Nostalgia is a bitch, and I’ll tell you why.

We spend so much energy trying to recapture moments that are gone. They’re done. They ain’t gonna happen again.

And that’s okay.

Open the photo album. Put on the record. Remember the glory days. Let the nostalgia wash over you. The problem starts when we spend so much time looking in the rear-view mirror waiting for an opportunity to make a U-turn that we forget to watch the road ahead. We run a red light, almost get T-boned, eventually rear-end a police car, then blame the accident on the fact that things aren’t the way they used to be.

But were they really that great?

I grew up in the 80s. Dudes wore crop tops and I had that business-up-front, party-in-the-back haircut. Sure, they were “simpler times.”

Every generation says that.

In the 80s, we were already nostalgic for the 50s. It was everywhere. Television, movies, music, cars. Happy Days was still on television. Billy Idol was taking sounds from early rock and roll and smashing them into something new. Mr. Miyagi had Daniel waxing a collection of beautiful old cars while teaching him karate.

We were nostalgic for the past while living through the period we’re nostalgic for now.

And to quote one of the most underrated films of all time, Hot Tub Time Machine:

“We had Reagan and AIDS.”

That pretty much sums it up.

We remember the music, the arcades and riding our bikes until the streetlights came on. We forget the parts that weren’t so wonderful.

Take medicine alone. We’ve made extraordinary advances in a single generation. Nobody is jumping into a DeLorean to go get their cancer treated in 1985.

That’s the thing about our fantasy of going back. We want 1985, but we’d like to bring 2026 with us.

We want the records, but we want Spotify too.

I like putting a record on a turntable as much as anyone. Hell, I’m one of the last people with cable and I’ll still flip through the channels just to see what’s on. We can argue about whether subscription models and algorithms have made entertainment better or worse.

But do we really want to give up the internet? Laptops? Cell phones?

If you woke up tomorrow and suddenly found yourself transported back to 1983, I guarantee the first thing you’d do is reach into your pocket and ask Siri what the hell is going on.

Then you’d realize there’s nothing in your pocket.

So you’d find a payphone.

Then realize you don’t have a quarter.

Then realize you don’t know anybody’s fucking phone number.

Welcome to the glory days.

And technology isn’t the only thing we conveniently edit out.

I grew up during a remarkably progressive era, but the battles hadn’t been won. To pretend otherwise is ignorant at best.

I remember standing on picket lines with my mother while nurses fought for pay equity. For those too young to remember the term, the fight was about addressing the systemic undervaluing of work traditionally done by women.

They had to fight for that.

Today everybody complains about “wokeness.” And sure, some ideas being pushed today seem extreme to me too. We should be able to argue about them.

But back in the day we called it “political correctness.”

And people complained about it then exactly the way they complain about wokeness now.

“You can’t say anything anymore.”

“Everybody’s too sensitive.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to offend somebody.”

Political correctness pushed us to reconsider language and behaviour around race, women and other groups. But the boundaries of acceptable cruelty were still much wider. Gay people could be openly mocked in ways mainstream society largely accepted. Trans people were routinely treated as punchlines.

That’s the time you want to go back to?

Because here’s something nostalgia conveniently forgets:

The person telling the joke and the person who was the joke may remember the exact same decade very differently.

Maybe the past wasn’t actually better.

Maybe we were just younger.

Of course life seemed simpler when somebody else paid the mortgage. We weren’t worrying about our parents getting older, our bodies changing, careers, retirement or whatever fresh disaster appeared in the morning news.

We were ten.

The adults weren’t having nearly as carefree a time as we remember having.

None of this means we should stop being nostalgic.

Quite the opposite.

Open the photo album.

Remember the people. Remember the music. Remember that ridiculous haircut. Remember the summer nights that seemed like they’d last forever.

Let it wash over you.

Then let it charge you.

Because the purpose of remembering a life well lived shouldn’t be convincing yourself that the best part of it is over.

It should make you want to create more days worth remembering.

The rear-view mirror is there for a reason. Look into it once in a while. Remember where you’ve been. Smile at everything disappearing behind you.

Then put your eyes back on the road.

We’ve got problems in front of us that need solving. We’ve got places we haven’t been yet. And if we’re lucky, twenty years from now we’ll glance into that rear-view mirror and today will give us the same warm feeling yesterday does now.

Nostalgia isn’t the problem.

Just don’t let it drive the fucking car.

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I had a long day.

I spent most of it on the road, and by the time I got home all I wanted was to eat my Tuesday taco and lie down in bed.

But Daisy hadn't had her evening constitutional.

Rather than start an argument about whose turn it was, I grabbed the leash and we set off.

My mind still firmly on the Old El Paso waiting for me at home, I decided to take the short route and cut through the park rather than walk around it.

The park was empty.

Well, almost.

There was a guy sitting alone on the ball diamond bleachers, reading a book and smoking a cigarette.

It was the cigarette that caught me.

Partly because you just don't see that many people smoking anymore, but mostly because it has been illegal to smoke in our parks for years.

There was even a sign about five feet away from him.

So, naturally, I did what any responsible citizen would do.

Nothing.

I kept walking.

I could have pointed out the sign. I could have reminded him that smoking wasn't permitted. I suppose if I was really committed to civic responsibility I could have reported him.

But why?

There was nobody around.

He wasn't blowing smoke into a playground full of children. He wasn't bothering anyone. He was a guy sitting alone on some bleachers, reading a book and having a cigarette.

The rule existed.

He was breaking it.

And somehow society survived my decision not to enforce it.

Rules are important.

We need rules. They're part of how millions of strangers manage to live together without everything descending into chaos.

But knowing when rules need to be enforced is just as important as having them.

Because sometimes we become so concerned with making sure the rules are followed that we forget why the rules existed in the first place.

And this week I read a story that reminded me how dangerous that can become when the stakes are considerably higher than a cigarette in a park.

A man had lived in Canada for decades after coming here as a refugee. He had permanent resident status. At some point, he returned to the country he had fled to care for an ailing family member.

That decision eventually put his status in jeopardy.

Not because he had committed some heinous crime.

Because he had broken the rules.

What stayed with me most was the reasoning attributed to the judge. The outcome wasn't necessarily fair. It wasn't necessarily just.

It was what the law required.

And that's where I have a problem.

Law and justice aren't the same thing.

We should know this by now.

We've had plenty of perfectly legal injustices throughout history. Saying that's the law explains why something happened. It doesn't establish that what happened was right.

Judges can't simply ignore legislation whenever they dislike an outcome. Nor should they. A society in which every official gets to personally decide which laws count isn't much of a legal system either.

But if our laws produce outcomes that reasonable people—including the people tasked with applying them—recognize as unjust, then somebody needs the power to ask whether applying the rule actually serves the reason we created it.

And if nobody has that power?

Then perhaps the problem isn't the judge.

It's the law.

Rules are tools.

We create them to protect people, maintain order, resolve disputes and make society function.

They are not sacred objects demanding obedience for obedience's sake.

Sometimes justice requires enforcing the rule.

Sometimes justice requires making an exception.

And sometimes it requires looking at the guy sitting alone on the bleachers with his book and his cigarette, looking at the No Smoking sign five feet away...

and continuing your walk.

Fact check me.

As summer winds down and my family gets ready to send the kid off for his last year of high school, we can't help but start considering what comes next.

And since this kid is so much smarter than his old man, he has some lofty goals.

I've realized he's not going to get there on his own.

So I'm sitting here with a laptop, researching university admission requirements and figuring out a strategy to give him the best chance of success.

Because with everything he's already got going on—making the grades, working the summer business he started, engaging in extracurricular activities—he can't possibly be expected to have the bandwidth to strategize his admission plan too.

I had supportive parents. They wanted me to succeed. But they were completely ignorant when it came to the workings of university admissions.

I went through it on a whim and a prayer.

I want my kid to have the leg up I never had.

And there's good reason for me to put in the effort, because all those kids at the top, snagging the best spots?

They're not doing it on their own either.

Private schools. Extra tutoring. Professional admissions advisors. Parents who already understand the system.

The idea that a kid should bear all the responsibility for his own success and stand entirely on his own two feet is some working-class bullshit.

What surprised me was how much strategy there actually is.

Which courses should you take? When should you take them? Which marks count? When are offers made? What does one university value that another doesn't? What can you do now to put yourself in a better position a year from now?

None of this is secret.

That's what makes it interesting.

The information is available to everyone.

And we have somehow confused access to the system with equal opportunity within the system.

The elites don't have to put up walls anymore and tell the rest of us we're not welcome.

Everyone can apply.

There's the website.

There's the application.

Good luck.

But we're not running the same race.

One kid arrives knowing the course. His parents have run it before. Someone has helped him train. Maybe his school has been preparing him for this since Grade 9. Maybe his parents hired someone whose entire profession is understanding university admissions.

The other kid just knows he needs good grades and should probably apply somewhere.

Nobody cheated.

Nobody bribed an admissions officer.

Nobody bought a building and put their name on it.

One kid simply knew how the system worked.

That's privilege too.

And it starts long before the application.

Do we really think a kid in an underfunded public school with an overwhelmed guidance department gets the same university preparation as a kid at an elite private school whose reputation depends partly on getting graduates into elite universities?

Of course not.

The private-school kid isn't doing anything wrong. Neither are his parents.

If I could give my kid every one of those advantages, I would.

That's why I'm sitting here learning the system.

The problem isn't that some parents help their kids navigate it.

The problem is that a child's opportunity depends so heavily on whether someone in his life knows that there's a system to navigate.

We like to look at the results afterward and call them merit.

And maybe the kid who got the spot worked his ass off.

Privilege doesn't erase effort.

But effort doesn't erase privilege either.

My parents loved me. They supported me. They would have done anything they knew how to do to help me.

They just didn't know how this world worked.

Neither did I.

So I went through it on a whim and a prayer.

My kid won't.

Because opening the starting line to everyone doesn't make the race equal.

Not when some kids showed up with a coach and the rest of us never got the rulebook.

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I made a comment about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the other day.

If AOC ever makes it to the Oval Office, we will be living in a very different world.

And it might just stand a chance.

Then again, that's too much hope to hang on one person.

That last line bothered me.

Because I don't actually think my hope is in AOC.

What excites me is that there seem to be more people talking about government differently. AOC. Elizabeth Warren. James Talarico. Pete Buttigieg. They aren't the same politicians. They don't agree on everything, and I certainly don't agree with everything any of them says.

That's kind of the point.

What interests me is the larger idea taking shape around them: that government should actually function. That it should solve problems. That a society can decide there are certain things its citizens shouldn't have to fight for alone. That healthcare, housing, education, wages, infrastructure and affordability aren't just individual problems to be survived but legitimate questions for all of us to solve together.

If that movement continues growing, does it really matter which one eventually sits behind the Resolute Desk?

Maybe we've been thinking about the presidency all wrong.

We've become so accustomed to Donald Trump behaving as though the presidency were something approaching a throne that we've almost forgotten democracy isn't supposed to work that way.

America doesn't elect a supreme leader.

It elects a government.

Hundreds of representatives and senators are elected by people across the country. Governors and state legislators have their own mandates. Judges aren't supposed to take orders from presidents. Members of Congress aren't employees of the White House, including those who happen to belong to the president's party.

They aren't supposed to bow to authority.

They're supposed to challenge it.

That's the entire fucking idea.

Power checks power.

Congress tells presidents no. Courts tell governments no. Opposition parties challenge governing parties. Members challenge their own leadership. Journalists challenge all of them. Citizens challenge everybody.

Somewhere along the way, we've started treating that friction as evidence that government isn't working.

Sometimes it's evidence that democracy is.

And that makes me reconsider what I originally said about AOC.

If she ever becomes president, perhaps we won't be living in a different world because she got elected.

Perhaps she'll get elected because we're already living in a different world.

Because enough people will have decided they expect something different from their government.

And if that's happening, AOC herself becomes less important.

Maybe it's Warren.

Maybe it's Talarico.

Maybe it's Buttigieg.

Maybe it's somebody we've never heard of who is sitting in a city council meeting somewhere right now waiting for their turn.

That's what a movement is supposed to do.

If your entire political project depends upon one extraordinary person winning one election, you don't have a movement.

You have a hero.

And heroes are fragile.

They lose elections. They make mistakes. They disappoint you. They retire. They die.

Ideas don't have to.

Ideas spread.

They get picked up by another candidate, another generation, another voter. Eventually the radical thing becomes the thing everybody takes for granted.

That's the world I find myself hoping for.

Not one where we finally find the right person to wield enormous power on our behalf. That's dangerously close to wishing for our own benevolent king.

I want something far less exciting.

Thousands of people throughout government representing millions of citizens, arguing with each other, negotiating, challenging authority, checking power and slowly moving society toward something better.

Messy.

Frustrating.

Slow.

Democratic.

Then perhaps presidential elections wouldn't feel like we're deciding the fate of civilization every four years.

The person sitting behind the Resolute Desk would still matter.

Of course they would.

They just wouldn't have to save us.

Because democracy was never supposed to have a throne.

We rag pretty hard on kids these days.

They're always on their phones. They consume instead of create. They don't go anywhere. They don't dress interestingly. They don't have great music scenes. They aren't building anything. They aren't rebelling.

And I'm starting to think that's probably undeserved.

I'm one of the last Gen Xers. I grew up at a strange moment in history where I wasn't quite old enough to participate in the glory days of everything, but I was close enough to feel their glow.

I've always felt like I was born about ten years too late.

There were still frontiers, but I could see the footprints of the people who had gotten there first.

Music was still changing. So was fashion. Technology was visibly evolving in front of us. New forms of media appeared. Entire subcultures could seemingly materialize overnight.

The Simpsons were once going to destroy the social fabric of Western civilization.

Now they're wholesome family entertainment.

I can't imagine what it feels like to be born in the new millennium.

Young people today never really had a chance to own their own culture.

That used to be one of the privileges of being young.

Your parents weren't supposed to understand your music. They weren't supposed to like your clothes. They weren't supposed to know what you were doing.

The confusion was part of the fun.

Now a kid discovers Nirvana and Dad says, "Great album."

He finds an old hip-hop record and Mom knows every word.

Baggy jeans come back and their parents tell them they wore them the first time.

I once tried to convince my own kid to get a mohawk for the summer.

He wouldn't do it.

Think about how badly we've fucked this up for them.

We're supposed to be horrified by the mohawk.

Instead we're suggesting it.

We never left.

Culture doesn't seem to replace itself anymore. It accumulates.

Every song is still available. Every movie. Every television show. Every fashion. Every aesthetic. Every subculture.

Punk isn't dangerous anymore. It's a Spotify category.

Everything rebellious eventually becomes something you can buy at the mall.

So what's left for a teenager to take from us?

Maybe that's why they don't seem particularly interested in expressing themselves through fashion. Yoga pants, joggers, hoodies, slides with socks — things that would have been social suicide when some of us were young.

Maybe they aren't failing to express themselves.

Maybe they're asking, what's the point?

Because the same thing has happened to accomplishment.

When I was young, being the best guitarist in your school meant something. You might actually believe you were exceptional.

Today your phone can introduce you to a twelve-year-old on the other side of the planet who can play something you can't even comprehend.

Exceptional has become ordinary because exceptional is what the algorithm shows us all day.

Sports records that once seemed superhuman fall. Kids train with techniques, equipment and information that professionals didn't have a generation ago. What once represented the limits of human performance becomes the starting point for the next generation.

And knowledge has done the same thing.

There was a time when someone with a manual, some intelligence and a whole lot of savvy could teach themselves a computer language and start building things.

Today, before you can reach the frontier of almost any mature field, you have to climb over decades of accumulated knowledge.

Programming isn't just programming.

It's operating systems, databases, networking, security, frameworks, libraries, cloud infrastructure, machine learning and layers upon layers of abstraction built by generations of people who came before you.

The frontier keeps moving farther away.

There was something powerful about the informed amateur — the person who knew enough to start fucking around but hadn't learned enough to know what couldn't be done.

We romanticize those people now.

The garage inventor.

The self-taught programmer.

The kid who picked up a guitar and accidentally created a new sound.

But we've spent decades professionalizing, specializing and optimizing everything.

Before you're allowed to push against the edge now, you're expected to spend years learning where the edge is.

Then we hand young people a device containing essentially the accumulated knowledge and culture of humanity and ask why they aren't more curious.

Maybe having everything at your fingertips isn't the advantage we think it is.

Maybe wonder requires a little scarcity.

Boredom probably did more for us than we realized.

There was fuck all else to do.

So you rode your bike somewhere. You started a terrible band. You built something stupid. You hung around a parking lot. You called somebody. You got lost. You found something.

Not because our generation was inherently more interesting.

Because the world still made us go looking.

Today's kids don't even get the luxury of believing something is impossible.

Artificial intelligence arrives — something that would have been literal science fiction during my childhood — and to them it's another app.

Of course it is.

They were born into a world where impossible things happen through software updates.

But there's one reason I suspect this entire argument might eventually prove wrong.

Every generation probably believes the map has been filled in.

We recognize the frontiers that mattered to us, so when those frontiers close we assume there aren't any left.

Maybe AI will actually lower the barriers again. Maybe young people won't need twenty years of specialization to navigate twenty different fields. Maybe knowing what question to ask will become as important as memorizing how everything underneath it works.

Maybe savvy gets another turn.

Or maybe the next great cultural movement is already happening and people my age can't see it.

I actually hope that's true.

Because if their music sounds terrible to us, their clothes look ridiculous, their technology seems pointless and whatever they're building makes absolutely no sense to their parents, then maybe we've finally done them a favour.

Maybe they'll finally have something that's theirs.

And this time, we should have the decency not to understand it.

We live in a world obsessed with expertise.

We're told to pick a lane. Find a niche. Specialize. Become the person who knows everything about one thing.

The deeper we dig into our little corner of knowledge, the more convinced we become that everything outside of it is someone else's problem.

But knowledge doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Science without philosophy builds powerful machines without asking whether we should use them.

Engineering without art creates things that work but inspire no one.

Poetry without history becomes empty sentiment.

Politics without economics becomes wishful thinking.

Economics without psychology misunderstands the people it's trying to explain.

Every discipline borrows from another. Every breakthrough happens where circles overlap.

Knowledge isn't a filing cabinet.

It's a Venn diagram.

That's why I've never wanted to be just one thing.

I've taught karate. Studied literature. Built a business. Learned photography. Read philosophy. Fixed toilets. Tinkered with cars. Written poetry. Spent nights trying to understand economics and afternoons wondering why Hemingway wrote the way he did.

None of those things compete with one another.

They make each other better.

People love quoting, "A jack of all trades is a master of none."

They usually stop before the best part.

"…but oftentimes better than a master of one."

Maybe our greatest mistake isn't knowing too little.

Maybe it's believing knowledge was ever meant to be divided in the first place.

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Canada was an independent nation for nearly a century before it adopted the Maple Leaf, and I think that says something.

Unlike our neighbours to the south, whose flag was born out of revolution and whose national anthem takes its name from the flag itself and tells the story of seeing it still flying after battle, Canada never seemed to define itself by its symbols. American history—whether entirely factual, embellished, or somewhere in between—places enormous importance on its mythology. The symbols came first. The ideals grew around them.

Canada took a different path.

We weren't built on symbols. We were an attempt to build on principles.

That's why we've never been known for grand displays of patriotism or demanding that citizens prove their loyalty through performance. Being Canadian has never required waving a flag. It has required participating in an ongoing project.

Our national identity wasn't declared in a single revolutionary moment. It evolved. Our flag didn't arrive until almost a century after Confederation. Our constitutional framework continued to develop over generations, culminating in the patriation of the Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We didn't start with a finished identity. We spent decades trying to figure out what kind of country we wanted to become.

That difference matters.

A nation built on symbols tends to protect its mythology. A nation built on principles has to be willing to question itself.

This isn't to say we've always gotten it right. Far from it.

Canada has made mistakes—some of them profound. Indigenous peoples, Chinese railway workers, Japanese internment, the Komagata Maru, the head tax. Our history isn't clean.

The point is that we don't have to pretend it is.

We don't need to insist that every founder was flawless or that every decision made in the past deserves eternal protection. We understand, at least in principle, that a successful country isn't one that never changes. It's one that leaves room for change.

Progress isn't an admission of failure.

It's an acknowledgment that no nation is ever finished.

Our Constitution isn't sacred because it can never be touched. It's valuable because it provides a framework that can grow with the people it serves. A living nation needs living institutions.

Perhaps that's the real Canadian identity.

Not a country held together by mythology.

A country held together by the belief that we can always become a little better than we were yesterday.

---

Fact Check Me

Canadians often worry that we lack the patriotic mythology of other countries, especially the United States. Maybe that's because our story was never meant to be about perfect founders or sacred symbols. Maybe our greatest national tradition is believing that the work is never finished.

A flag represents a country.

Principles are what keep it worth representing.

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I grew up in one of the quietest neighbourhoods you could imagine.

On paper, it was perfect.

Parks. Ball diamonds. Football fields. Tennis courts. Basketball courts. Creeks. Trees to climb.

Everything a kid could want.

Most of the time, I had it all to myself.

I'd spend entire afternoons lying in the grass, staring at the sky, waiting for something to happen. We'd struggle to find enough kids for a baseball game or a round of street hockey. The neighbourhood always felt like it had been built for a life that never quite arrived.

That's why I loved going downtown.

I was shy. It's not like I was introducing myself to strangers. But I loved the energy. The pace. The feeling that every block held a hundred stories I hadn't heard yet. The city felt alive.

At the same time, I watch videos of someone living alone in the Alaskan wilderness and think, That looks like the life.

For years I thought those desires contradicted each other.

Now I don't.

Cities and wilderness aren't opposites in the way I once believed.

They're both real.

The city demands your attention. The wilderness demands your respect. In both places you have to participate. You can't simply exist in the background.

Suburbia often asks much less of us.

It promises convenience.

One trip to the big box store and you've bought a week's worth of groceries, a pair of jeans, a new television, dog food, and a birthday card.

Efficient?

Absolutely.

Memorable?

Not even a little.

The happiest I've ever been running errands wasn't when everything was under one roof.

It was when nothing was.

Living in midtown Toronto, I could walk to the bakery, the butcher, the barber, the hardware store, and the grocery store. Every stop meant different people, different conversations, different smells, different storefronts. The errand wasn't something to get through. It was part of the day.

I noticed the same thing in Europe.

People would buy only what they needed for that evening's meal. Fresh bread. Fresh vegetables. A quick stop at the market on the walk home. Tomorrow, they'd do it again.

It sounds less convenient.

Maybe it is.

But it also keeps you connected to the world around you.

The wilderness works the same way.

If you want heat, you gather wood.

If you want food, you go find it.

The environment isn't something you look at through a window. It's something you engage with.

Maybe that's what's missing.

We've spent decades trying to remove every inconvenience from our lives.

Groceries delivered.

Meals delivered.

Entertainment delivered.

Work from home.

Shop from home.

Exercise at home.

We celebrate every reason not to leave the house.

Then we wonder why loneliness is rising.

Maybe convenience isn't making us happier.

Maybe it's making us spectators in our own lives.

We've built homes so comfortable they contain everything we need.

And sometimes I wonder if we've mistaken that comfort for freedom.

Because a house filled with everything you love can still become a cage if there's no reason to step outside.

Maybe the problem was never friction.

Maybe friction was where life happened.

Fact Check Me.

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Hindsight is 20/20, so it's easy to look back at who you were and feel guilty.

But sometimes you have to stop for a moment and remember what you were carrying.

Maybe the load was heavy. Maybe there were forces working against you. Maybe you lacked the confidence, awareness, or experience to make the decisions that seem so obvious now.

Maybe that wasn't failure.

Maybe that was growth.

Life doesn't come with a manual. There isn't a path waiting for you to follow. Most of us are just trying to figure it out one decision at a time, learning from the ones we got wrong.

You can't expect an earlier version of yourself to know what only a later version of you could have learned.

So maybe regret isn't proof that you lived badly.

Maybe it's proof that you learned.

If you cringe at something you once said, feel embarrassed by the person you used to be, or wish you had handled a situation differently, that's often a sign you've become someone different. Your standards changed. Your understanding deepened. Your perspective expanded.

The past doesn't change.

You do.

The people who scare me aren't the ones haunted by their mistakes. They're the ones who can explain every mistake away. They have a reason for everything, an excuse for everyone they hurt, and a story that always casts them as the hero.

They don't grow because nothing is ever their fault.

Regret isn't comfortable, but neither is growth. They often arrive together.

I'd rather feel the sting of regret than the comfort of believing I never needed to change.

Fact check me: sometimes regret isn't the weight holding you back.

It's the proof you kept moving forward.

Maybe the greatest disconnect between the 99% and the 1% isn't how much money they have. It's what money means.

To most of us, money is a tool. It buys a home, pays the bills, lets us take a vacation, retire with dignity, help our kids, donate to causes we believe in, or spend a little more time with the people we love. We don't dream about money. We dream about what money allows us to do.

Somewhere along the way, for the ultra-wealthy, the equation seems to change.

Money stops being a means to an end and becomes the end itself.

From the outside, it looks strange. You have more money than you could spend in ten lifetimes, yet you keep chasing another billion. You don't need another house. You don't need another jet. You don't need another company. So why keep going?

Maybe because at that level, wealth isn't about buying things anymore. It's about keeping score.

That's the part I think most of us misunderstand.

We assume if we had enough money we'd stop. We'd travel. Read more books. Open a charity. Coach Little League. Build a community centre. Finally breathe.

But perhaps extreme wealth changes your worldview in ways we can't easily imagine.

When your problems no longer resemble everyone else's, eventually neither do your solutions. You become surrounded by people who depend on you, agree with you, admire you, or fear losing access to you. The world becomes increasingly curated. Not because you're evil, but because your life is unlike almost anyone else's.

We often say wealth corrupts.

I'm not convinced that's the greatest danger.

I think wealth isolates.

Not just from ordinary people, but from ordinary reality.

That's why I think societies should be cautious about allowing wealth to concentrate indefinitely. My concern isn't that every billionaire is a villain. It's that no human being is designed to remain deeply connected to the lives of millions while living so completely outside their experience.

Extreme wealth creates gods out of men.

And the worst kinds of gods are the ones who still carry all the flaws of men.

The ego.

The insecurity.

The tribalism.

The need to win.

The certainty that they're right because the world has rewarded them for being right before.

We expect wisdom to grow with wealth, but wealth doesn't guarantee wisdom. It guarantees options. It guarantees influence. It guarantees insulation.

And those are very different things.

Maybe the real purpose of democracy isn't simply to protect us from kings.

Maybe it's to remind us that no matter how successful someone becomes, they're still just a person.

Fact check me.

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Let's talk about manufacturing jobs for a second.

You hear it in Canada and the United States all the time: "We need to bring back manufacturing jobs."

Look, don't get me wrong. If you work in manufacturing, I respect the hell out of you. You work hard, long hours, often doing physically demanding jobs that produce the things the rest of us rely on every day.

But let's be real. These are not good jobs. Let's stop romanticizing them.

The nostalgia comes from remembering your grandfather raising a family fastening rivets at the plant eight hours a day. It paid well. It was unionized. It provided security.

But mark my words: your grandfather probably hated that job.

He did it because it paid the bills. Because it was the best opportunity available with the education he had. He didn't spend forty years on an assembly line hoping his kids would one day pack frozen chickens into cardboard boxes beside him. He did it hoping they'd have the chance to do something else.

My father spent his life in the trades repairing collision damage on cars. His work demanded skill, patience, training, and incredible attention to detail. He was a master of his craft.

Many people would love to have those skills as a hobby.

As a career?

Nine hours a day repairing mangled Fords after Hondas after Kias, one wreck rolling in as soon as the last one rolled out. Day after day. Year after year. Losing his hearing after decades of shop noise. Breathing dust and chemicals. Tennis elbow from swinging a body hammer—not from afternoons at the country club.

He took pride in his work.

He also wanted his kids nowhere near it.

Manufacturing is even harder to romanticize. The work is repetitive. The shifts are long. Your body pays the price.

So when politicians stand in front of cameras and tell us that the future of wealthy countries like Canada or the United States is bringing back more assembly-line jobs, I can't help but think we've set the bar embarrassingly low.

Our goal shouldn't be to recreate the economy of 1955.

It should be to build the economy of 2055.

We should be investing in skilled trades, advanced manufacturing, engineering, healthcare, research, software, robotics, education, and the industries that create value with knowledge as much as muscle.

A knowledge-based economy doesn't just make us wealthier. It gives more people the chance to do meaningful, creative, skilled work instead of work that wears down their bodies before their time.

The promise of Canada—or America—was never that your children could inherit your shift.

It was that they wouldn't have to.

That's not disrespect for manufacturing workers.

It's respect for what they sacrificed to give the next generation more choices than they had.

With all the hoopla about Substack's new AI checking feature, I thought I'd give it a go and try to be a real writer.

So I jumped in the Kia, went out and got myself one of those fancy crystal-cut whiskey glasses and a pack of cigarettes.

Got back home and lugged out the antique typewriter my wife bought to decorate the office. Placed it on the desk by the window, poured myself some apple juice in the whiskey glass, neat.

Started sipping and cursing as the pack of smokes sat on the table, an unlit cigarette hanging loosely from my lips. Hunched over the typewriter, I hit the keys as they clunked with all the fury my two index fingers could muster, mumbling to myself the whole time.

Writer's block hit me almost immediately.

That led to a full-blown existential crisis, which led to me pouring and downing three glasses of apple juice while puffing madly on my unlit cigarette.

I thought what I really needed was some air.

But since I live in suburbia, there were no bullfights, boxing matches, race tracks, or smoke-filled jazz bars. So I walked to the park where kids were playing little league while moms with tattoos exchanged Pinterest photos from the bleachers.

I got up and left before anyone had the chance to ask me which kid was mine.

That would've made the whole thing awkward, having to explain that I was just some random guy watching nine-year-olds play T-ball looking for literary inspiration.

Got back home, had a perfectly mediocre argument with the missus. Something about leaving the clothes in the dryer.

Sat back down at the typewriter to write what you're reading...

...until I realized it's 2026.

What the hell am I going to do with a stack of typed pages? Not to mention the ribbon on the typewriter dried out sometime during the Harper government.

So I laid down in bed, picked up the shitty phone I don't like, and AI'd this thing into existence.

Now I'm handing it to you.

If you decided to read this, thanks.

If you think I wasted your time... you probably knew what you were getting into.

So maybe I'm not that sorry.

Maybe we've spent so much time worrying about how people write that we've forgotten to ask whether they had anything worth saying in the first place.

Fact check me.

They say love lives in the heart and in the mind.

It lives in little moments and in a life that's shared.

It lives in long days and hard times. It's in acts of service and selfless moments.

It lives in physical spaces—in homes and cities, in forests or farms.

It exists in joy and pain.

Love takes many forms.

It speaks softly and can race like rapids.

It hides in a soft kiss, a warm embrace, in a fixed toilet gone unnoticed.

It's lunch boxes that are always full and ready to go.

Love is a dog who can tell you've had a bad day.

It's a ride when someone could have let you walk.

Love is the new toy of a child and the hole in a parent's shoe.

Love is a coffee prepared just how you take it.

It's a student who long outgrew you, yet greets you warmly after years apart.

Love is a home built together, beautifying.

It's an athlete bowing humbly before the fans.

Love is in food prepared by someone else's hands.

It's a donut or a slushy in a 7/11 parking lot when you won or lost the big game.

It's in the book that lets you get lost in someone else's mind.

Love is a porch light left on while someone waits inside.

Love is sharing a TV show, no matter how bad it is.

It's long nights next to hospital beds.

Love is a son shaving the face of a father when his hands don't work so well.

Love is forgetting.

Love is remembering.

It's showing up when nobody else does.

Love lives in shared experiences communicated over digital data lines.

Love is a joke shared, a laugh, and some self-deprecating humour.

It's a person who shows up on moving day when they have somewhere better to be.

It's in pictures painted and poems written.

It's in a craft perfectly executed, mastered until every flaw fades away.

Love is everywhere and in everything.

So why can we never find it?

I've been trying to figure something out.

Lately I've been drawn to degenerate characters in fiction.

Not because I want their lives.

Quite the opposite.

I'm about as straight-laced as they come. You won't find me drinking until I black out, gambling away my paycheck, or waking up on someone's couch wondering how I got there.

That sounds exhausting.

So why do I keep coming back to these characters?

At first I thought maybe I admired that they didn't give a damn.

But that wasn't quite it.

Because most of them do give a damn.

They're lonely.

They're broken.

They're angry.

They're carrying wounds that never healed.

No one envies that.

Then it hit me.

Maybe we don't admire the degenerate.

Maybe we admire the part of them that stopped performing.

They aren't chasing promotions, polishing résumés, building a personal brand, or measuring themselves against everyone around them.

For better or worse, they've stopped trying to become someone.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I'd spent much of my own life trying to be something.

A good father.

A good teacher.

A good husband.

A successful business owner.

A respected martial artist.

None of those are bad ambitions. In fact, I'm proud of them.

But I spent so much time trying to become someone that I never stopped to ask what it meant to simply be.

Maybe that's what these characters reveal.

Not because they drink.

Not because they gamble.

Not because they're disasters.

But because, beneath all the wreckage, they seem strangely unencumbered.

Of course, fiction cheats.

If the same character got up every morning, paid his phone bill on time, did his laundry every Wednesday, made himself a coffee, read a book, and quietly enjoyed his life, we'd probably call him boring.

So writers make him a drunk.

They make him reckless.

They give him addictions, broken relationships, and spectacular failures because chaos makes better stories than contentment.

Maybe we've mistaken the packaging for the message.

We think we envy the bottle.

Maybe we envy the weight they no longer seem to carry.

The challenge isn't to become the degenerate.

The challenge is to learn how to stop performing without destroying your life in the process.

Maybe that's the real work of the second half of life.

I spent the first half trying to be something.

Maybe the second half is about finally learning how to just be.

Fact check me.

Why do we demand integrity from our children but excuse its absence in our heroes?

As children, we're taught a simple moral code.

Share.

Play fair.

Tell the truth.

Treat others the way you'd want to be treated.

We're told that character matters, that integrity is everything, and that how you win is just as important as whether you win at all.

Then we grow up.

Suddenly, we're taught an entirely different set of rules.

"Business is business."

"You don't get rich by being nice."

"Love him or hate him, you have to respect what he built."

Really?

Do we?

Somewhere along the way, we've accepted the idea that success justifies almost anything. That to make it to the top you have to be ruthless. You have to bend the rules, exploit every advantage, crush your competition, and do whatever it takes. We don't celebrate these traits despite them being morally questionable—we celebrate them because we've been taught they're necessary.

It's a strange contradiction.

We raise our children to value kindness, honesty, and empathy, then applaud adults who seem to succeed by abandoning those very principles.

Take someone like Dana White.

People often tell me, "Love him or hate him, you have to admire what he's done for mixed martial arts."

Do I?

I can acknowledge that under his leadership the UFC became a global phenomenon. That's undeniable.

But why does building something successful automatically make the builder admirable?

The athletes who step into that cage put their brains, bones, and futures on the line. Many fighters have long argued they deserve a larger share of the wealth they create, while those at the top continue to prosper. Whether you think fighter pay is fair or not isn't really the point.

The point is this:

Success answers one question.

Did it grow?

It doesn't answer the more important one.

Was it built in a way worthy of admiration?

Those aren't the same thing.

The same pattern appears everywhere.

We romanticize billionaires as visionaries before we ask how they accumulated their wealth.

We celebrate politicians because they won elections, as though victory itself proves virtue.

We even idolize criminals. The mafia has become entertainment. Gangsters become antiheroes. We quote them, dress like them, and call them legends while forgetting the violence, fear, and exploitation that made their empires possible.

We have an odd habit of confusing power with greatness.

Then there's influence.

How can someone like Joe Rogan speak to millions of people every week and be told he bears virtually no responsibility for the ideas he amplifies?

Many of his listeners are young men looking for direction, purpose, or simply someone who seems to understand the frustrations they feel. Whether you agree with him or not, that kind of reach carries weight.

We expect teachers, journalists, doctors, and coaches to understand the influence they have over others.

Why should people with audiences hundreds of times larger be held to a lower standard?

Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from criticism.

Influence carries responsibility whether you asked for it or not.

What concerns me most isn't any one billionaire, podcast host, politician, or sports executive.

It's the story we're constantly being sold.

Be bold.

Break the rules.

Don't apologize.

Do whatever it takes.

The people who benefit most from that message are often the same people with the largest platforms and the greatest ability to shape our culture. Through podcasts, documentaries, business books, social media, and endless interviews, they teach us that this is simply what success looks like.

Maybe that's why I had such a hard time watching The Audacity.

Not because it's unfair.

Because it feels plausible.

It's a satire about Silicon Valley and tech billionaires, but it could just as easily be about politics, professional sports, entertainment, or Wall Street. Strip away the industry and the message is the same: once someone convinces themselves they're changing the world, the rules somehow stop applying to them.

The frightening part isn't that these characters exist.

It's that we recognize them.

We've seen them before. We reward them. We defend them. We buy their products, consume their content, vote for them, and tell ourselves that their brilliance excuses behaviour we'd never tolerate from anyone else.

Apparently integrity is mandatory—unless you're successful enough that it becomes optional.

So what's the alternative?

Do we simply accept that the world is dog eat dog?

Even that expression falls apart under scrutiny.

Dogs survive because they work in packs.

Human beings have never advanced because one ruthless individual conquered everyone else. We advanced because we cooperated. We shared knowledge. We built communities. We trusted one another enough to create civilizations.

Today we possess something our ancestors could scarcely imagine.

The printing press changed the world by making information harder to control.

The internet changed it again by allowing almost anyone to create information, challenge institutions, expose corruption, organize communities, and support ideas they believe in.

The powerful still have advantages. They always will.

But they no longer have a monopoly on the conversation.

The rest of us have voices too.

Power isn't just something that's taken.

It's something that's given.

Every ticket we buy.

Every subscription we keep.

Every dollar we spend.

Every vote we cast.

Every post we share.

Every public figure we excuse.

Those are all tiny acts of consent.

Individually they feel meaningless.

Collectively, they're how cultures change.

Maybe the question was never whether we should admire success.

Maybe the question is whether success, on its own, deserves our admiration.

Because if we continue to mistake winning for wisdom, wealth for virtue, and influence for righteousness, we shouldn't be surprised when the people at the top keep teaching us that the only thing worth measuring is who got there first.

I think we can do better than that.

Fact check me.

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White people don't have culture.

Before you fire up the comment section, let me explain.

That's not the same as saying people who are white don't have culture. Of course they do. My point is that "white" isn't a culture. It's a racial label.

I recently came across a video that was almost certainly designed to make me angry.

A woman declared, "White people have no culture."

Another creator stitched the video to prove her wrong.

"Oh yeah? Then what about this?"

Cue the montage.

Professional wrestling.

Monster trucks.

NASCAR.

Kid Rock.

Batman... for reasons known only to the editor.

I laughed.

Not because the original statement was profound. Not because the response disproved it. I laughed because the rebuttal seemed to reinforce the very point it was trying to defeat.

I couldn't resist leaving a comment.

"You just proved her point."

The responses were exactly what you'd expect. About half agreed with me. The other half were happy to explain why I was an idiot.

The funny thing is, I don't think either side was really talking about culture.

I've never been particularly attached to calling myself "white." I know that's the box society puts me in, and I understand why those boxes exist, but I've never confused race with culture.

When someone asks me about my culture, my skin colour isn't the first thing that comes to mind.

I think about my Portuguese family.

The food I grew up eating.

The traditions my grandparents passed down.

The neighbourhood I was raised in.

The values my parents instilled in me.

Those things shaped my culture.

Not the amount of melanin in my skin.

A white man from Tupelo, Mississippi and a white man from Oslo, Norway don't share a culture simply because they share a skin tone. Their histories, traditions, food, humour, languages, and values can be worlds apart.

The world has never been more connected or more mobile.

There are Black Frenchmen.

Asian Dutchmen.

Portuguese Canadians.

People don't inherit culture through melanin. They inherit it through family, community, language, history, and shared experience.

What is culture, anyway?

It's your grandmother's recipes.

It's the lullabies your parents sang when you couldn't sleep.

It's the jokes only your family understands.

It's the stories your grandparents refused to let die.

It's the holidays you celebrate, the words you use without realizing they're unique to where you grew up, and the values quietly passed from one generation to the next.

Culture isn't carried in your DNA.

It's carried in your memories.

And memories become richer the more they're shared.

Which raises another question.

Why do we keep treating culture like it's property?

The older I get, the more I think culture isn't something we're supposed to own.

It's something we're supposed to share.

Recipes are meant to be cooked by strangers.

Music is meant to cross borders.

Stories are meant to be retold.

Ideas are meant to spread.

If culture never left the people who created it, humanity would still be living in isolated villages, reinventing the wheel every few hundred miles.

Maybe the best evidence I have for all of this is my own life.

I'm a Portuguese Canadian who has spent most of my adult life teaching a Japanese martial art in Markham Ontario, often referred to as China Town North, to students whose families come from every corner of the world.

At no point did karate become less Japanese because I taught it.

At no point did my students become less themselves because they learned it.

Culture wasn't diluted.

It was shared.

If anything, that's what made it stronger.

Maybe we've been asking the wrong question all along.

Instead of asking who owns a culture, maybe we should ask what kind of world we'd have if nobody shared theirs.

Fact check me.

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The thing that frustrates me most about life is watching the overwhelming majority of human kindness and potential get drowned out by a loud minority of assholes.

Most people are decent.

Most people want to love their families, help their neighbours, laugh with friends, and leave the world a little better than they found it.

Yet somehow we end up believing humanity is defined by its worst examples.

Why?

I've never understood why ambition so often seems to drift toward greed and self-interest.

Why is success measured by how much someone owns instead of how much they contribute?

Imagine if the same drive that built billion-dollar fortunes was directed toward curing diseases, strengthening democracy, educating children, or ending poverty.

We celebrate conquest.

Why don't we celebrate stewardship?

History remembers the conquerors.

It also remembers the people who eradicated disease, expanded human rights, advanced science, and built institutions that outlived them.

Ambition isn't the problem.

Greed is just one destination for it.

Then there's the idea that for someone to win, someone else has to lose.

Some things are competitive by nature. There can only be one Olympic champion.

But we've applied that thinking to everything.

Business becomes a blood sport.

Politics becomes a war.

Education becomes a ranking.

Even happiness starts to feel like a scarce resource.

Yet the greatest achievements in human history weren't built by defeating one another.

They were built together.

Clean water.

Libraries.

Public education.

Vaccines.

Space exploration.

Civilization advances fastest when cooperation beats competition.

So why do we let fear lead us instead?

Fear convinces us strangers are enemies.

It tells us compassion is weakness and scarcity is inevitable.

It narrows our world until neighbours become threats instead of allies.

The people who profit from fear understand something important.

Frightened people are easier to divide.

Easier to manipulate.

Easier to convince that someone else is responsible for every problem.

Then come the con men.

The charlatans.

The professional outrage merchants.

Like magicians, they survive by directing our attention exactly where they want it.

While we're watching one hand, the other quietly picks our pockets.

The trick isn't that they're brilliant.

The trick is that they understand us.

They know we'd often rather believe a comforting lie than wrestle with an uncomfortable truth.

Generation after generation, we fall for the same illusion dressed up in different clothes.

So what do we do?

How do you fight a powerful minority determined to divide, deceive, and distract?

The answer is simpler than we think.

You connect.

You reach out.

You bring people together.

You talk openly instead of retreating into echo chambers.

You call out hypocrisy wherever it appears—even when it's on your own side.

Connection is an act of resistance.

Every honest conversation weakens the lie that we're destined to hate each other.

Every hand extended across a divide chips away at the walls built by those who profit from keeping us apart.

And maybe that's the biggest lesson of all.

It's just a numbers game.

Our numbers have always been greater.

The problem is we've stayed quiet for too long.

A loud minority can appear enormous when the majority mistakes silence for virtue.

But goodness has never been outnumbered.

It's just been out-organized.

Maybe the future doesn't belong to the richest.

Or the loudest.

Or the most ruthless.

Maybe it belongs to the day ordinary decent people finally realize they've always been the majority—and decide to start acting like one.

Fact check me.

This one is for Jan — @punkrockpixie.

Someone who already has enough in her own life to cry about, yet still finds tears for everything that's beautiful, hopeful, and worth protecting in this world.

May we never lose people like you.

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If we want to talk about first-world problems, I miss my old phone.

My new one does everything I need it to do, but I didn't buy it because it was the phone I wanted. I bought it because after dropping my Samsung Z Flip 4 one too many times, replacing it became a necessity.

Most people would ask, "Why not just get the newest model?"

Because I was already four or five generations behind. I've reached that point in life where spending $1,500 on a phone when a $300 Costco special will technically do the job just makes more sense.

For the first few weeks, I'd instinctively press my finger against the back of my Motorola, waiting for it to snap shut. Instead, I'd just be greeted with resistance. Muscle memory is a funny thing.

Now I carry around an oversized slab wrapped in an even more oversized case that leaves a perfect rectangle stamped into my jeans pocket.

The case is there because, about five minutes after buying the phone, I dropped it. It bounced off a kitchen drawer and displayed exactly the level of durability you'd expect from a $300 supercomputer.

Thankfully, Costco has one of those return policies that makes you wonder if they're running a warehouse or a witness protection program.

Truthfully, though, I've been drooling over something else.

Apparently physical keyboards are making a comeback.

I do most of my writing lying in bed at night, somewhere between inspiration and whatever magic modern antidepressants perform. My thumbs and touchscreens have never really gotten along. My spelling wasn't great to begin with, and autocorrect can only do so much when the word you're trying to type bears absolutely no resemblance to the collection of letters your thumbs actually produced.

Then I stumbled across the Clicks Communicator.

To be clear, it's a perfectly capable smartphone.

But the company insists on calling it a companion phone.

A phone for your phone.

Think about that for a second.

We've reached a point in history where someone looked at a phone and said, "You know what this needs? Another phone."

Researching phones sends you down strange rabbit holes.

One of the biggest trends right now is the rise of the "dumb smartphone."

Apparently our phones have become so smart that they've made the rest of us a little dumb.

So naturally the solution is obvious.

Let's make the phones dumb again so we can be the smart ones.

There are companies selling stripped-down smartphones with fewer apps, fewer notifications and fewer distractions.

We spent twenty years paying companies to cram more features into our phones.

Now we're paying different companies to take them back out again.

Not dumb enough?

How about a smartphone with an e-ink "paper" screen like a Kindle?

The idea is that the slower, less colourful display makes you less likely to doomscroll.

Sounds great.

The only problem is the screen refreshes about as fast as that bird on The Flintstones chiseling pictures into a stone tablet.

The best part?

The whole time I'm thinking, "At least this thing will be cheap."

Then I click on the price.

Two thousand dollars.

Apparently the cure for technology addiction costs more than the addiction itself.

Some days I'm tempted to chuck my phone into the river and be done with it.

But let's be honest—that's never going to happen.

I remember when phones were optional. Now you feel naked leaving the house without one.

Besides, all I'd really be doing is polluting the river with yet another cellphone tossed in by another frustrated owner.

Then reality sets in.

How am I supposed to order the Uber home?

I could take the bus.

Except my PRESTO card is on my phone.

So is my debit card.

My concert tickets.

My boarding passes.

Half my passwords.

My grocery points.

Somewhere along the way, our phones stopped being something we carried.

They became something we are.

Fact check me.

The smartphone revolution wasn't about putting a computer in our pocket.

It was about slowly turning our pocket into the place where we keep our entire lives.

That's why none of us can throw them away.

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Pierre Poilievre has spent years calling for the defunding of the CBC.

I think we should do the opposite.

I think we should invest in it, expand it and begin treating it as something more important than a domestic television network that occasionally produces a show people watch while folding laundry.

Not because the CBC is perfect.

It is a massive public institution, which means it is almost certainly bloated in places, inefficient in others and capable of spending more money to accomplish less than some of its private competitors. Those criticisms should not be dismissed. Its budgets should be scrutinized. Its executives should be held accountable. Its programming should be judged honestly.

But those are arguments for making the CBC better.

They are not arguments for destroying it.

That distinction matters, especially when wealthy private interests are buying, consolidating and influencing more of the media we consume.

We have watched much of the American information landscape come off the rails over the last decade. News has become less about informing the public and more about reinforcing whatever version of reality keeps a particular audience frightened, angry and watching.

Private media does not necessarily provide the information people need. It provides the information advertisers can sell around.

There is a difference.

When a handful of extremely wealthy people control the platforms through which millions understand the world, their economic and political interests inevitably shape the conversation. That does not require a secret meeting in a dark room. It is simply what happens when news becomes a product and the people producing it know who signs their cheques.

Canada is hardly immune. Researchers have spent decades documenting concentration within the Canadian media and communications industries. A 2025 Carleton University-led report examined 40 years of ownership, consolidation and upheaval across the country’s network-media economy.

But the CBC remains different in one essential way.

We own it.

It does not ultimately exist to enrich a billionaire, satisfy shareholders or protect the interests of a corporate parent. Its mandate is public service.

That does not magically make every story balanced. Journalists are human. Editors make choices. Institutions develop blind spots. The CBC can be criticized, and it should be.

But the popular accusation that it is simply the propaganda department of the Liberal Party has never been supported by much evidence.

In 2010, CBC released the results of an extensive news-balance study that it had commissioned from the independent research firm ERIN Research. The firm examined roughly 15,900 television, radio and online stories broadcast or published between October 2009 and May 2010, alongside a public-opinion study conducted by Ipsos Reid. Reported findings indicated that The National treated the governing Conservatives more positively than the national newscasts on CTV and Global and gave Conservative politicians substantial airtime.

That study is old and should not be treated as proof that every CBC broadcast today is perfectly impartial. It does, however, complicate the claim that the network has always functioned as a Liberal cheering section.

Apparently the propaganda becomes reliable journalism whenever a Conservative politician wants to cite it.

But preserving trustworthy news is only part of the reason we should invest more in the CBC.

The larger opportunity is cultural.

For much of our history, Canadian television appeared embarrassed by its own Canadian identity. Toronto pretended to be New York. Vancouver played Seattle. Canadian characters lived in unnamed North American cities where nobody mentioned universal healthcare, ordered a double-double or wore a toque.

We acted as though Canadian stories could travel only if we scrubbed the Canada out of them.

Then something changed.

Murdoch Mysteries, Schitt’s Creek, Kim’s Convenience, Workin’ Moms, Heartland and other Canadian productions found audiences outside this country without disguising where they came from.

They did not succeed despite being Canadian.

Their Canadian character became part of the appeal.

Kim’s Convenience presented a Korean-Canadian family running a Toronto convenience store. Workin’ Moms was unmistakably set within the rhythms and contradictions of life in Toronto. Schitt’s Creek never needed to wave a flag in the background because its humour, humanity and lack of cynicism felt Canadian without becoming a government heritage commercial.

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These shows travelled because specificity travels.

Audiences do not need every story to resemble their own lives. They need stories that feel honest enough to invite them inside.

Canadian productions supported by our broadcasting and cultural-funding ecosystem have already demonstrated real export potential. Canadian Media Fund-backed television projects generated hundreds of millions of dollars in international presales over a five-year period, showing that Canadian storytelling can be both culturally valuable and commercially viable.

So why are we still talking about the CBC like it is merely a domestic expense?

Why are we asking how small it can become instead of how far it can reach?

The BBC has understood this for generations.

Britain did not build the BBC World Service out of charity. It understood that journalism and culture create influence. They introduce a country to people who may never visit it. They establish familiarity, credibility and trust long before a diplomat enters the room or a company considers an investment.

In 2024–25, the BBC reported a global weekly reach of approximately 453 million people across BBC News and BBC Studios. Its international news services alone reached 418 million people each week, while the World Service reached about 313 million. The BBC also reported that international business decision-makers who use its services were more likely to consider investing in the United Kingdom.

That is not simply broadcasting.

That is soft power.

Canada should have the same ambition.

We find ourselves in an unusual moment. The United States, for generations the dominant cultural and political voice in our hemisphere, is increasingly perceived as polarized, unpredictable and hostile to outsiders. Its institutions appear less stable. Its alliances seem more conditional. Its politics spill across its borders whether the rest of us invite them or not.

Canada can offer a different story.

Not a perfect country. Not a morally superior country. Not a country that has solved racism, inequality, reconciliation or immigration.

A functioning country.

A country whose institutions remain broadly stable. A country where regulations can be followed and contracts can be trusted. A country where people from different cultures can retain their identities while participating in a shared national life.

Canada’s political and economic stability is already presented as a competitive advantage when attracting international investment. Statistics Canada also recognizes that a country’s reputation and soft power can strengthen trade relationships, attract visitors, talent and investment, and increase its ability to influence international standards.

Media is part of that reputation.

Every successful Canadian drama, comedy, documentary, podcast and news program becomes a small introduction to this country.

It shows people what our cities look like.

It lets them hear our accents.

It introduces them to our artists, communities, Indigenous voices, immigrant families, political arguments and strange collection of regional identities.

It can demonstrate what a multicultural nation is capable of without pretending multiculturalism is effortless or complete.

There is economic value in that.

Culture attracts tourism. Reputation attracts talent. Familiarity helps create markets. Trust encourages investment. A country that successfully tells its own story is more likely to be understood on its own terms.

If we truly believe the world needs more Canada, do we not have some obligation to bring Canada to the world?

Not to dominate it.

Not to lecture everyone else about how civilized we are.

And certainly not to turn the CBC into a government propaganda service projecting maple leaves onto every available surface.

The value of public broadcasting lies in its independence. A global CBC would be useful only if it retained the freedom to criticize Canada, expose our failures and tell the truth about who we are.

Soft power does not have to mean propaganda.

It can mean being honest about ourselves while still believing that what we are building is worth sharing.

Imagine a properly funded international CBC service distributing Canadian journalism, documentaries, comedy and drama around the world. Imagine partnerships with broadcasters throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Imagine reporting available in multiple languages, not merely explaining the world to Canadians but helping the world understand Canada.

CBC/Radio-Canada becoming a full member of the European Broadcasting Union in June 2026 demonstrates that deeper international collaboration is not some impossible fantasy.

The infrastructure already exists.

The talent already exists.

The stories already exist.

What appears to be missing is ambition.

Pierre Poilievre looks at the CBC and sees an institution to cut.

I look at it and see an institution we have never fully allowed to become what it could be.

Reform it. Audit it. Modernize it. Make its leadership more accountable. Strengthen its political independence and demand that it serve Canadians in every region, not merely those living close to Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.

But then give it a larger mission.

Let it become a global home for Canadian journalism and culture.

Let it create opportunities for Canadian writers, actors, filmmakers, musicians and journalists.

Let it tell stories that private broadcasters will never consider sufficiently profitable.

Let it become a trusted voice in a world where trustworthy voices are becoming harder to find.

The world does not need Canada to become another empire.

It may simply need Canada to stop whispering.

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Every generation seems convinced it has finally figured out how to raise children.

We read the books. We listen to the experts. We argue over screen time, homework, sports, university, and whether kids today are too soft or too entitled. We obsess over giving them every advantage we never had.

I did it too.

Like most parents, I assumed my job was to prepare my son for the world the way I had learned to survive it. After all, I had already walked the road. I knew where the potholes were. I knew where life would try to break him. If I could simply steer him around the mistakes I'd made, maybe he'd arrive with fewer scars than I did.

There was only one problem.

He wasn't me.

People say he looks like me, and maybe he does. But underneath that familiar face is a completely different person. He has a different temperament, a different way of solving problems, different passions, and a mind that often works in ways I don't fully understand.

And somewhere along the way I realized that wasn't something to fix.

It was something to protect.

I had spent most of my life believing perseverance meant never quitting. I stayed in places longer than I should have because that's what I thought commitment looked like. Naturally, I expected my son to approach life the same way.

Instead, he would dive into something, learn from it, become good enough to satisfy his curiosity, and then move on.

At first, I worried.

Then I noticed something.

He wasn't becoming an expert in one thing.

He was becoming an interesting person.

I stopped trying to push him toward the interests I understood. Instead, I started following him into his.

Anime. Video games. Technology. Ideas I would have dismissed years earlier.

It turns out children don't just learn from their parents.

Parents have the opportunity to keep learning through their children.

Then I made another realization.

I think too many of us are raising successful children instead of happy ones.

We define success the way the machine defines success. Good grades. Good university. Good job. Buy a house. Raise a family. Become a slightly more valuable cog than your parents were.

For years I thought that was the goal.

Then I looked at my own life.

I had worked harder than I ever imagined. Sacrificed more than I thought I could. Chased every responsibility that appeared in front of me.

And I asked myself a question that changed everything.

Is this really what I want for my son?

Or do I want him to be kind?

Curious?

Emotionally healthy?

Comfortable in his own skin?

Able to build meaningful relationships and find joy in ordinary days?

Once those became the priority, something unexpected happened.

The practical stuff started taking care of itself.

We're touring universities.

He's thinking about careers.

He's learning how to manage money.

Sure, he still doesn't know how to do his own laundry.

But laundry isn't that hard.

Teaching someone kindness is.

People also love asking parents another question.

"What's been your favourite age?"

My answer has never changed.

The age he is now.

Every version of him has been my favourite because every version introduced me to someone new.

People mourn the loss of baby cuddles.

I don't.

If you're lucky enough to raise a teenager who still likes spending time with you, the cuddles never disappear.

They just evolve into a 170-pound monster lying between his mom and dad, laughing while he forces you to watch one more ridiculous TikTok video.

People tell you not to become friends with your kids.

I agree.

Parents are supposed to be so much more than friends.

A friend doesn't carry your fears while pretending everything is okay.

A friend doesn't spend decades preparing you for a world they'll eventually have to leave you alone in.

A friend isn't asked to love someone enough to let them become a completely different person than they imagined.

Parents are.

Sometimes people ask me, "What if he's still living at home when he's thirty?"

Then I'll make him a sandwich when he gets home from work.

Maybe we'll watch anime.

Maybe we'll work on the car.

When I was young, I couldn't wait to leave home.

My dad never wanted his sons to go.

I didn't understand him then.

Now I do.

One day, almost without noticing, I became him.

Not because I want to hold my son back.

But because I've learned that the measure of successful parenting isn't how quickly your child leaves your house.

It's whether, after becoming an adult with every reason to be somewhere else...

...they still choose to come home.

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Fact Check: We spend so much time trying to prepare our children for life that we sometimes forget life isn't a test to pass. Maybe our job isn't to raise successful adults. Maybe it's to raise people we'd genuinely enjoy knowing if they weren't our children. If we accomplish that, the rest has a funny way of taking care of itself.

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