Star in Their Eyes

A sequel is hard to pull off. The Odyssey, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Godfather Part II, and The Dark Knight succeeded. But Caddyshack II bombed, as did Blues Brothers 2000. Everybody was thrilled at the prospect of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman only to be disappointed that it was no To Kill a Mockingbird. Nobody asked for Jaws: The Revenge, Basic Instinct 2, Speed 2: Cruise Control, or Zoolander 2, and nobody liked any of them.

Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance is that rare contemporary sequel that cuts the mustard — perhaps not spectacularly but amply enough. It certainly won’t meet the sad fate of Opposing the System, Charles A. Reich’s follow‑up to his big hit The Greening of America, a Baedeker to the passion-charged 1970s; a quarter century later, Reich’s ideas got little attention. As the second act to The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., edited by the poet Al Purdy and published in 1968, this new book may have less bang than the first, but it packs more immediacy and relevance.

With such contributors as Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, Hugh Garner, George Jonas, Margaret Laurence, Irving Layton, Dennis Lee, Dorothy Livesay, Peter C. Newman, and Mordecai Richler, that original came at a time of American upheaval (the protests over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy) and Canadian uplift (the happy hangover of the Maple Leaf flag, Expo 67, Trudeaumania, the welcoming of American draft dodgers, and the appearance of the remarkable phrase “Canadian exceptionalism”). The current era has surface similarities. Only about a third of Americans (the MAGA insurgency, mostly) and an infinitesimal fraction of Canadians (whoever they are, they must be somewhere) believe the United States is on the upswing. In contrast, Canada is experiencing an unprecedented resurgence in pride that has removed California wines from most shelves, imported litre upon litre of Brazilian orange juice, and altered the economy of beach towns in Maine and Florida alike.

But the big difference — the raison d’être of Elbows Up! — can be expressed in two words: Donald Trump, whom Canadians might after all these years regard simply as He Who Must Not Be Named, even though his name is spoken within the first sixty seconds of any conversation held between Cape Spear and Boundary Peak 187. Another president given to bombast, Lyndon Johnson, was in the White House when The New Romans was published. Canada had nothing to fear from him; after all, he had said at Expo 67, “The gift of providence we cherish most is that we were given as our neighbors on this wonderful continent the people and the nation of Canada.” It is unimaginable that the forty-seventh president might utter such a sentence.

In 1968, Trump, with five deferments, was a draft dodger of a sort. He was starting out in the New York City real estate business, learning the tricks of his new trade that were discredited even then, joining the exclusive Le Club in midtown Manhattan and bragging that he was so handsome that nightclub managers worried he would steal other men’s wives. Today, he is a bête noire, given his insults that range from denigrating Justin Trudeau as “governor” rather than “prime minister” and fantasizing about making Canada the fifty-first state to capriciously brandishing the tariff bludgeon.

It may be the case that the world needs more Canada, as ad executives, Bono, and Barack Obama have all said. But Canada once again needs thoughtful critiques of its southern neighbour. It very likely needs Elbows Up!, the title being a phrase attributed to Gordie Howe, that giant of a son of Floral, Saskatchewan. Really, who would have guessed that a right-winger who played in Houston, Hartford, and Detroit would provide a national rallying cry in this age dominated by the Liberals?

All this turmoil sent me to my local Montreal library to search out a copy of The New Romans, inexplicably — or maybe presciently — shelved in the travel section. It is a remarkable 196-page work, now yellowed with age but still shimmering with courage, insight, and sheer brilliance. What I found particularly eerie is this passage, written by Farley Mowat, who employed an anatomical term that itself shines through his anger and frustration: “Actually the only time Canadians even raise themselves on their elbows these days is to defend their chosen masters and to attack, with the bitter hostility only known to turncoats, those who dare reproach them for their spineless espousal of slave status.”

Elamin Abdelmahmoud, the host of CBC Radio’s Commotion, did well in reprinting four entries (Atwood, Laurence, Mowat, Richler) from the earlier anthology, but I wish he had borrowed more. For Pete’s sake, Michael Ondaatje is in there, and the essay by the University of Saskatchewan’s John W. Warnock would have fit in gracefully: “The great liberal society of the United States is now in a period of real crisis, similar to that of Athens at the peak of that liberal-democratic empire. Will the United States go the way of all previous empires? Will the individualistic society break down because of internal contradictions?” Plus ça change and all that.

At least Abdelmahmoud was clever enough to cadge a February 2025 Atlantic essay by Ken Dryden, whose physical and intellectual toughness is encapsulated in two sentences tucked into the finale of the collection: “As for the 51st state crap, knock it off. It’s beneath you.”

This typist can hear your sotto voce fulmination that nothing is beneath Trump, and fortunately that is not the only theme of Elbows Up! In fact, the book is a celebration of Canada and a reflection of what the U.S. once was — more so than a screed against the current powers that be in Washington. Of course, there’s also a dose of “Canada is great but we have faults of our own.” It’s all quite Canadian: the boasting is muted, the reflections deep.

Most of these contributors verily believe in this country, which may be better equipped to set out on its own than it was in 1968. The threat certainly feels greater than it did then. With the information economy, the possibilities of robust trade, and cultural relationships with Europe, India, China, and other lands, it’s an utterly changed world. Mark Carney is urging Canada to diversify its economy and, tellingly, its outlook and thus its identity: another word that is on every commentator’s lips, or so this volume would suggest.

That identity thing is one of the hardy perennials of Canadian life. In his introduction to The New Romans, Purdy acknowledged the conundrum by saying he found the whole matter “irritating”— he’d “never doubted” the country’s identity. Then he launched into a paragraph that, in its way, renders both volumes almost redundant:

It makes sense that, in his own introductory essay, Abdelmahmoud also confronts the identity défi. He dutifully quotes Richler, who described “one of the few original Canadian enterprises, the What-Is-Our-Identity business.” But in referring to contemporary ties, Abdelmahmoud also expresses hope that the reader will come away from these entries with “a sense of broadening possibility: that this relationship can be reconfigured, maybe even nudged out of the centre of Canada’s cultural imagination.” He also poses a vital question: “How might Canada understand itself differently if more Canadians understood that these recent threats do not constitute a new kind of encroachment on the self-determination of people who live here, but rather a continuation of the old encroachments?”

To this end, Niigaan Sinclair, an Anishinaabe professor at the University of Manitoba, conceives of Canada as a giant Indigenous band. “Welcome to Indigenous life, Canada,” he writes. “You now get a taste of what it’s like to have one’s culture attacked, leadership demeaned, and economy undermined. Up next will be land invasion, resource exploitation, and the introduction of draconian systems that implement pain and suffering.” Jesse Wente, the former chair of the Canada Council for the Arts, takes the analogy further. “Canadians,” he writes, “now find themselves in a position familiar to First Nations on Turtle Island, holding one end of a treaty while the other end is shredded.”

The wrongs have not only been against First Nations, as the novelist Jen Sookfong Lee points out. “The history of Canada is marked by ugly truths,” she writes. She asks which Canada she is fighting for: “the Canada I think we could be, the Canada that might emerge from this mess of trade policy and misinformation, and anti-trans and misogynistic ideology?” Is it worth the fight, she asks, “when this is the country that gave my grandfather hope and took it away, that gave my mother a home and five daughters to care for her, but that also kept her at the fringes through language and culture? Is it too poisoned from the roots up?”

Although Atwood argues, in a new piece gathered here, that “Canadians’ enthusiasm for themselves appears to be cyclical,” not everything is going to come around again. “The relationship will never be the same as it used to be,” the veteran news anchor Peter Mansbridge is convinced.

Some things, however, do remain the same. Carol Off, the former co-host of CBC Radio’s As It Happens, points out that much of Canada’s news media, television fare, cinema offerings, and publishing industry is actually American. In his New Romans essay, Robert Fulford, then the editor of Saturday Night, spoke of the American musicians Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Peewee Russell, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis as “my first heroes” and of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow as “the novelists I first took seriously.” But what matters now more than ever, Off argues, is the fact that somehow “we find ourselves deeply attached to this idea of Canada: an entity not quite defined, but a country whose moment to shine has certainly arrived.”

Are Canadians themselves to blame for what the actor and comedian Jay Baruchel calls “the American cultural conquest of Canada” and for the fact that America “is the standard against which we measure, compare, and define ourselves”? Perhaps, he suggests, the reader should “consume whatever you like, but let your consumption of Americana be somewhat mitigated or offset by countervailing consumption of Canadiana.”

It was a nice touch — and touching — to commission an essay from Leslie Hurtig, the artistic director of the Vancouver Writers Fest. She’s the daughter of Mel Hurtig, who published The New Romans and who warned in The Betrayal of Canada, from 1991, that Canada had become “a country where too many of our major corporations are no longer Canadian, where too many decisions affecting our lives are made in foreign boardrooms.” Hurtig fille cites the 1957 report of the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects and concludes that the threats the commissioners and her father identified then —“economic domination, cultural assimilation, and political dependency”— remain today. “Their legacy,” she suggests, “is a challenge to this generation: to protect Canada’s ability to chart its own course in the world.”

Certainly not everybody is pleased with this project. Ken Whyte, the founder of Sutherland House Publishing and the author of what is arguably the best recent biography of Herbert Hoover (a book I regard so highly that I once invited him to join a panel I was running on the presidency, where his insights were penetrating), has pointed out that the profits from this volume will go to Penguin Random House, a privately held multinational based in New York City, which supplied many of the contributors. As he sees it, the current book doesn’t measure up to Purdy’s original, which wasn’t launched by a megacorporation but instead was an independent effort in Edmonton. I’d argue that this fresh crisis requires a fresh look. But such a contretemps stands as proof that Canadian literary life is yeasty enough to produce argument, stir dissent — and provoke controversy. My faint and almost certainly vain hope: the inclusion of the scorching Whyte critique in any second edition of Elbows Up!

I will end by noting that I am a dual citizen who has been working on both sides of the border for the past seven years. I read much of Elbows Up! on an Air Canada flight just a week after that blast from Will Smith of the Los Angeles Dodgers broke the back of the Toronto Blue Jays and with it the heart of an entire country. Many of the passengers were still wearing their Jays raiment. The flight attendants distributed those dark-chocolate Célébration biscuits, which have been produced in Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures, Quebec, among other Canadian locations, for 120 years; and the ginger ale they poured, over two cubes of ice, has borne Canada’s name for just as long, largely because its developer was from Enniskillen, Ontario (though, in the spirit of Whyte, I must point out that the producer of the champagne of ginger ales, which used to feature a beaver image on its label, is now a division of Keurig Dr Pepper, Inc., based in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Frisco, Texas).

A year ago, I might not have noticed such things. A year from now, I suspect that I and most of the readers of this magazine will still be saying, in regard to the United States, “Vive la différence.” So forgive me, please, for invoking an American poet, but Canada now is taking the road less travelled by — and that has the possibility of making all the difference.