Elbows Up!: Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance

A blazing collection of responses to the U.S.’s shocking annexation threats and the swell of Canadian national unity that followed, from a remarkable array of Canada’s sharpest and most influential minds.

2025. Donald Trump is president. And he is insisting that Canada is for sale. It feels disorienting, even existential, to watch a trade war escalate and to hear an American president vow to make Canada ＂the 51st state.＂ Amid this disorientation, there is an urgent question: how do we meet the moment?

This is not the first time we have had an identity crisis resulting in a swell of Canadian pride, but it is the first time many Canadians have experienced the direct threat of American imperialism knocking so loudly on our country’s door. The fact that treaties can be broken, that resources can be stolen, and that the consequences of land theft include loss of culture, ritual, and identity is not new to the Indigenous and refugee peoples living in this country. But to many other Canadians, this kind of threat is new. As a result, there appears to be a new sense of a ＂we＂ emerging. People are angry and standing together with renewed shared purpose. This is a pivotal moment in history, and we need to take stock of how we got here, to learn from our past and walk tenaciously together into an uncertain future.

Inspired by the 1968 collection The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., which was edited by Al Purdy and curated amidst the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Elbows Up! is the book for our generation’s own moment of crisis, featuring the words of leading cultural figures speaking candidly on America, on Canada, and on the malleable contours of a national narrative still taking hold.

ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD is a culture writer for BuzzFeed News and was the host of CBC’s pop culture show Pop Chat, and is the host of new CBC Radio show Commotion. He was a founding co-host of the CBC Politics podcast Party Lines, and he is a contributor to The National’s At Issue panel. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Globe and Mail, and others. When he gets a chance, he writes bad tweets.