I was listening recently to Anthony Scaramucci speaking with California Governor Gavin Newsom when he made an argument about America that stayed with me.
He wasn’t talking about tax rates, immigration or the latest fight in Washington. He was talking about how Americans see themselves.
His argument was that the average American is fundamentally aspirational. Americans want to succeed, but they also want other people to succeed. He pointed to the Marshall Plan and the institutions that emerged from Bretton Woods as examples of an America confident enough to believe that helping rebuild other countries would ultimately make America stronger too.
There was self-interest involved, of course. The Marshall Plan wasn’t charity. Europe had been devastated by the Second World War, and the United States had enormous economic and strategic reasons to rebuild Western Europe, restore functioning markets and contain Soviet influence.
Bretton Woods had its own purpose. In 1944, representatives of Allied countries met to design a more stable international economic system for the world that would follow the war. The institutions that emerged from that effort included the International Monetary Fund and what became the World Bank.
These were ambitious projects undertaken by countries that believed they had the ability to shape what came next. Canada was one of them.
We sometimes talk about the postwar international order as though Canada simply benefited from something the Americans created. That’s not quite right. Canada participated in building that order. We were at Bretton Woods and among the founding members of the United Nations. In the decades that followed, Canadians played important roles in NATO, peacekeeping, international development and the institutions that shaped the Western world.
There was a similar ambition at home. Canada built highways, universities, hospitals and an increasingly national social infrastructure. Medicare went from a provincial experiment to a defining Canadian institution. The St. Lawrence Seaway was built, and the Trans-Canada Highway connected a country whose geography had always worked against connection.
None of these projects was perfect. Some produced consequences we understand differently today, and some excluded Canadians who should’ve been included. But underneath them was an assumption that feels less common now: Canada was something we were building.
Today, much of Canadian politics feels like an argument over what’s left. Housing is scarce, doctors are scarce, infrastructure is inadequate and governments are running deficits. Young Canadians wonder whether they’ll ever own homes. Provinces argue with Ottawa, Ottawa argues with provinces, and Canadians argue about immigration, taxes, energy, language, identity and who’s responsible for whichever problem happens to be dominating the week.
Many of those arguments are necessary because the problems are real. What’s striking is how rarely the conversation moves beyond them.
The left has become very good at explaining where Canada’s fallen short, while the right has become very good at explaining how Canada’s been lost. Neither description tells us very much about what Canada should become.
A country can’t build very much from the belief that its best days are behind it, and it can’t build very much if its national story becomes primarily an inventory of everything it’s done wrong. Canada has made serious mistakes and accomplished remarkable things. We should be capable of acknowledging both without turning either into our entire national identity.
Once politics becomes organized around grievance and scarcity, almost everything starts to look like a competition between groups. Investment in one region means another was cheated. Opportunity for one person means somebody else lost theirs. Government support for one group becomes evidence that another has been ignored.
Citizenship starts to become an argument over shares.
An aspirational country approaches things differently. A shortage of housing becomes a reason to build. A shortage of doctors becomes a problem of capacity to solve. Natural resources become an opportunity to create prosperity. Infrastructure becomes an investment in what the country might need twenty or thirty years from now.
Canada has the resources for that kind of ambition. We’ve got extraordinary amounts of energy, minerals, farmland and freshwater, access to three oceans, a highly educated population and direct access to the largest economy on Earth. We also have relationships across Europe and the Pacific that countries of our size would envy.
Yet Canadian politics often sounds as though we’re managing the final few pieces of something rather than building the next version of the country.
Scarcity inevitably produces resentment because every political decision becomes distributional. Growth creates room for a different conversation, and Canada understood that once.
The country that emerged after the Second World War wasn’t one in which Canadians had solved every disagreement. French and English Canada still had enormous differences. Regional tensions were real and political fights could be vicious. None of that prevented Canadians from building.
Much of what we now regard as permanent was once simply somebody’s proposal for what Canada might become. Institutions become so familiar after several generations that it’s easy to forget somebody had to imagine them before anybody could build them.
I don’t think Canada needs another national slogan. We’ve had plenty of those. Nor do Canadians need politicians telling them to be more optimistic while grocery bills, rents and mortgage payments say otherwise.
Aspiration has to be credible.
Telling young Canadians that home ownership remains possible doesn’t mean much if we don’t build enough homes to make it true. Universal healthcare isn’t much of a promise to someone who can’t find a family doctor. Calling Canada an energy power rings hollow without the infrastructure to develop and move that energy. Bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the country requires us to build the housing, transportation and public services necessary for them to succeed here.
National confidence comes from believing these problems can be solved and then developing the capacity to solve them.
Canada’s never been a finished project. Our institutions, economy and national identity have changed repeatedly as the country itself has changed. Much of our stability has come from that willingness to adjust rather than from insisting that whatever existed yesterday has to exist forever.
The Canadians who built much of the country we inherited weren’t living in easier times. Many had lived through depression and war. They faced enormous geographical distances, regional divisions and a country considerably poorer than the one we live in today. They still thought beyond the immediate argument and built things they expected Canadians decades later to use.
Our generation inherited those ambitions. We also inherited the responsibility to have some of our own.
Somewhere along the way, Canadian politics became very good at asking what’s gone wrong and much less comfortable talking about what we might accomplish next.
Maybe that’s what we’ve lost.
Not optimism. Aspiration.
The belief that Canada can still become more than it is today.
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