By: Donovan Martin Sr, Editor in Chief
Image Credit, Greg Newman
There’s a question hanging in the air these days that previous generations would have found unthinkable: how did we get here? How did a country built on compromise, stitched together by improbable agreements and shared purpose, arrive at a point where people casually entertain the thought of breaking it apart? It’s strange how quickly the language of separation, alienation, and ideological purity can creep into our public spaces, even though history has shown, again and again, that division never leads where people believe it will. You can see the exhaustion in the conversations between provinces, between rural and urban communities, between governments of different stripes who seem unable to remember that disagreement is not a crisis, it’s part of the democratic fabric itself.
Canada wasn’t born out of perfect alignment. Confederation only happened because people who didn’t trust each other completely still believed that cooperation was better than chaos. They bargained, they argued, they split hairs, they made concessions, and somehow a fragile idea took form. Over time, that idea evolved—because it had to. A country that spans oceans, languages, cultures, and climates was never going to move in a single direction. But the genius of it, the thing we sometimes forget, is that the structure was designed to let us disagree without exploding. Federalism works only when each part accepts that the country is bigger than the moment, bigger than one policy fight, bigger than any ideological season.
Yet here we are, stumbling into familiar traps. Provinces compare who gets what. Some regions feel unheard or unappreciated. Others feel they are asked to carry too much of the burden. Federal transfers become symbols of fairness or grievance depending on where you stand, when in truth they were created to reduce—not inflame—inequality between regions. The intent was simple: no matter where you live, you should be able to count on a baseline of opportunity and public services. But goodwill is fragile. In difficult times, people look inward. Numbers turn into narratives. And soon the conversation stops being about fairness and becomes about fault.
It’s easy to blame the present moment on polarization, on social media, on complicated global pressures that make people anxious about the future. But the deeper truth is that we’ve allowed ourselves to drift into a place where crisis has become our only motivator. We rally when disaster strikes, when communities burn, when floods swallow cities, when hospitals overflow, when a tragedy forces us to remember that borders between provinces don’t matter when the country is hurting. In those moments, Canadians move as one. That capacity never left us. What faded is our willingness to access it without being pushed to the brink.
The irony is that the same people who argue about separation rarely want to live through what that separation would actually create. A fractured Canada wouldn’t just be smaller; it would be weaker, poorer, and perpetually unstable. The world is full of examples of nations torn by internal divisions, where once-neighbours became enemies and the cost of rebuilding was measured not only in dollars but in generations of loss. Civil wars don’t just redraw maps; they break people in ways that cannot be undone. And harmful rhetoric—careless, angry, oversimplified—has always been the spark for violence elsewhere. Canada has avoided that fate not because it is immune, but because enough people, historically, understood the weight of their words.
So the real question is not whether we have differences; of course we do. The question is why we treat those differences as existential threats rather than the natural by-product of a diverse society. If anything, our disagreements reflect the scale of the country itself. What works for the Prairies won’t always work for the Maritimes. What Ontario debates may feel irrelevant to the North. This isn’t dysfunction—it’s geography, culture, and lived experience. The federation survives when we see those differences as assets rather than irritants, when governments govern for the whole, not just their base, and when citizens refuse to let frustration push them toward easy fantasies of starting over.
The way forward isn’t a grand revelation. It’s a shift in mindset. It’s choosing to see the country as a long project rather than a short-term negotiation. It’s acknowledging that unity is not the absence of conflict, but the commitment to work through conflict without threatening to walk away. It’s remembering that every province, every territory, every community carries part of the national identity, and losing any piece of it weakens the rest.
If Canada is going to be here for another hundred years, two hundred years, or longer, it won’t be because we suddenly learned to agree on everything. It will be because we rediscovered the discipline of listening. Because we stopped assuming bad faith in one another. Because we recognized that the forces trying to pull us apart—economically, culturally, politically—are far smaller than the forces that brought us together in the first place. A country is sustained not by perfection, but by intention. By the belief that even when it’s messy, even when tempers run hot and ideologies clash, there is something worth staying for.
Maybe the real story is that we’ve forgotten how remarkable it is that this country exists at all. That so many different regions, histories, and perspectives managed to bind themselves to a shared purpose, and in doing so created something forceful enough to withstand world wars, depressions, political crises, and cultural shifts. It’s easy to assume that this will always be true. But nothing lasts by accident.
How did we get here? By letting frustration overshadow perspective. By forgetting the lessons our grandparents never had the luxury to forget. But the more important question is how we move forward. And the answer, as simple as it sounds, begins with choosing the harder path—the one where we stay in the conversation, keep the country intact, and refuse to let momentary divisions erase the decades of progress built through patience, argument, and shared effort. We are stronger together not because it’s sentimental, but because it’s demonstrably true. The only choice now is whether we act like we remember that.
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