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Canada is Awesome:

A Little Book About a Big Country

By Neil Pasricha

Do you remember bank calendars?

When I was younger my sister Nina and I always waited in the long line for tellers with my dad at the big Royal Bank in downtown Oshawa, Ontario.

We’d spend time begging my dad for a Coffee Crisp from The Hasty Market next door, a handful of Sour Chews from the candy machines, or maybe one of those foil-wrapped chocolate-covered mints sitting up at the counter—the ones you’d rip apart as dozens of tiny chocolate islands broke off the mainland and stretched across the pasty white minty sea expanding between your fingers. 

I remember being surprised those minty chocolates were sold by the Royal Canadian Legion.

Why chocolates?

Was it just a way to keep their boxes full for the 11 months a year they weren’t filled with poppies?

You had to love the Legion’s quarter-in-a-box POS system, too. 

How Canadian!

For me those boxes brought back memories of unmanned stands selling eggs, lilac bouquets, or jars of honey on two-lane highways to Sandbanks or Wasaga Beach. 

Nina and I would swing under the felt ropes, fingernail-scratch million dollar withdrawals on those thin triplicate pink-white-green carbon papers, and sometimes ‘reorganize’ the wall of pamphlets with names like “Open an RRSP”, “The Power of Canada Savings Bonds”, or “Get A New Royal Bank Visa Today!” 

Most pamphlets showed a husband and wife grinning at each other at their kitchen table. 

I remember thinking they’d probably sell more credit cards if they showed a mom with sweaty bangs holding two red, white, and green plastic bags outside the entrance of The Bay. 

Bank lines were a regular and uneventful part of our lives… 

UNLESS… 

…it was the one day we were handed a new bank calendar for next year. 

I can still feel the excitement of holding next year’s calendar for the first time. 

Like holding a lightning bolt. 

We were going to be staring at this thing on our kitchen wall all year—every soccer practice, every birthday party, every dentist appointment—so it was by far the most critical piece of technology in our home. 

After walking through the bank’s shoveled parking lot my dad would pull open the door to the rear-facing backseat in our wood-paneled Pontiac Parisienne and we’d hop in and start flipping on the drive to A&P… 

Our eyes popped at misty rainbows over Niagara Falls, snow-capped peaks smeared like icing over mountains, and tiny people walking on Bay of Fundy floors.

We stared at evergreens standing silent behind mirrory Algonquin lakes, red and yellow leaf-covered drives on twisting Cape Breton roads, and a fading sun setting over the Toronto skyline … years before the Skydome. 

We flipped past totem poles of Stanley Park at sunset, chalky-blue Lake Louise waters lying tranquil between mountains, and the majestic Chateau Frontenac looming over a frozen Quebec City.

We gazed at mossy boulders beside deep blue lakes, giant redwoods on Vancouver Island, and nearly neon-green grasses rolling over lush Prince Edward Island hills. 

“Never forget how lucky we are,” my dad would remind us as he steered us from A&P to Harvey’s. 

“Never forget how good we have it.” 

“All those pictures are from your own country.” 

“Canada is the land of opportunity … it’s the best country in the world and you get to live here!” 

It took me a long time to realize my dad was right. 

I guess he would know. 

My dad was born Surinder Kumar Pasricha in 1944 in a small village called Tarn Taran in Punjab in India and grew up in a small house on a sandy side street sharing a tiny bedroom with three brothers and a sister. He was three when his mom died and his aging grandmother came to teach the kids to scrimp, save, and study for the next twenty years. 

They had one slate board for homework and bought an egg maybe once a week. 

“Once a week?” I’d ask 

“They were five rupees each!” he’d say 

At night my dad worked long hours ironing at his father’s Singer sewing machine shop … helping his dad stay on the sales floor, pressing shirts in the back. 

While doing his Masters in Nuclear Physics at the University of New Delhi he applied for immigration and was accepted in 1968. 

“Why Canada?” I asked him. 

“It was a newer country. It was more opportunities at that time. And my brother was there. So I thought that was a good place.”

“What about Sweden? Norway? Finland? Didn’t you tell me they were number one?” 

“They were. I looked up a list in school and Scandinavian were on top. But they don’t speak the language. Canada, US, Australia were the ones with English speaking. And there was lot of teachers demand.” 

“So then … why Canada specifically?” 

“I got the letter back from Canada first.” 

My dad arrived at Toronto International Airport in 1968, sixteen years before it was named after Lester B. Pearson, with a small suitcase and eight dollars in his pocket. 

“Why does every immigrant come with eight dollars?” 

“That was what the maximum rupees the Indian government allowed out of the country was worth.” 

He got an apartment in Scarborough and spent the summer ripping tickets at the public pool in the Beaches before being hired as the first high school physics teacher in the Durham Board of Education. 

Ontario had just split science into its biology, chemistry, and physics subcomponents so, according to my dad, they simply needed people to teach physics “because they never taught it to anyone before.” 

And my dad wanted to embrace every aspect of his new country. 

Some family and friends lived on Gerrard Street or out in Brampton near some emerging Indian restaurants, temples, and shops—and he certainly loved samosas from Motimahal and burfi from Brar Sweets—but my dad preferred his own version of heading into the unknown and moved to Oshawa where he lived as one of a handful of visible minorities in a blue-collar GM town half an hour east of the big city with large populations of immigrants from Ukraine, Italy, Portugal, France, Romania, Germany, Poland, and Greece. 

My dad started eating beef, going on school canoe trips, and chaperoning dances, where a few years later he was swirling and twirling my mom at twice the speed of everyone else—in his frilly baby blue dress shirt, dark velvet jacket, and a big smile—his boxy glasses flashing rainbow reflections from the disco ball. 

My dad brought home our first Sears Christmas tree with the spray-painted prongs telling us where on the forest-green broomstick trunk we should poke the branches. 

He hosted birthday parties at Burger King where my friends Jason Hopgood and Jason Daigle and I toured the slippery orange-tiled kitchen before swiveling on tan chairs wearing gold paper crowns.

He took us tobogganing at the golf course a few years after seeing snow. 

My dad didn’t know what he was doing. 

But he knew he wanted to try. 

I think my dad’s sense of curiosity and wonder with Canada rubbed off on my sister and me. 

Never forget how lucky we are. 

Never forget how good we have it. 

My dad was right. 

And there are so many reasons why. 

So many things that make Canada Canada. 

Where do we begin? 

Maybe it all starts with those blue puddles on our map… 

They’re in half the calendar photos for good reason. 

Turns out the last ice age ripped more than two million lakes into our fabric and they’re filled with the world’s largest supply of fresh water. 

No big deal but most sources say we have more lakes than every other country in the world … COMBINED. 

We have 20% of the world’s fresh water! 

Sure, the definition of lake is vague, and much of our fresh water isn’t exactly accessible, but the point is we are completely surrounded—everywhere—by the ingredient most precious and vital to our existence. 

We are the second-largest country in the world after Russia but did you know we have the longest coastline (243,042km) and the most islands? (52,455) 

And did you know we have the biggest island in a lake (Manitoulin Island, Lake Huron, 2766 km2) and that on that island there are over 100 other lakes and that on one of those lakes (Lake Mindemoya, 39km2) is an island (Treasure Island, 0.4km2) which is officially … the world’s largest island on a lake on an island on a lake. 

So much water… 

So many islands… 

Including Baffin Island which is the fifth-largest island in the world between Madagascar (#4) and Sumatra (#6)… 

…and Victoria Island which is the eighth largest island in the world right between Honshu (#7) and Great Britain (#8)… 

We are also heavily crowned ear-to-ear by the Pacific Ocean, Arctic Ocean, and Atlantic Ocean and even have Hudson’s Bay, clocking in at the near-unfathomable 1,230,000km2—five times all the Great Lakes combined!—which makes it the second largest Bay in the world after the Bay of Bengal. 

(Hudson’s Bay, of course, has its own spritely l’il offshoot— James Bay—which itself the same size as Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, or Ireland.) 

Water, water, everywhere… 

So many drops to drink… 

We forget this all the time! 

Have you ever drank bottled water all week on some WestJet all-inclusive to Punta Cana, Cancún, or Varadero and then found yourself marvelling as you filled up a glass at your kitchen sink when you got home? 

Me too. 

I remember pushing the black rubbery ‘foot rail’ on the big floor-standing school bathroom sink at Sunset Heights in Oshawa with all the boys giggling and drinking from the sprinklers showering water into our tiny, cupped hands… 

We trust the water. 

We drink the water.

We live by the water. 

We vacation by the water. 

This is such deep primal pleasure and it’s right in front of us— inside us, beside us—all the time. 

We watch creeks freeze and thaw as our tiny spinning planet tilts on its axis every year. 

And since we’re smacked way, way up top we feel those tilts in the form of dramatically changing seasons. 

And I really do mean up top! 

Two million lakes … changing every year. 

Forty million Canadians … changing every year. 

Our seasons are invisible but create so many endless pleasures. 

Orange skies burning as winds whisper on chilly October walks home from school. 

Sun dipping down in the distance and dogs barking behind backyard fences as your hair blows wildly in the crisping breeze. 

Flurries floating past streetlamps and snowflakes sticking on lashes as we mitten-swipe picnic tables at the park. 

Everything slowing into an eerily pitch-perfect silence under shadowy sheets of bright white. 

Pine trees swaying softly, Christmas lights flickering, and biting air scraping our frosty cheeks. 

Finding long-lost lip balms and shrunken clementines in windbreakers and smelling freshly cut grass as mowers shave yellow winter beards in the backyard. 

Twilights lengthening and toddlers racing on tipsy trikes with big kids cruising on wobbly bikes before stars pop out to twinkle and glow. 

Scrunching sand on the beach… 

Lapping water at the dock… 

Sprinklers on burning driveways… 

Stomping on dry crunchy leaves… 

Holding hot mugs in warm toques… 

We feel the joy of our seasons deeply because we’re given the chance to miss our weather. 

We deprive ourselves of silently paddling past baby loons on their parents backs on humid summer mornings when we’re sliding along icy patches to steep tobogganing hills. 

And we deprive ourselves of sliding down snowy hills when we’re paddling across silent lakes. 

This way every single day has the potential to “feel like a treat” which helps us live in the moment and see and feel every sense around us. 

Every single day in our country.

Helps us live in the moment. 

Do you ever notice we speak in the collective? 

“What do you think of the weather we’re having?” 

“Shall we grab a Tims before the meeting?” 

“Think we have a shot at the playoffs?” 

We, we, we. 

We use the word we so much. 

Why do we feel like such a collective? 

I don’t think it’s complicated. 

I think it’s because we are one. 

We all toss around half of everything we make into a big glass jar and use it to pay for everyone’s health care, education, and services. 

Sure, the system’s never perfect, but if you shatter your ankle in an icy Canadian Tire parking lot, need a dozen years of free school for five kids in Kamloops, or want to drive on freshly snowplowed roads from Comox to Calgary to Cornwall to Côte-Nord to Cape Spear, well … we got you. 

We got you. 

We got everyone. 

When we know the bottom isn’t going to fall out we have less fear in our hearts and aren’t living a bracing existence of revving engines, stashing weapons, and putting up our dukes. 

Take as many comic books as your kid needs from the library, stroll through park grasses you just helped mow, and feel free to call 911 after your son sets his bedroom curtains on fire with his giant bong. 

(Bong fires, of course, being one downside of becoming just the second country in the world to legalize cannabis [2018, after Uruguay {2013}, before five more up to today]. Might we call ourselves one of the world’s progressive pioneers? We were third to get universal “free at point of service” healthcare [1966, after Germany {1883} and the UK {1948}, before France {1974}, Australia {1975}, and five others up to today], fourth to legalize gay marriage [2005, after the Netherlands {2001}, Belgium {2003}, and Spain {2005}, before 29 others up to today], and fifth to legalize assisted dying [2015, after Netherlands {2002}, Belgium {2002}, Luxembourg {2009}, and Colombia {2015}, before four others up to today].) 

We allllllllllll throw half in the big glass jar. 

Some love the jar. 

Some hate the jar! 

Do we all find ourselves complaining about the jar and thanking the jar at different times? 

I would argue that either way the jar creates a sense of connection, community, and a certain all-in-this-togetherness you don’t find many other places. 

We take care of each other… 

educate each other… 

support each other. 

We encourage each other… 

help each other… 

heal each other. 

We pay for afternoon storytelling on public radio, support film festivals in any town with a couple projectors and the side of a barn, and help musicians, writers, and filmmakers fund their magnum opus. 

We are also the most educated country in the world with the highest percentage of our population completing “tertiary” education—which is just a fancy word for what comes after “primary” and “secondary”. 

Wait, did I just say we’re number one? 

The most educated country? 

In the whole world? 

YES! 

We are! 

And we never even talk about this. 

But it’s true. 

A somewhat mind-boggling 63% of Canadians have completed a diploma or degree after high school. 

For perspective: 

South Korea is #4 … at 53%. 

Ireland is #3 … at 54%. 

Japan is #2 … at 56%. 

(Btw, the global average is 6%.) 

Today more than 20 million Canadians have a piece of paper saying that after primary school and secondary school they didn’t stop. 

They kept going! 

And going and going and going and going. 

They went deeper for three, four, five—even a dozen extra years (shoutout to our brain surgeons and anesthesiologists!)—on absolutely everything you could imagine going deep on. 

Because how do you get really good at something? 

You go deep. 

How do you become best-class, top-class … world-class? 

By going deep. 

And how do you go deep? 

By studying animation at Sheridan, engineering at Waterloo, hospitality at George Brown, winemaking at Niagara, underwater vehicles at Memorial, jazz at McGill, game design at Vancouver Film School, emergency management at Fanshawe, classics at Dal, l’histoire at Laval, commerce at Queen’s, business at Western, aerospace at Carlton, arts at OCAD, literature at Windsor, vet medicine at Guelph, naturopathic medicine at York, mining at Laurentian, nuclear engineering at Ontario Tech, medicine at U of T (or the Caymans), publishing at TMU (or Ryerson), paramedics at Sask Polytech, nursing at U of M (anitoba), agro at U of S (askatchewan), petroleum engineering at U of A(lberta), railcraft conducting at SAIT in Calgary, aircraft maintenance at BCIT, forestry at UBC, or even flying planes in Sault Ste Marie! 

This isn’t even 1% of what’s offered here. 

And to what can we attribute our top global marks? 

Our historically generous investments in public school? 

Our double-degreed teachers?

Our constant immigrant influx? 

Are we just selecting the studious from the best and brightest applying here ever year? 

Could be! 

Maybe! 

Who knows! 

But I want to propose something. 

I think maybe our best-in-world education rates are a function of our long and deep cultural history of learning, growing … and reading. 

Did you know Canadians read the second-most books per year? 

Other than our Icelandic pals who read 20 books a year, our 17 books a year is tops! We’re ahead of the super-readers in Finland at #3 with 16 and fellow readers and leaders in Norway, Estonia, New Zealand, Australia, England, and the US who are all around a dozen. 

The point is: We love books! 

We know reading is the pathway to almost everything else. 

Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) reminds us “books are a uniquely portable magic”, Mordecai Richler (Barney’s Version) cautions that “you don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture— just get people to stop reading them”, and Robertson Davis (Fifth Business) imparts the Canadian value that “a room without books is like a body without soul.” 

Amen! 

I believe this. 

I’m guessing you do, too. 

You’re reading this right now! 

You know one of our long gone elders who we should thank? 

Thomas Cary!

Thomas Cary opened the very first Canadian bookstore in 1797 in Quebec City on Rue de la Fabrique. The format of the store was like a local lending library where readers could subscribe and enjoy “the use of a periodical room from 10 o’clock in the morning to 3 o’clock in the afternoon.” 

How Canadian! 

Do your morning things, do your evening things, but if you can? 

In the middle? 

Sneak off and read. 

Thomas Cary’s deep Canadian bookstore spirit continues across our country today—with a thriving Munro’s in Victoria (Est 1963), Kidsbooks in Vancouver (Est 1983), Audrey’s in Edmonton (Est 1975), McNally Robinson in Winnipeg (Est 1981), The Bookshelf in Guelph (Est 1973), Glad Day in Toronto (Est 1970), Argo Bookshop in Montreal (Est 1966), La Maison Anglaise in Quebec City (Est 1984), and The Bookman in Charlottetown (Est 1972). 

Just a handful of the over 300 and growing independent bookstores coast to coast to coast. 

And let’s not forget mighty Indigo (Est 1994) spearheaded by Montreal-born septuagenarian “Chief Booklover” Heather Reisman who has filled her 100% Canadian-owned 172-store chain with Heather’s Picks tables, local author signings, and Saturday morning readings for over 30 years. (And, of course, Indigo has the deep history of bringing Chapters [Est 1992] and Coles [Est 1940] into its national reading push.) 

Btw: 

With Indigo and our indies we have a majority Canadian-owned book market despite great competition from US powerhouses. 

What a feat!

For perspective, even England’s largest chain (Waterstones) is owned by an American private equity company. 

Canadian owned, Canadian led bookstores, with their delightful Staff Picks walls and passionate booksellers—like Sarah at Another Story, Kyle at Type, or Steven at The Monkey’s Paw—help reflect stories back to us that continually help us grow and see ourselves. 

(Our Irish mate David Mitchell [Cloud Atlas] reminds us that “Booksellers are doctors of the mind.”) 

Water! 

Seasons! 

Learning! 

Reading! 

All part of what makes us us. 

And how do we pay for all this? 

The big glass jar! 

And it is big. 

Some say high tax rates curb our ambition. 

We say it doesn’t! 

Some say high tax rates limit our ability to produce at the greatest possible economic productivity. 

We say it does! 

We say go ahead and crunch your spreadsheets showing who has the highest GDP per capita. 

We’ll be at the cottage drinking Moosehead. 

I mean, sure, we understand measuring some success with productivity. 

After all, we are ambitious! 

We are a nation of creators, makers, and builders. 

We invented the telephone and insulin and the zipper!

(And the pacemaker and instant replay and garbage bags and the snowmobile and IMAX and paint rollers and time zones and batteries and the caulking gun and carbon dating and Javascript and the Wonderbra and the electron microscope…) 

I’m just saying! 

We are ambitious but we don’t need maximum productivity. 

Maybe we’re okay being 16th in GDP per capita at $51,000 per person? 

And zooming in we see there are 193 countries on the world’s highest productivity list and the top is dominated by tiny-peopled corporate hotspots like Luxemburg (pop: 653,000), Macau (pop 677,000), and Brunei (460,714). 

We’re educated, remember? We know it’s gamed! 

Feels like we’re OK being 90th instead of 99th percentile on that one… 

Canadians know success doesn’t always show up in rankings and graphs. 

Wealth isn’t just how much we create, make, or build! 

Wealth is also having a half-dozen friends we can call to help us move, knowing when we’re too old to shovel our driveway a kid on our street will help us out, and feeling sure everybody at work will smile when you say you’re taking off early to catch your kid’s soccer game. 

There’s a reason “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” is one of the top five regrets of the dying. 

We don’t work ourselves to death in Canada because our system sets a high baseline of health, education, clean water, and good government. 

We also pay parents to be off over a year after having a baby since nothing’s more important to us than nurturing future Canadians. 

Sure, we’re welcome to make more if we have the vision, feel the drive, or crave the spoils. Sure! And many of us will. And many of us do! 

But we don’t mistake non-optimal efficiency for any kind of nationwide deficiency. 

(Plus, we can sniff out other places counting things we count like the UN Human Development Index which ladles in life expectancy, education, and income. On that we’re 15th! Or the OECD Better Life Index which folds in work-life balance, community, and the environment. On that we’re 9th!) 

Creating. 

Making. 

Building. 

We’re getting into Canadian values now. 

Below the skin and into the muscle. 

Creating. 

Making. 

Building. 

Can we extend those into… 

Drive. 

Grit. 

Determination. 

I think we can. 

I think most of us know our Canadian values are deeply forged. 

Our land, our water, our changing seasons. Our messy, murky, mixing origins. Our strength and little-steps-to-big-steps ways. Our collectivism, our togetherness—our big glass jar—and things like our sacred medicare, public broadcasting, and two-hands-under-each-other’s-feet boosts over life’s many fences. 

I think stirring values together results in something like a spirit. 

Is there a spiritual essence of Canada we might point to that ties us together in an invisible way? 

I think there is. I’m sure there are many! But for me one story—arguably our strongest “Canadian folk story”—epitomizes so much of Canadian beliefs and spirit. 

I am, of course, talking about Terry Fox. 

The sound of Terry’s footsteps are the heartbeat of our nation. 

This is the man who died running across Canada on one leg. 

Who ran a marathon every day for 183 days. 

Who took nothing for himself. 

Who accepted no sponsors. 

Who gave it all to cancer research. 

Terry Fox was born in Winnipeg in 1958. 

His family moved to Surrey, British Columbia when he was 8 and Terry showed resilience early—told he was too short for his high school basketball team he took up cross-country skiing as his coach suggested and then showed up at basketball again next year. He eventually made the team and in Grade 12 won his high school’s “Athlete Of The Year” award. 

Terry went to Simon Fraser University (SFU) up in the foggy mountains to study kinesiology and become—his goal!— a gym teacher. 

But life had other plans. 

At age 18 Terry was diagnosed with bone cancer and very suddenly had his leg amputated 15cm above his knee before being outfitted with a stiff plastic leg. 

It would grind and make his stump bleed during painful walks or runs. 

Runs? 

Yes! 

A wise nurse moved 18-year-old Terry to the children’s ward and he spent the next year getting treatment with young children who filled his heart. 

“I’m crying now because there’s somebody here right now going through the same thing I went through—that same thing, and he’s only 10 years old,” Terry said at the time. “And I—I had the most inspirational day of my life today.” 

Terry spent a year doing in-depth planning for a run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. Doesn’t cancer research get a lot of money? Nope! Not 45 years ago! It was a disease you hid back then—like leprosy, schizophrenia, or AIDS. Terry was told by doctors the chances of him living from his cancer were 15% just a couple years ago but thanks to research it was now 50%! 

Terry was blown away. 

He wanted to bring cancer out of the shadows. 

But how? 

By running across Canada to raise awareness and money. 

Did anybody run on plastic prosthetic legs then? 

No! 

The stump chafed, it grinded, it bled. 

The pain was intense! 

But Terry felt like he had nothing to lose. 

He was just told he had a 50% chance of surviving. 

“I was told all my life I’m not the biggest, not the fastest, not the strongest, not the smartest,” Terry told his brother Fred at the time. 

But he had Canadian drive 

grit 

determination. 

Terry’s plan was to run from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island on a self-proclaimed “Marathon of Hope” with the goal of running a literal marathon every day on his leg. 

He wrote letters to every company he could think of asking for donations. Ford donated a camper van, Imperial Oil donated gas, Adidas donated running shoes. He turned down any company asking him to endorse products because he didn’t want anyone to profit from his run. 

Including, of course, him. 

Terry began by famously dipping his prosthetic limb in the Atlantic Ocean— 

—with the goal of dipping his foot in the Pacific Ocean when he got there. 

His journey lasted 187 days. 

He said he wanted to raise a million dollars. And nobody paid attention! 

There were no crowds in Newfoundland. 

No press coverage. 

Just an endless empty highway. 

Terry ran through Newfoundland sleet, Newfoundland hail, and Newfoundland winds. 

How much did he run? 

On one leg? 

Every day? 

42 kilometers! 

Every day! 

He let anybody run with him who wanted to and kept raising his goals as attention started building. He started calling into CBC radio every week. When he passed through one town of 10,000 people he suddenly raised $10,000 dollars and then Terry changed his goal from $1 million to $24 million. 

His new idea was raising one dollar for every one of the 24 million Canadians. 

Some said he was stitching the country together. 

My parents went to see Terry running through Oshawa on July 9, 1980 when I was 9 months old. 

And from July to September 1st that year he kept going and ran from Oshawa all the way to Thunder Bay. Only 1424km! On top of how far he’d already come Terry was at 5,373km when the cancer suddenly spread to his lungs and forced him to stop. 

Five months later in February as our nation cheered his recovery Terry reached his (expanded!) goal as his Marathon of Hope hit a total of $24.17 million. 

Terry Fox died in June, 1981. 

He was 22. 

I never knew Terry Fox. 

But I know Terry Fox.

We all do. 

I feel his reverence in echoes of his words gone by. 

“I am only one member of the Marathon of Hope,” he said. “I am equal with all of you.” 

I am equal with all of you. 

Forty-five years later my children do the Terry Fox Run every year at school. Terry’s brother Fred Fox came to speak in their tiny gym and, before she died, Terry’s mom Betty Fox spoke to over 400,000 Canadian schoolchildren in twenty-five years crossing the country … in her son’s footsteps. 

Btw: 

How many schools did the Terry Fox run … last year? 

9233. 

How much did they raise … last year? 

$24 million. 

With corporate sponsors? 

Nope. None. Never! 

That wasn’t Terry’s wish so it’s always been respected. 

Terry’s runs are independent and run by volunteers. 

And today have now raised over $900 million dollars. 

Tying a country together. 

The heartbeat of our nation. 

Our relationship with equality, egalitarianism, and the big glass jar runs deep. We work hard! We do. And we love our off time, too. 

For us. 

And for our country. 

Because we know more downtime also means more garage bands playing covers at the corner pub, more stalls of homemade hot sauces at the farmer’s market, more well-written newspapers in more small towns, more community meetings with full chairs at the library, and more people having time to fix bikes, spraypaint murals, or play banjos on subway platforms … searching, finding, and sharing beauty. 

When my dad used to say, “It’s a free country!” he wasn’t talking about the taxes. He meant this is a place where you can live where you want, marry who you please, talk about what you like, and watch anything on TV. 

We’re welcome to pray when we want, where we want, if we want. 

Temples, churches, mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras, forests, even pulling a mat from the trunk of your Uber and getting down on your knees on the sidewalk! 

We preach curiosity, acceptance, and kindness here. 

We know everybody can fine-tune our neighbourhoods, cultures, and subcultures to their tastes. 

Speaking of tastes, with so much diversity, a town in Canada could easily have samosas, shawarma, and ceviche on the same corner. But we enjoy other very Canadian treats too like Nanaimo Bars (chocolate, coconut, icing squares), poutine (hot salty fries covered in gooey cheese curds and steamy dark gravy), butter tarts (melted brown sugar with raisins poured into greasy pastry), Montreal smoked meat (salted, cured, steamed brisket served with mustard on rye bread), and, of course, Ketchup chips (ketchup chips). 

This doesn’t even include the dozen varieties of indigenous Kraft Dinner. 

A beautiful collection of millions of lakes … smeared across the second largest country in the world … playing four seasons in four acts every year … feeding the world from a tap of educated people … all living under a warm blanket of values like drive, grit, determination, and egalitarianism. 

Come on! 

Where did this paradise come from? 

How did we … get here? 

We’re talking about what makes Canada Canada. 

But what made Canada Canada in the first place? 

Logically, we must first look to answer that question by turning to the “Heritage Canada” TV commercials. 

Do you remember those? 

When I was a kid there was one sharing the story of James Naismith getting a hole cut in a peach basket so he could teach people how to play his newly invented basketball, one of Laura Secord running through fields to warn the Brits of an American attack in 1812, and one of Joe Shuster racing down a station platform to catch his train to Toronto after giving his girlfriend Lois his first-ever drawing of Superman. 

Then there was the “Heritage Canada” commercial about how Canada became Canada. 

The commercial takes place in the forest. 

It’s the early 1500s and a bearded, blue-bereted Jacques Cartier comes over a hill with robes and scarves sweeping majestically across his body in slow motion. 

He’s surrounded by a group of fellow French explorers and an old dude who looks like the Quaker Oatmeal man. 

Then a group of leathery, dark-skinned natives with feathers in their long black hair also step into the clearing to meet them. 

They have wide eyes and hold tomahawks. 

What looks like the tense buildup for a forest bloodbath soon dissolves into a simple French garcon asking for some directions at the corner of Birch and Maple. 

After the native says something in an Iroquoian dialect, the French Cartier asks the Quaker Oatmeal guy, in impeccable English: “What’s he saying, Father?”

Father replies: “Commander Cartier, he is saying, this nation’s name is Ca-Nada.”

The native man replies and we read in the subtitles: “Ka-Nata, yes, the village.”

Then, and this is the big moment, Cartier squints, looks into the sun, and in a flag-stabbing-into-the-moon type of moment he proudly declares: “Ca-Na-Da.”

Suddenly a guy wearing a toque in Cartier’s posse, who looks like he used to play drums for Broken Social Scene, pops over Cartier’s shoulder and says, “Beg pardon sir, but the word he used, I think he really means that village down there.” 

Quaker Oatmeal gets huffy: “No, no! Believe me, I know the word, and it means nation, and Canada is its name!” 

The natives nod in confusion and say “Kanata” and begin leading Cartier down to a village of teepees forming Stadacona— which is modern Quebec City. 

As the commercial fades to black we hear the drummer say “But I’m sure it means the houses, the village…” 

The message is clear. 

Canada is named after a misunderstanding. 

The native man was talking about a village, the noun for village, and Cartier thought it was the proper name of the whole region. 

That’s still many Canadian’s view of how Canada was named. 

I remember my Grade 10 history teacher describing it as a very Canadian way to get our country’s name. 

“England … is land of Angle tribes. India … is land of Hindus which were called Indus. Russia … is land of the Rus people who settled in the ninth century.” 

Canada … is a misunderstanding? 

However, a more recent investigation into Cartier’s own diaries reveals the famed explorer actually understood the word perfectly. 

He knew Kanata meant village and in his own journals, titled Bréf Recit, he called the land Canada because, as he wrote, “They call a town Canada” and his earliest name for the wider territory in his journals is “le pays de Canadas”—plural!—which means “the land of Canadas” or simply “the land of villages.” 

Where do indigenous cultures fit in?

Weren’t they here first and didn’t French and then British colonialists smother and then methodically destroy their cultures as part of the endless global parade of landing, planting flags, and cultural genocide happening … everywhere? 

Yes. 

Ugh. 

Yes. 

That’s what happened. 

We have a dark past, too. 

We learn about it. 

We read about it. 

We talk about it. 

But it’s a wrestling and reckoning that people like me—the son of immigrants who came here fifty years ago—are working to internalize, navigate, work through. 

I want to talk about it as openly as I can. 

So let’s start with the word: Canada. 

We were … the land of villages. 

We are … the land of villages. 

Explorers and fur traders adopted that name and the villages expanded across the land. Though violence occurred there are also reports that in Canada the French, English, and indigenous tribes worked together quite a bit with stories of trading, living together, and swapping medicines for scurvy. There was also a new group called the Metis which I’ve heard people lovingly joke “showed up about nine months after the Europeans landed.” 

There was love. 

But that’s not to say there wasn’t hate. 

It’s not to say there wasn’t violence. 

The world was an arguably more violent place 500 years ago and there was fighting between tribes and the teaming up of most indigenous tribes with the French against a group that was majority Brits. This culminated in the Seven Years War where French and English forces battled each other around the globe from 1756 to 1763. 

In Canada the natives fighting with the French ultimately lost to the English. 

They split Canada up. 

Country lines were set. 

Some indigenous. Some English. Some French. 

And much disagreement on where those lines should be. 

There is no way to sugarcoat much of our brutal history in this era and beyond. Colonialism, and the dominant thinking in our species for thousands of years around “planting a flag and calling it yours” meant existing cultures and communities were often supplanted in forms of horrifying cultural genocide. 

My Grade 10 history textbook in the early 90s had no mention of residential schools—the 100-plus years of Canadian colonialists and churches subjugating indigenous populations to horrible conditions in distant schools where they were systemically robbed of culture, language, and traditions all the way up to the 1990s. 

No mention of segregated and underfunded “Indian” hospitals that were not phased out until the 1980s. 

No mention of First Nations schools on reserves being funded at half the rate of schools in Canada until 2016! 

There is a learning and an unlearning many Canadians are working through now—with open arms, listening ears, land acknowledgements, and exploring things like changing words to anthems (as Juno-winning Jully Black sang at the NBA all-star game “…our home on native land”) with our National Truth and Reconciliation commission, active from 2008 to 2015, working towards a mutually respectful relationship between everyone who lives here. 

We see national events like the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games or the 2025 swearing-in of Prime Minister Mark Carney beginning with traditional indigenous ceremonies to mark, signify, and reflect back to us the sacred nature of a deep history we all, all share. 

These days my kids are wearing orange shirts in Kindergarten to recognize the rights of all children and to symbolically memorialize residential school survivor Phyllis Jack Webstad who was stripped of her clothes, including the new orange shirt her grandmother had bought her, which was never returned. 

More recently Daniel Levy, of Schitt’s Creek, took the University of Alberta’s “Indigenous Canada” online course and encouraged others to join him. 

Over 600,000 Canadians have enrolled. 

It’s a great start toward a relationship of mutual respect, understanding, and connection. 

But—the name Canada? 

Just the name part? 

That was 1867. 

From forest chats 500 years ago to writing it down 158 years ago! 

And there was big debate over the name! 

What else were we considering? 

Superior! 

Transatlantia! 

Efisga! 

Wait … Efisga?

Yeah, somebody had the idea of putting the first letter of every background and country who had settled here together: 

E for England 

F for France 

I for Ireland 

S for Scotland 

G for Germany 

A for Aboriginal 

Does it sound T for Terrible? 

Sure does! 

I admit I sort of like Transatlantia, though. Doesn’t that sound like a superhero sonic jet who might fly around the world and poke their head into a cameo appearance with Ananas on Téléfrançais? 

In the end we went with Canada. 

It was settled like most things. 

By a bunch of rich white dudes in a boardroom. 

All distant lenses get cloudier and there is much in our history to look back on in horror like our head tax on Chinese immigrants (1885-1923), our refusal to accept the Komagatu Maru ship of Sikh immigrants and sending them back across the ocean to slaughter (1914), our relative spurning of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany (1939), and our internment of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II (1942). 

We need to continue confronting and discussing these histories so we can learn from them, grow from them, and get better from them—use them as ways to fill the world with more kindness today. 

Today! 

Today? 

Today! 

Today our country keeps changing. 

Every day around 1000 Canadians die, 1000 Canadians are born, and 1000 Canadians arrive. 

Every day! 

Every day around 1000 Canadians die, 1000 Canadians are born, and 1000 Canadians arrive. 

We’re up 1000 people a day! 

We are a dynamic and ever-changing tribe. 

There are now, as of today, 41,528,680 of us including Indian, Dutch, Chinese, Ethiopian, Pakistani, Somalian, Japanese, Australian, Sri Lankan, Filipino, Brazilian, Estonian … and so many more … from every part of the world… 

I was in Wellington, Ontario last Spring, a beautiful small town between Toronto and Ottawa on the shores of Lake Ontario. 

My wife and I strolled through a farmer’s market of stalls in a church parking lot before my three-year-old and I organized a big game of tag with all the kids—playing on the old, dangerous playground equipment in the grassy waterfront park beside the parking lot. 

We climbed wooden bridges, swung through spiderwebs, across monkey bars, and ran up and down tube slides till our shirts stuck to our backs and our faces were dripping. 

Turns out most of the kids were children of the folks running stands in the market. 

One seven- or eight-year-old girl who played with us had slightly wiser eyes than the others. She laughed loud and ran fast and was careful to take care of her three-year-old brother the whole time. When I went back to the market I saw her sitting in a lawn chair at a booth selling homemade tabouli, hummus, and baba ghanoush. There was a lineup of people waiting to buy mixed trays. The woman working with the girl ladled my plate full of hummus and told me she is a refugee from Syria. 

And … isn’t that the story? 

How did everyone else get here? 

Come here when you are running from something or running to something. 

Run here. 

Work hard, work for your family, work for your community. Use schools, parks, hospitals like interlocked fingers helping you over the fence. Finish your teaching degree, get a diploma in machinery, work with a group to plant some trees… 

…and help the world with your contributions. 

Canada appears to be as far as you can get from the dawn of civilization. 

No stories from the Bible take place here. 

No stories from the Quran. 

No scientists have found 200,000-year-old skeletons here like they have in Africa. 

Evolutionary scientists tell us humans and our human-like Homo ancestors have lived in Africa for 3 million years … and North America for 15,000. 

Every person who is here, at some point, came here. 

Running from something. 

Running to something. 

And not that long ago. 

It was less than fifteen thousand years ago, a blink of an eye in our global history, that our ancestors walked or sailed down the Pacific Coast from freezing East Asia. 

Only a thousand years ago Vikings arrived on a boat to Newfoundland. 

Only five hundred years ago the French sailed to Quebec. 

Only three hundred years ago the British marched up from the South. 

Only fifty years ago my dad flew here from India.

Only yesterday Canadians arrived from Eritrea, Honduras, and East Timor. 

Today a quarter of Canadians were born outside of Canada. 

Today! 

A quarter! 

That’s a remarkable story about how new we still are and where we came from. 

Black Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, American slaves coming through the underground railroad, Ukrainians fleeing Stalinist famine, European Jews fleeing Nazis, Polish refugees escaping Prussian occupation, Rwandan Tutsis fleeing genocide, Tamils fleeing Sri Lankan civil war, Iraqi refugees escaping the Iraq war, Palestinians fleeing the Israeli-Arab War, Chinese refugees fleeing Communist violence, Soviet Jews fleeing religious oppression, Afghans fleeing Taliban rule, Bosnian Muslims fleeing the Yugoslavian war, Hungarians fleeing the 1956 revolution, Congolese refugees fleeing dictators, Tibetans fleeing Chinese occupations, Haitians fleeing earthquakes, Americans dodging the draft, and oh so many more… 

A Vietnamese refugee owns a convenience store near my house. She told me she’s worked there twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for twenty years. More than two full-time jobs. Raised her children right beside the Canada Dry cooler. And now, she says, with tears in her eyes, after all those years she proudly has a dozen grandchildren doing well all across Canada. 

We give people a home and let them succeed. 

We’re a bosom for the world to develop global citizens who rocket up and into the world. 

We’re a talent factory. 

A citizen producer.

We give people support, a hand, a chance … and then we let them flourish. 

My dad took his eight dollars and turned it into fifty years teaching high school, buying triplexes with his brother, and helping my cousins (his nieces) open pharmacies. Today he’s 80 and still works managing real estate properties. My mom started in the basement of The Royal York hotel on Front Street as a bookkeeper in downtown Toronto and a decade later was drafting tax laws with the Minister of Finance. Today she’s 75 and still running the books for my dad. 

We see musicians grow and leave, actors grow and leave, startups grow and leave, Quebec Nordiques grow and leave, inventors grow and leave, companies grow and leave… 

That’s part of being a developer. 

We develop for the world. 

And heaven will always have you back when you’re ready. 

We take pride in fellow Canadians—and Canadian inventions and Canadians goods—but we’re not showy. 

Do you also find we talk ourselves in the form of trivia? 

“Did you know Malcolm Gladwell, The Rock, and Rachel McAdams are Canadian?” 

“Did you know peanut butter was invented in Montreal?” 

“Did you know Jim Carrey, Catherine O’Hara, and Norm McDonald are Canadian?” 

“And John Candy and Lorne Michaels and Seth Rogan?” 

“Did you know Quebec produces more maple syrup than the rest of the world combined?” 

But these facts are just tiny blades of grass in the vast and growing field of our country.

We celebrate the celebrity … but we should really be celebrating ourselves. 

Our endlessly emerging nation. 

A young country, fresh country, maybe the world’s adolescents… 

Maybe we get painted idyllic or overly optimistic but we are just always trying and growing and staying open to ideas. 

We haven’t polluted our supply of fresh water, we don’t have corn syrups in all our food because it’s cheaper, we don’t value tomorrow less than today since we’re paying the hospital bill anyway and feel the importance of connective tissue between our moving parts. 

A wonderful place to raise a family. 

A wonderful place to find great friends. 

Forever curious, forever searching. 

Never forgetting how lucky we are. 

Never forgetting how good we have it. 

We balance being ambitious with raising families, helping each other, and building businesses. 

I met a friend years ago at a community event called TEDxToronto and he went on to lead the Toronto office of thousands of people for many years of a big Canadian technology company who helps the world find easier ways to start online businesses. 

I met a group of Torontonians who started a sauna and cold plunge space to build community and mental health. They built two in Toronto that got so popular they’re now opening more in New York and down the US east coast. 

A friend on my street dresses up like a duck all day and walks around as a street artist who makes a living from selling hats and shirts. I was visiting him on his front porch last week when he introduced me to his wife Camila who came to Canada from Brazil before the pandemic. They told me she was playing violin in São Paulo and had been considering singing opera. While listening to 96.3 FM her aunt learned the DJ was a former opera singer so she cold emailed the station and got an email back with an invitation to meet the DJ for coffee. That DJ introduced Camila to her first vocal coach and now—today!—Camila is a permanent resident, married to the duck, and singing in the Montreal opera. 

Maybe we don’t need to over-optimize for individual success because we define success more broadly—with time together, cheers at hockey games, tears at concerts, starting new ventures, and taking slow walks with friends down by the water. 

What do two Canadians do when they bump into each other? 

Say sorry. 

Though it’s a well-known Canadian trope there’s perhaps a deeper tie there to us feeling interwoven and connected. We have time and space to feel like getting by is not just a question of survival but of making things work … together. 

We are lucky to be able to feel that way, of course, where an apologetic putting-others-first reflex isn’t just possible— but the norm. 

But it is. 

May we never forget how lucky we are. 

May we never forget how good we have it. 

So… 

… 

… 

…after my dad parked the station wagon in the driveway Nina and I headed inside to hang the calendar on the yellow kitchen wall. 

It was hidden behind December for a month but soon we’d scroll through the year and fall into beautiful images that helped us feel and remember the vivid texture of our country coming to life… 

Sit back and feel 

…bright red suns slowly setting over hay bales beside highways… 

…picnic tables wobbling in front of mirrory lakes… 

…cold refreshing smells of freshly flooded ice and glass cleaners in arenas at six in the morning… 

…of wet umbrellas open on boot trays at the dentist office… 

…of not being able to explain why a Toonie is called a Toonie… 

…of dipping hot fries and quarter chicken chunks in Chalet sauce… 

…of piles of splintery hockey sticks in the corner of the garage… 

…of owning way too many ice scrapers but somehow none are in your car on the first snowstorm… 

…of walking by a group of kids playing cricket in the park after school… 

…of sitting under blankets in Muskoka chairs complimenting the person who built this campfire… 

…and of not even thinking if we can drink the water out of this tap… 

We gazed fondly into our country and dreamed of distant trips to far off places, but of course it’s only by leaving that we truly see all the things that make our home so beautiful. 

Forever curious. 

Forever searching. 

Gorgeous land, gorgeous people, bright futures, big dreams, and shared values. 

May we never forget how lucky we are. 

May we never forget … how good we have it. 

Thank you for this connection over our shared paradise. 

May we all never forget that Canada … our Canada … is truly 

AWESOME! 

Purchase a copy of the book here or download the PDF here!