What are we in for?

Through the Eyes of a Lifetime

I was born in March of 1966, in a small Canadian city called Cornwall, Ontario. And Cornwall felt, at the time, a world away from the noise of politics and the storms of history. Yet history has a way of finding us, even when we aren’t looking for it. Over the course of my life, I have watched Canada, and the world, transform in ways my grandparents could never have imagined.

I have lived through the fear of nuclear war in the 1960s, the unrest of the 1970s, the flashy optimism and hidden anxieties of the 1980s, the fractured unity of the 1990s, and the painful shocks of the 2000s. I have seen social media reshape our lives in the 2010s, and I have felt the uncertainty of pandemics, wars, and climate disasters in the 2020s.

Canada has never been a simple country. It is a mosaic - sometimes beautiful, sometimes broken, often fragile. It has been shaped by the weight of our neighbours to the south, by the echoes of our colonial past, and by the voices of Indigenous peoples demanding to be heard. It has been pulled apart by debates over Quebec, strained by Western alienation, and tested by waves of immigration that both enrich and challenge us.