Today is Labour Day.
It is a day to recognize the people who built this country, and the people who continue to build it every day.
The tradespeople who build our homes and infrastructure. The farmers who feed us. The nurses, teachers, factory workers, truck drivers, engineers, small-business owners, miners, mechanics, technicians and countless others whose work rarely makes the front page but whose contribution makes Canada function.
Canada was not built by governments alone. It was built by Canadians who went to work.
This Labour Day arrives at an unusual moment.
Our relationship with our largest trading partner is being tested in ways few Canadians expected. New tariffs have already been imposed on Canadian goods, and tomorrow Canada enters another stage of that dispute with countermeasures of our own.
There will be plenty of time to debate the decisions being made in Ottawa and Washington.
Today, I think there is a larger question worth asking.
What kind of country do we want to be when the world around us becomes less predictable?
For generations, Canada has prospered because of our relationship with the United States. That relationship remains enormously important, and no serious person should pretend otherwise.
But friendship and trade with another country should never become a substitute for confidence in our own.
Canada has extraordinary advantages.
We have energy, minerals, agriculture, manufacturing, technology, skilled workers, enormous natural resources and some of the best educated people in the world.
Most importantly, we have each other.
One of the greatest economic opportunities sitting in front of Canada is Canada itself.
For too long, it has often been easier to trade north and south than east and west. We have allowed provincial barriers, different regulations and old habits to make doing business with one another more difficult than it should be.
That needs to change.
Becoming a stronger and more independent Canada does not mean turning our backs on the United States or anyone else. It means building a country that has more choices.
It means selling more Canadian steel to Canadians, moving more Canadian food across provincial borders, building with Canadian lumber, developing Canadian energy, supporting Canadian manufacturing and making it easier for Canadian businesses and workers to operate anywhere in their own country.
We should expand our trade around the world.
But before looking across every ocean for the next great market, we should remember the enormous market already stretching from St. John’s to Victoria and north to the Arctic.
Forty million Canadians in ten provinces and three territories; we are one country.
The events of the past several weeks should not make us fearful about Canada’s future. They should remind us how much capacity we already possess.
Canada is not helpless, nor are we small, and we are definitely not broken.
We are a wealthy, sophisticated, resource-rich country entering a period when self-confidence, cooperation and national purpose are going to matter enormously.
The people who built this country understood something we sometimes forget.
Countries do not simply happen. They are built generation after generation, worker after worker, community after community.
This Labour Day, while we recognize the Canadians whose work built the country we inherited, perhaps we should also think about the country our own work will leave behind.
The world is changing. Canada can change with it.
We have the people, the resources and the ability. What we need now is the confidence to act like it.
Happy Labour Day, Canada.
Christopher M. Michaud
Founder, United Canadian Centrist Party
uccparty.ca | JOIN US AND BE HEARD.
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