder whether the opportunities their parents took for granted will still be available to them.
Yet much of our national conversation remains trapped in the same old arguments between the same political camps.
I believe Canada needs a bigger conversation than that.
That’s what The Canadianist Manifesto is meant to contribute.
Over several years, I’ve tried to understand not simply what’s going wrong, but what is actually happening to the country. That distinction matters. If we diagnose every change as a failure, we’ll spend our time looking backward for a Canada that no longer exists. If we understand the forces reshaping the country, we can start deciding what Canada should become next.
That work eventually grew into five books, each approaching the country from a different direction but all connected by the same underlying question: How do we tend the country we’ve built and leave it stronger for the Canadians who come after us?
And the rest can continue from “Along the way, something else happened. I started listening more.”