AUBUT: A path forward - Canada’s ‘postnational’ experiment is failing

Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.In December 2015, soon after becoming Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau described Canada to The New York Times Magazine as a “postnational” state, adding: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” He then pointed to shared values such as openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, and to pursue equality and justice. He intended that as praise, but for me, I heard it as a warning. There is no such thing as a country without a core identity, as that is what makes every country unique. Any country that has forgotten its culture or has been taught to be ashamed of it is in a dangerous condition because it leaves citizens unmoored and leaves institutions free to treat people as inputs to be managed rather than citizens to be served.For most of my life, being Canadian meant something that needed no explanation. It meant kindness for others because in a hard country, decency is not optional. It meant cooperation because winter does not care about ideology. It meant strength and fortitude because distance and climate punish weakness. It meant a quiet confidence in law because fairness is the only authority that can hold a vast land together. No one was supposed to be above the law, and the law was supposed to embody fairness rather than serve as a tool of politics.Those traits were not sentimental but the practical needs of our nation. Neighbours helped neighbours because they had to and because everyone was expected to carry their share. “Pay it forward” has obvious benefits in a hard land. You just never know when you will be the one needing help. When that expectation is present, kindness does not become naivety, and cooperation does not become coercion. It becomes mutual reliability, which is the true foundation of a free society.If you want a cultural snapshot, think of the instinct Canadians once took for granted: when trouble hits, you help. Many Canadians saw that spirit captured in stories like Come From Away. It felt familiar because it was familiar. It matched what many of us were raised to believe about ourselves. You can debate whether we always lived up to that ideal, but the ideal mattered. It set a standard. It was who we were. It was core to being “Canadian.”.A key part of that standard was the rule of law. In the British tradition, law is supposed to bind rulers and ruled alike. Canada was not founded on revolution, but it was founded on the idea that lawful authority is legitimate only when it is restrained, fair, and accountable. That is why Canadians admired institutions that appeared to practice restraint and impartiality. When citizens believe the law is fair, they will accept hardships, disagreements, and even mistakes. When they believe the law is selective, legitimacy collapses quickly.Canada’s political evolution has also always contained an unresolved tension between local life and distant power. Municipal government is the most responsive because consequences are immediate and visible. The provincial government is more distant but still tangible. Federal power, in a country as large as Canada, is the most remote and therefore the easiest place for unaccountability to hide. As the population has concentrated in a few large metropolitan regions, federal incentives have increasingly aligned with those regions, leaving many rural and smaller urban communities feeling ignored.Until the 1990s, many Canadians still believed that, whatever our differences, the system broadly worked and broadly cared. The 1980s were hard economically, but hardship did not automatically breed cynicism. People endured because they believed the rules were still the rules and that effort still mattered. The 1990s changed the tone. Canadians began to notice that moral language was increasingly used to justify administrative control, and that important choices were being made in ways that felt insulated from ordinary accountability.A concrete example of Canada’s incremental shift toward control is the firearms policy. Handguns have required registration in Canada since 1934, long before the current era. In 1995, the Liberal government passed Bill C-68, the Firearms Act, expanding licencing and requiring the registration of all firearms, including non-restricted long guns. The long-gun registry component was later repealed, but the 1995 moment still mattered symbolically because it signalled a widening assumption that citizens must be tracked and licenced, not merely governed by clear and equal law.Where the downward slide became impossible to ignore for many Canadians was 2020. The COVID-19 period became a stress test of Canadian civic culture. Reasonable people can disagree about which public health measures were necessary, which were excessive, and which were mistakes made in real time. But there is a deeper issue that cannot be waved away: large numbers of Canadians came to believe that a fundamental line was crossed, and that the crossing was morally justified by officials and socially enforced by neighbours..For clarity, I use the words “vaccine” and “vaccination” only in their older sense: a product that stimulates the immune response, is safe, and is effective. Where those criteria are not met, I will not use language that implies otherwise.For decades, Canadians were told that bodily autonomy and personal choice are bedrock principles. Yet during the pandemic, vaccine status became a social sorting mechanism. Access to travel, employment, and ordinary participation was restricted for many people, and the moral justification often shifted from public health to moral condemnation. For those who declined “vaccination,” the experience was not simply a policy disagreement. It felt like purposeful targeting. It felt like a country that had abandoned its own ethic of fairness and had replaced it with permission to punish dissenters. For many citizens, that was the Rubicon moment. A line that should never have been crossed was crossed.That rupture did not end when restrictions eased. Trust does not bounce back on command. Once a society learns that it can exclude a segment of its own citizens under the banner of safety or virtue, it has taught itself a habit that will be used again. The lesson is not that Canada became “fascist” overnight. The lesson is that a society can become comfortable with unequal treatment under the law, and then deny it happened.The convoy and the federal response amplified this rupture. Again, reasonable people can differ on the protests themselves. But the legal and institutional aftermath is instructive. On February 17, 2023, the Public Order Emergency Commission released its final report and concluded that the threshold for invoking the Emergencies Act had been met. On January 23, 2024, the Federal Court ruled that there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Act, that the decision was unreasonable and ultra vires, and that certain measures infringed Charter rights. In law, the term ultra vires, meaning ‘beyond the powers,’ describes actions taken by the government outside the authority granted to it. In a system governed by the rule of law, even well-intentioned actions are invalid if the power to act was never lawfully granted.On January 16, 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the government’s appeal and upheld that the invocation was unreasonable and ultra vires, and that Charter infringements occurred..Two things can be true at once. An inquiry can find that a government acted within a broad threshold, and courts can later find that the legal standard was not met and that rights were infringed. What matters for civic cohesion is what happens next. When citizens see extraordinary measures used, see courts find those measures unlawful, and then see no meaningful accountability or acknowledgement, trust corrodes further. The rule of law is not merely about winning a case. It is about the culture of restraint that prevents extraordinary powers from becoming normal tools.This is the point at which many Canadians ask the hardest question: Can Canada still be saved, or have we gone too far?There are Canadians, especially in regions that feel persistently ignored, who now argue that Canada is structurally beyond repair. They point to the dominance of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver in federal outcomes, and to the reality that a critical mass of population and economic power is concentrated far from where many Canadians live and work. They argue that the distance between the governed and governors has become too large, and that the federation has become a machine that serves concentrated interests while using national unity language as cover.That diagnosis should not be dismissed. But neither should the risks of disintegration. History offers examples of peaceful transformation and examples of violent fragmentation. A Velvet Revolution is possible when people share enough moral centre to demand change without turning neighbours into enemies. Balkanization becomes likely when politics collapses into competing identities and mutual suspicion. Canada’s best hope is to avoid both nihilistic fragmentation and coercive centralization by rebuilding a shared standard of fairness and responsibility..So what is the path between where we are and where we need to be?It begins with the recovery of culture, not as ethnicity or ideology, but as civic ethic. Canada does have a culture. It is the ethic of kindness joined to responsibility, cooperation joined to independence, and law joined to fairness. If Canadians stop believing that ethics is real, the country becomes only an administrative zone. If Canadians recover it, the country becomes governable again.Restoration requires four practical commitments.First, restore equal application of the law. Not a perfect law, but a law that is visibly impartial and binds those who wield it. Selective enforcement and double standards are poison in a large country. If citizens believe rules apply only to the governed, they will withdraw their consent.Second, restore subsidiarity. Decisions should be made as close as possible to the people affected. This is not an argument for chaos. It is an argument for accountability. The closer the government is to citizens, the harder it is for officials to hide behind abstractions, and the easier it is for citizens to see and influence outcomes..Third, restore dignity through responsibility. Compassion is not the removal of burden. It is the provision of fair conditions under which people can carry it. A society that replaces responsibility with dependency does not become kinder. It becomes resentful, brittle, and easily manipulated.Fourth, restore a Canadian story that is honest and usable. Not propaganda, not shame, but a narrative that explains why a hard country required mutual reliability, why the rule of law mattered, and why fairness was once understood as the precondition for peace.If Canadians can do these things, Canada can be saved without destroying itself. If Canadians cannot do these things, then the pressure for radical options will grow, whether anyone wants that or not. The choice is not between comfort and change. The choice is between deliberate reform and eventual rupture.The first step is the same step any recovering alcoholic must take: admit the problem. Canada’s problem is not that we disagree. Canada’s problem is that we no longer share a standard of fairness and restraint that makes disagreement survivable. The path forward is to restore that standard, and with it, to restore belief in ourselves.Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.