Surviving Survivalism

Some time in the last half dozen years, Canadians decided that we had made it as a country. No audible click of consciousness-raising occurred, but by one of the mysterious processes of collective decision making that takes place from time to time in democracies, we simply decided that as a country, a nation-state, a political entity, we had outdistanced both of our existential risks—that we might be split into two by Quebec’s separation or that we might be swallowed up by the United States. This moment of truth (or of fervent wish fathering a transformational thought) released us from the psychological straitjacket of “survivalism” that has been our defining creed since our very national beginnings, an angst that encompasses no differently English Canadian anxiety vis-à-vis Americans and French Canadian anxiety vis-à-vis English Canadians, plus the worries of both of these groups and all others here about sheer physical survival amid our...