The country is on fire. I mean that the way you’d mean it at a kitchen table — half literal, half bone-tired. The forests actually are burning; the sky two provinces over has gone the colour of a bruise, and the air smells like the inside of a chimney. And the rest of it is burning too, just slower and with worse manners: the loud neighbour to the south musing out loud about making us his fifty-first state, a province threatening to pack its bags and stomp off like a teenager who’s forgotten the house was never in his name, the bridges and the tariffs and the THE ALL OF IT.
So this is the Canada Day I’ve been handed. Fireworks over a tinderbox. And the only useful thing I’ve learned to do with a day like this is the thing nobody seems able to manage anymore: hold two things at once.
(Two things. Simultaneously. I know — fetch the medal. Apparently it’s the heaviest lift in the nation right now.)
Thing one: I love it here. I love the lake that can’t decide if it’s a sea. I love that strangers apologize when you step on their foot. I love the particular hush of a northern morning, the maple-everything, the way “sorry” is less a word here than a form of weather. This is home in my actual body — it made me, and I’m not ashamed to say I’m glad it did.
Thing two: it was taken. Not in a textbook, not safely in the past tense where it can’t touch us — taken, and still being kept. The borders I find so cozy were drawn over older ones. The land my comfort sits on came with promises attached, and the promises were broken before the ink was properly dry.
Both of those are true. At the same time. And a love that can only hold the first one isn’t love — it’s décor.
Here’s the part the current circus keeps proving, bless it. A treaty is a promise. Not a vibe, not a suggestion, not a historical flourish you get to opt out of when it’s inconvenient. So when a province announces it might just leave — hold a vote, draw a new line, take its ball and go — I’d gently point out that you cannot un-sign a signature by squinting at it. The land was never the province’s to pocket. The agreements that made this country possible were made nation to nation, and they don’t dissolve because someone at a podium is having a feeling. You can’t inherit the benefit and disown the bill. That’s not independence. That’s a dine-and-dash.
And then there’s the third one, the one that chills me most — because he’s already inside the house. The man who wants to run the place and is standing off to the side quietly rooting for the fire, hoping the home team trips so the keys land in his hand. He’d let the kitchen smoke just to be the one holding the extinguisher in the photo. You’re allowed to want the job. You are not allowed to want the house to burn to get it. That isn’t opposition — it’s arson with a campaign slogan, and it leaves the people actually trying to hold things together bent into pretzels while he counts the cracks.
And the neighbour to the south, eyeing us like a parking spot? Funny thing: nothing has made me feel more Canadian than being condescended to by a man who couldn’t find Saskatchewan with both hands and a map. Overnight, we’ve all gone misty and patriotic — flags on the porch, elbows up. Which is lovely. It’s also a little rich — rallying around a founding story we still haven’t had the nerve to read all the way to the end.
Because here’s the elephant: this is a country that apologizes for everything. We say sorry to furniture. We say sorry to the people who bump into us. And yet the one apology that actually costs something, we tend to deliver like a press release — read it out, file it, call the matter closed, get back to the long weekend. A reflexive sorry is not a reckoning. It’s a flinch with good PR.
I don’t say any of this to set the whole thing on fire. (It’s doing fine on its own, thanks.) I say it because I’ve reached the age where I’ve stopped needing the things I love to be innocent in order to love them. I had to learn that on myself first — that I could be grateful for my life and clear-eyed about the wreckage in it, both at once, without one cancelling the other. Turns out a country is the same. You can adore the place and refuse to look away from how it came to be. In fact, the looking is the loving. Amnesia is just a prettier word for abandonment.
So here is the line I keep coming back to, the one I’d stitch on a flag if I were the stitching type:
This is a new day. We honour the promises our forebears made — even though they didn’t.
That’s the whole job. Not guilt — guilt is lazy; it just sits there, feeling damp and important, changing nothing. Responsibility is the grown-up cousin. The people who made those promises broke them. We didn’t make them, and we don’t get to break them either — we get to keep them, and then some. To finally be the generation that’s good for its word. You don’t have to have signed a thing to be on the hook for honouring it. You just have to be standing on the land where it was signed, which, last I checked, all of us are.
This week, the fire is doing the metaphor’s work for it — the country is quite genuinely smouldering while we argue about whether we’re a nation or a real-estate opportunity. So let it take the one thing that actually belongs in the flames. Not the country. Not the love. The comfortable version — the tidy, polite, innocent, nothing-to-see-here story we were handed and never thought to question. Throw that on the fire. Keep the place. Keep the work. Keep the promise.
For the record, I fly two flags year-round — the maple leaf and the Pride one, both up 365 days a year, not just when the calendar makes it convenient. That’s the patriotism I can stand behind: the kind with a guest list that leaves no one off it, and a memory that doesn’t conveniently stop at the flattering part.
I’ll wave my little flag. And I’ll mean two things by it.
* Relevance. Ritual. Rebellion. *
Journal prompt: Name the two things you’re holding — the love and the harder truth, whatever they are for you: your country, your family, your own history. Don’t resolve them. Don’t let one talk over the other. Write them side by side and let them both be true. The point was never to choose. The point was to grow big enough to hold both.
Thanks for being here. If this landed, tap the heart or send it to someone who’s tired of being told to pick a side when the honest answer was always both. New work follows the moon.
Lovely article Lee. I can relate to holding two things at once. Being an American has been very confusing the last several years. I continue to return to the idea that the veil has lifted and you can’t unsee what is now seen. Hopefully the embers will cool soon for you guys. 🔥
I loved this post so much.