A New Book Asks, What Is Canada?Prime Minister Mark Carney’s White House visit and the Toronto Blue Jays’ playoff victory over the New York Yankees dominated the news this week. But it’s the subtext that I’ll focus on today, using a book coming out next week as a springboard.
Since moving to Canada last year, I have been captivated by the intense debate about the nation’s identity, and how it is shaped by Canada’s relationship to the United States. I was born and raised in Greece, where identity is heavily defined by reverence for a glorious past. So one of the things that have struck me about Canada’s identity conversation in the era of President Trump’s “51st state” talk is how much it is focused on the future. “Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance” (McClelland & Stewart, out Oct. 14), tackles the newly urgent question, What is Canada? The book also explores how the country can reassert its independence and step out of the looming shadow of American cultural hegemony. A collection of 30 essays edited by Elamin Abdelmahmoud, an author and critic who hosts the CBC program “Commotion,” the book includes powerful Indigenous and immigrant Canadian voices, Québécois authors, and sports and culture experts. “What emerges,” Mr. Abdelmahmoud writes in the introduction, “is not a declarative nationalism but something quieter: a steady belief in the sturdiness of an unfinished project.” The book draws inspiration, and a couple of essays, from the 1968 collection “The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S.” It does not cover the perspective of people who believe that Canada should acquiesce to the United States — or that it would be better off doing so. Nor does it get into the politics of the phrase “Elbows up” as a Liberal rallying cry. I asked Mr. Abdelmahmoud if the book could be read as partisan. “It’s really worth emphasizing that ‘Elbows up’ was not invented by Mark Carney,” he said. “I think there was a deliberate political intelligence to the ways Mark Carney used the slogan, but it became a catchall phrase on the threats to Canadian sovereignty a few weeks before that,” he added. Too many passages from different essays stood out for me, but here are three I highlighted while reading an advance copy. Margaret Atwood, Canada’s foremost living author, writes: “In 1963, when I was working for a market research company, the majority of Canadians in one of our surveys answered ‘No’ to the question ‘Is there a difference between Canada and the United States?’ Though they also answered ‘No’ when asked if Canada should join the United States. It seems they knew there was a difference, but they didn’t know what it was.”
Carol Off, a prominent Canadian journalist, offers an in-depth treatise on the impoverishment of Canadian cultural output, partly because of the overwhelming gravitational pull — and money — of the American alternative. “Do we have the courage, or even the desire, to resist assimilation?” she asks. She goes on to make a strong case that Canadians should find both, pronto. The Vancouver-based author Jen Sookfong Lee lays down a scathing critique of the country, while simultaneously expressing faith in it. “So what are we fighting for now? Am I fighting for the idea of Gold Mountain, the idealized version of Canada that prompted my grandfather to leave his village at the age of seventeen?” she writes. “I am choosing to believe that Canada can be the country my grandfather once dreamed of,” she continues, “but that I can also be the Canada that I would wish for my children and grandchildren.” Mr. Abdelmahmoud told me that, ultimately, “it’s a book that says we can’t ignore the reality of our vulnerability, so how should we think about it?” If you’re looking for more Canadian political writing, the Writers’ Trust of Canada recently celebrated exceptional samples of the genre from the past year. At the trust’s Politics and the Pen event in Ottawa last month, judges awarded the 2025 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing to Raymond B. Blake, a University of Regina history professor, for his “Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity.” Finalists included “The Prince,” a political biography of Justin Trudeau by Stephen Maher; Tanya Talaga’s searing examination of residential schools, “The Knowing”; and “Health for All: A Doctor’s Prescription for a Healthier Canada,” by Jane Philpott, a former health minister. Looking ahead, a punchy, urgent book, “Breaking Point: The New Big Shifts Putting Canada at Risk,” by Darrell Bricker, a pollster and political analyst, and John Ibbitson, a journalist, will be published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart on Oct. 28. Enjoy the long Thanksgiving weekend (with some Canadian Thanksgiving recipes from NYT Cooking). Trans Canada
Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the country. She can be reached at matina.stevis-gridneff@nytimes.com. How are we doing? Like this email?
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