I can’t recall the first time I heard the phrase “so‑called Canada,” but I am quite sure it must have come from somebody paid by the government. It’s the kind of phrase career bureaucrats say. Several of our universities have used it in official documents. Non-profits, in their grant applications, sometimes use it. It’s the world’s most casual form of political resistance, shorthand for the country’s inherent illegitimacy as a product of colonialism. Anyone who says “so‑called Canada” is almost certainly an academic or an activist-journalist or an arts administrator, among a shrinking cadre whose income, in one way or another, derives from the very government the phrase delegitimizes.
Political illegitimacy is only one implication of “so‑called Canada,” though, and not the most important, I think. The other implication of the phrase is that the current political organization of the territory of Canada will stop existing, and that it should stop existing...
Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future and On Writing and Failure, among other books.
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