We should be counting the number of actual Canadians, which is probably somewhere around 22 to 25 million. As far as a unified national identity goes, I think our failure to develop one has been a hindrance to our sovereignty and posterity. For too many people, the very idea of a Canadian nation is just a loose collection of territories LARPing as their own countries. This was also contrary to the ambitions of Sir John A. Macdonald and the Fathers of Confederation. The Industrial Revolution and our growing mastery over the natural world made Canada possible in the first place. The railway connected the country, followed by the personal automobile and eventually passenger aviation. But it’s 2026, not 1866, and the world has grown considerably smaller. The major powers can now export their cultures directly into our homes, eroding our own cultural indigeneity, while mass immigration made possible by commercial aviation threatens our demographic continuity. Suddenly, India and China aren’t so far away. Even within Canada, travelling from Montréal to Toronto no longer takes four to six days by horse and carriage, assuming the weather cooperates. To a certain extent, this process has already happened through the consolidation of Canadian media and the dominance of national broadcasters like the CBC, CTV and Global, alongside Canadian films, television shows, cartoons and sports, particularly hockey. Two Canadians growing up on opposite ends of the country, one in Halifax and the other in Vancouver, can share the same cultural references, they share roughly one of the most recognizably homogenous accents in the world, recognize the same institutions and develop an understanding of themselves as belonging to the same nation. The internet has reduced genuine cultural differences and regionalisms further. It’s time to abandon the last pretences of provincialism and the parochial attitudes that have survived alongside it. The Québec City to Windsor corridor should finally develop into the national core it was always meant to be, much as London, Washington, Paris and Berlin became the political, economic and cultural centres of their respective countries. Our urban, industrialized and now managerial heartland should assert its natural primacy over the provincial, regional and parochial interests that have obstructed national unity for generations. With modern mass media, the internet, telecommunications, the prospect of high speed rail, and restoring east-west trade over north-south, we have every means available to consolidate a genuinely unified Canadian nation around its historic heartland, project it across the continent, and to the entire world. My instincts have always been to scale up and to centralize. I have never pretended to be anything other than what I am: a Montrealer, an Anglo-Quebecer, a Laurentian, a techno-optimist and a cosmopolitan.

Nothing will ever be like 2016, but experiencing less than 1/10 of what these people do to others, and they’re having mental breakdowns