“Enjoy how your body feels!” dance teacher Kristina Alleyne shouts over the music. The rehearsal hall is lined with standing fans, swiveling hot air. It’s a warm summer day in Toronto, but the dancers aren’t holding back, leapfrogging through the air and improvising to the Alleyne’s rapid counts of six. The morning training session is part of TO Love-In’s summer program. A not-for-profit, volunteer-driven organization based in Toronto, Love-In is dedicated to providing supportive spaces and alternative training to professional dancers.

Amanda Acorn and her friend Eroca Nicols launched TO Love-In in 2009 in response to what they saw as a gap between the technical training required to thrive in the dance world and dancers’ ability to let their own creativity and practice flourish. “After you graduate from a dance program, you look around and think, ‘What do I do now?’” says Kate Nankervis, a contemporary dancer and one of the TO Love-In’s current lovers, as they’re dubbed. “We’re all training in this one particular way.”

In addition to summer programming, the group also puts on a performance series where local, national, and international teachers provide training for local dancers. While the Love-In primarily works within the professional dance community, their workshops are open to anyone. “We work in arts and we make things that are reflective of the world we live in,” says Nankervis. “If there’s no room to have your own voice, your own thoughts, your own body, then how are we going to continue to evolve? We can train forever, but what’s the point if we can’t apply it to making something and sharing it?”

Between us, that tune you love more than your life,
like honey is a thing said without need for panacea

Though I’d haven’t a few months
ago agreed, the other day okay’d it:
I’d have to dream to bring you back, heralding
midnight, the perfect crucible, your skull
like a harness for your purple prostate
though I could just as well go before you

My mind bell-off the passing sails
on a tumbling forest, gifting me
this silence or you, another way—
the sea. I have failed
you already, dear father
Ain’t I feared enough
your partial tongue,
too skilled at pirate & poison.

How I miss the days you’d answer
everything with a sigh

Post Ashes, Station II

If I had know, I would never have no children
Si mwèn té sav, ma té ka’i jenmen fè pyès yish

The chants in your regrets
mimic a wood-sound &
better in Latin: si cognovistis me, ut non habuerit prolem,
all my children, yet you have never been priest apart
from the bell you rung every Sunday
for three sharp decades of your life
while your last daughter’s heart
in the second pew soared like bird in chest

Do I balance the score if I tell you that
For a man with many offspring, you will know before your end
There’ll still be too few signs of you left
to keep a pulse, to survive—
to bury in the garden
to grow

If Veronica Simmonds were writing a how-to guide for unparalleled elation, it might go a little something like this: follow your curiosities, meet all kinds of people, do the research, piece it all together and go live on-air—without knowing if anybody is listening. A sound-loving radio artist from Toronto, Simmonds has produced radio documentaries for ABC, BBC, and CBC. For her, radio is much more than call and response—it’s an open invitation, a feedback loop, a respite. “Most of my projects,” she says, “are all about encouraging people to go a little slower and listen to each other.”

As the creator and host of Braidio, Simmonds also braids hair on air. From 2012–2015 it graced the airwaves of CKDU in Halifax and can now be found as a podcast online. Braidio is more than just a good pun: Simmonds braids hair behind her subjects, allowing them to feel like they’re speaking to themselves, a sort of on-air Freudian therapy. Simmonds has braided artists, musicians, journalists, and scientists, but Braidio is open to anyone who is willing to open up about their work, their childhood memories, their feelings about hair, and everything in between.

Simmonds’ love of the sonic isn’t bound to traditional radio. She characterizes her work as hugging the line between journalism and art. Take, for example, Body of Water, a co-created ode to urban lake swimming. The “immersive parallax web experience” pairs Simmonds’ recordings of ethereal subaqueous sounds with dreamy underwater photos, short videos, and interviews about people’s swimming experiences. One desert-dwelling listener told her it felt like he was swimming. “That’s the gold star,” she says,” being able to take people to a place they haven’t been before.”

Simmonds likens herself to a sonic sorceress. There’s power, she says, in not knowing what you’re going to get on the radio. “I love to be on the other end,” she adds, “being the weird serendipitous magician that can give you something you weren’t expecting.

A scene from Just BGraphic’s Summer Arts Academy 2016. Photo courtesy of Just BGraphic

Past the gymnasium and down a stairwell, a standard classroom scene unfolds in Toronto’s Downsview Secondary School. Students file in, arrange themselves around tables, chat as their instructor, Josh Watkis, asks for order. Watkis, a spoken word artist, has scrawled “my childhood tastes like” on the blackboard. “What’s the top rule?” he asks, over the gradually receding babble. “Respect each other, respect yourselves.” (The second rule is “no Iggy Azalea.”) The kids are here, in July, as part of not-for-profit Just BGraphic’s (JBG) summer academy. Watkis demonstrates the exercise. “My childhood tastes like limelight. My childhood taste like divorce. My childhood tastes like bad grades. My childhood tastes like homicide,” he says, adding, “The idea isn’t to write something you can taste. The idea is to match it to something you can’t.”

Launched in 2010 by Kayode Brown, JBG began as an after school program to provide accessible, constructive activities during “at-risk” hours—that unstructured and often unsupervised window after school and into the evening. In its first year, about 60 kids attended JBG programs, a number that climbed to 850 students last year. Now, Brown’s out to do more than offer a safe space for students—he wants to boldly revolutionize arts education in schools and their surrounding communities. “Art plays a crucial role in society, period,” he says. “The power of imagination—the power of seeing something that’s not there and building that—that is what we’re built on.”

During the school year, JBG runs curricula for high school-aged students. Workshops are collaborative and bring together teachers, JBG expertise, and contemporary artists who resonate with their students, including Ivan Evidente, a director at Universal Music Canada, as well as activist and author Sister Souljah. The idea is to make artistic aspirations tangible, a way to shape pop culture into an animating opportunity. Brown says the students are often enthralled with such guests. “I’m talking the room is dead silent. You can hear a pin drop,” Brown beams. When it’s time for Q and A, the hands fly up. “To see that energy—it’s something that’s remarkable.”

Performance builds confidence. Mentorship breeds possibility. Technical skills, like those earned in an upcoming podcasting program about “your ideal school” are transferable. Brown should know. Art runs in his family. Brown’s brother is Luther Brown, dancer and choreographer of So You Think You Can Dance Canada fame. His father, a principal, has been a deejay for years—a way to preserve his Jamaican culture after immigrating to Canada at a time when there weren’t any reggae programs on the radio. Brown himself has a background in marketing and owned his own company. Yet, when he started to lose his sight in 2010, he moved away from marketing and started JBG. In 2014, a year after he had two eye surgeries and lost sight completely in his left eye, he closed the marketing company to focus all his energy on promoting arts education.

JBG programs weave discussions of mental health and identity into its activities, both as theme and self care. Drama classes guide kids in unfolding notions of identity; workshops on stereotype-busting invite students to question their assumptions; literary court scene reenactments have them interrogate forgiveness. Brown believes that having space, as a young person, to deal with the idea of stigma, to deal with notions of self through creation and expression is a holistic approach that works. Plus, he adds, “What good is health and fitness if your brain can’t process imagination?”

Brown now wants to expand collaborations and bridge institutions. While the program is highly localized and the spirit community-based, the Toronto District School Board and JBG are in talks for a centralized programming initiative, which means Brown will be able to bring his brand of inclusive arts programming to students across the city. “We are not conformed to any one type of learner, one genre of music or culture or art,” says Brown “We are as diverse as art can be. One three-letter word represents so much.”

Alexandra Shimo, left, and Lia Grimanis. Photo courtesy of Lia Grimanis

Uncommon rain and no wind in April 2014 in the mountains of Pokhara, Nepal, nearly halted Lia Grimanis’ elaborate wedding proposal to award-winning author, Alexandra Shimo. After planning the para-hawking proposal (a combination of paragliding and falconry) for three-and-a-half years, Grimanis couldn’t back out now. She took advantage of a short clearing in the weather and plunged off a mountain with Shimo. But the falcon tore off the paper message meant for Shimo tied to its ankle reading: “Say yes.” Then the walkie-talkie malfunctioned.

“I just started screaming to Alex, ‘We’ve been together over three years….’ And Alex yelled, ‘What?’” Grimanis laughs. “Luckily, she understood ‘Will you marry me?’”

The extreme gesture is typical of Grimanis, who holds two Guinness World Records for being the first woman to pull a tractor-trailer 100 feet in high heels. Grimanis uses these feats to remind female survivors of violence, homelessness, and poverty that they are stronger than they think.

As a teenager, Grimanis fled a violent home, lost her virginity to rape, and dropped out of high school. Driven by a promise she made on a shelter bed to give back to other women in need, Grimanis has clawed her way out of homelessness and, for the last 25 years, has helped other women do the same. “Nobody ever came back to help me and said, ‘Look at me, I’m a doctor, lawyer, astrophysicist after being homeless.’ I needed to be that story,” says Grimanis.

She landed a corporate IT sales jobs she was under-qualified for by being the most enthusiastic, well-researched candidate. By 2006, she had saved enough to invest $50,000 to found Up With Women, an organization dedicated to providing formerly homeless and at-risk women and children with strategic leadership, career, and business development services, and mentoring for youth. Shortly after meeting Shimo in 2011, Grimanis left the corporate world to focus on Up With Women.

Both women work at reframing their negative experiences and are fiercely committed to social justice. Shimo, who is of Caucasian and Japanese descent, lived with her mother in a run-down home in North London with no immediate family nearby, no heat, phone, or hot water. The house was eventually condemned, and they moved into social housing with her mother’s emotionally manipulative boyfriend.

“Each night, [my mother] came home from whatever job she had and cried,” Shimo recalls. “Sometimes we would pack up our suitcases and get ready to leave. Then we would unpack again; my mother didn’t want to move into a homeless shelter. I think that those experiences of feeling helpless and trapped by poverty have undoubtedly shaped me and all that I do.”

Shimo sits on the advisory board of Up With Women and volunteers with First Nations youth organizations. Her latest book, part memoir and part history, is called Invisible North: The Search for Answers on a Troubled Reserve. It is inspired by the injustice and hope experienced by those on the Kashechewan First Nation, and is slated for publication this fall.

As for Grimanis, she’s preparing for her third and final Guinness Book of World Record as the first woman to pull a jet plane. She’ll attempt the feat on May 14, 2017—Mother’s Day—as a testimony to mothers’ resilience.

“It’s hard enough being in a shelter as a single person feeling broken and like there is something wrong with you, but these mothers feel incredibly guilty,” says Grimanis, noting that many mothers unfairly blame themselves for having their children in a shelter, when often they’ve fled home to keep their children safe. She and Shimo just had their first child, and, fittingly, their anonymous sperm donor wrote on his intake form that homelessness is the thing that bothers him the most.

It’s the same feeling of anger and frustration that drives Grimanis to help other women with lived experience of poverty. “You can be incredibly traumatized from what happens to you, or you can use that pain, anger, and memory of loneliness and make it your fuel,” she says. “This is what will drive you harder than anything else and bring you the opportunity to change other’s lives as well.”

Everything else is Weather, torn flesh,
“Reality.” I am a mountain, and by I
I mean the shoreline, the sea-bed, the
cup that cradles the injured storm.

How can she wear those pants? Here,
let me tell you: being happy only once
in a while. Her summer being past &
future miseries you’re normal not to know.

Rafting between ATMs, you come to
love the raft. Holding on to your pud, you
yearn for a wood-paneled MacBook Pro
to hold your porn. I want to hold you

while you’re hating, but you won’t think it
proper in the fight for more things.
Now, if you crane up, the power lines shoot
through the trees, & the leaves, the

branches, they let them

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

I want a future Canada where words matter. Where stories are honoured and storytellers are valued. I want a Canada where diversity and equity are more than catch phrases. Words matter in future Canada. Words matter because they are the fabric that wove together Peace and Friendship Treaties. In future Canada we consult with one another; we respect difference without trying to erase it.

We respect the lands here in future Canada. We learn from the Original Peoples how to care for waters and respect lands. We acknowledge the names of the traditional territories we live on. If we are settler colonials we have learned about violences we inherited. And when stories are told in future Canada we listen to the storytellers. We sit at their feet and learn.

Here, in future Canada, we celebrate the multiplicity and richness of Black cultures and communities without forgetting that Canada was built by enslaved peoples.

In future Canada, if you are a displaced person or a refugee, we welcome you without asking you to foot your own bill. We work with you to access the health care, support, education, and public transit you need to start to settle into life here. Your neighbours bring you food, help you acclimatize to the seasons.

Future Canada is queer, by the way. Future Canada is bi-. Future Canada is transgender. Future Canada loves a rainbow, and it loves diversity of sexualities and identities more. Future Canada loves multiplicities and future Canada is made up of an army of lovers.

Here in future Canada we dance.

In future Canada mentorship is generous and respectful and doesn’t come with the risk of abuse. And guess what? In future Canada rape chants and racism don’t happen on college and university campuses with the dependable regularity of new notebooks being purchased for fall semester. In future Canada we just get the new notebooks.

In future Canada we believe survivors, but we don’t have any more victims, because in future Canada respect is real and consent is the bedrock of interaction. I’ll say it again: in future Canada we believe survivors. Always, we believe survivors.

In future Canada Tanya Tagaq is one of our most respected artists. El Jones is our poet laureate and we sit down and listen when she recites. In future Canada poetry changes minds and hearts. And the poets? They get paid, because in future Canada funding for the arts is at an all-time high.

Illustration by Matthew Daley

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

Almost 50 years ago, in 1970, my friend Stephen Clarkson asked 50 people to guess what things would be like in 50 years and published them under the clever title Visions 2020. I made the cut then and—who’d have guessed—have made it again. I predicted that the world would still be run by multinational corporations and, I must say, was remarkably prescient.

I could try to say the same thing. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll stand my prediction on its head and imagine what I hope will happen: what must happen if we are to survive in our age of catastrophes, of global warming, droughts, wildfires, rising sea levels, species extinction, pandemics, terrorism and wars on terror, cyber wars, and new horrors not yet named.

As for the monster corporation, it must wither away to create the room for the smaller institutions of community. Corporate rights, as embedded in trade agreements, must yield to human rights. Corporate globalization must give way to communities that are in solidarity, fundamentally egalitarian.

After the great wave of economic globalization prior to World War I, Karl Polanyi described how the economy, separated from the society in which it had long been embedded, had taken on a life of its own. From that utopian project came the Great Depression of the 1930s and fascism in Germany. But, in a great victory of democracy over capitalism, there had also come, as counter-movement, the American New Deal, albeit with many flaws, and its modest Canadian equivalent.

Learning nothing from history, globalization in the raw was born again. The separation of finance from society and democratic control led to the 2008 global financial crisis. The state saved the whole system but resisted attempts at reform.

Meanwhile, the world worsened. This time globalization had yanked nature, ecology itself, from society; the disasters that resulted from that were made manifest. The good news is that again movement has led to counter-movement. Tellingly, deep analysis has been accompanied by political action, Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein being leading examples.

In my distant days on the editorial board of This Magazine, I wrote the Innis Memorial Column named for the great Canadian economic historian and student of civilizations, Harold Innis. Innis was much concerned with the conditions essential for creativity and stability, which he saw as a proper balance of space and time, of matters spatial and matters temporal. Globalization, gathering force in his lifetime, meant control of space, of the global economy.

Innis made “a plea for time,” in an essay of that title in 1950. Though agnostic, he appealed to Holy Writ: “Without vision the people perish.” This agnostic would insist on the plural: “Without visions …” The singular smacks of utopia and, even in my lifetime, of totalitarianism of the left and the right.

This Magazine is to be thanked for anticipating this point, for inviting 50 “visions.” To survive for 50 years is a considerable achievement. We are entitled to celebrate. To do another 50 is itself a vision and a hope, a project well worth the effort. Call this my Innis Memorial Column redux, my own abbreviated plea for time. Time for history as collective memory. Time for dialogue, not debate. Time to reflect, not react. Time to heed and to help. Time to care and share. Time to contemplate and meditate. Time to create the good. Time to heal and not hurt. Time to spare.

And lest I forget: time to renew your subscription to This Magazine. Ask for the special 50-year rate.

The question I ask is who has written, decided, and preserved the prevailing Canadian narrative? Considering the colonial and predominantly white, english, and male control of the Canadian ideal, the national myth is essentially homogenous. However, this homogeneity is hidden behind a strategically woven story, a deceptive narrative neatly integrated into civil structures, institutions and government processes ­ described, listed and lived within the supposed ideals of multiculturalism, plurality and benevolence.

What would be an effective way to rupture this homogeneity? To interrupt the dominant story, and influence the Canadian narrative in a radical and truly disruptive fashion? How can we reveal potential and possibility in Canada and its future without breaking down the barriers that exist within the psychic and physical infrastructure of the nation?

I was paralyzed by these questions when confronted with the task of articulating my vision for Canada over the next 150 years. I felt trapped… as I often do, when considering my place within Canadian national identity and the institutions that govern its natural and cultural systems. It is easy to become apathetic and lost in a situation dominated by a voice that is ignorant to its own prerogative and far removed from personal experience.

I can’t continue to blindly play along, and circle back into the dominant structure of the national narrative. I want to break out of that cycle. As a self identified queer, feminist, white, English, cisgender female, eighth-generation Canadian, I don’t want to continue taking up space. I want others to speak, to vision, to imagine and create a new fantasy we can stumble about in together. Of course I have a voice too, (in this case and in many other opportunities I have been presented,) and my voice is enabled, by its varied privileges, to step aside. To open the dialogue and advocate for a discourse that is created between multiple voices of varied backgrounds and situated circumstances.

Where will Canada be, what should Canada do and how should we proceed should be answered through discourse powered by the voices of the people who currently live in and around the borderlands of the dominant narrative. Search for Canada, the imagined reality, the through the voices of people who already live on the edge of the dominant reality. Who really one could say already live in the realm of fantasy ­ a courageous place of possibility.

Listen to the borderlands. Be present in their imaginings, their desires. Be silent, my privileged voice, and listen…

Helaina Laland:

The year is 2164. The last fifteen decades or so have been rather trying for mankind. Canadians have had an especially hard time of it, what with the beaver fever outbreak of 2081 and the 2142 U.S. invasion of Fort McMurray and ensuing Martial Law. Thankfully, that was put to an end with the development of bovine methane power. This, in addition to greatly lowering greenhouse gas emissions globally, is what has made Canada one of the most influential (wealthy) countries in the world because of its vast expanses of forest and meadow, which have been mowed down to golf course standard and now serve as pasture for billions of cattle.

In the sports world, we have recently been celebrating Quilla daughter of Mabel’s zirconium medal win in four­-armed backstroke at the 2164 Olympic Games. Corporeal enhancements have made it a good time to be in athletics, along with the fact that athletes are now the highest wage earners in the country.

Since paper was banned in 2150 in order to conserve Canada’s few remaining trees, artists have been searching for alternative forms of hard media, which some believe to be more authentic than digital art, however primitive it may seem. Most recently, the trend has been toward lino cut, a technique that has been facilitated in modern times by high-­precision, cutting laser pointers.

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about the state of things without mentioning the latest fad to sweep the nation ­ analog watches. This isn’t the first time an archaic technology has become popular among “mode­-ites”, and it almost certainly won’t be the last. So­-called fad­-augurs are predicting a return to eyeglasses might be next, but really, who knows what the future holds?

Josie Baker:

I am not proud of Canada right now. We seem to be governed by the ideology that government’s role is not to build and maintain a stable, just society, but to facilitate corporate profits and to ensure a compliant workforce ripe for exploitation. As a nation we are actively ignoring the threats posed by climate change and increasingly desperate poverty. We are actively criminalizing First Nations activists, migrants, refugees, immigrants, and environmentalists. Canada today is embodying the worst of what our history has to offer; a history of colonialism, imperialism, and genocide.

The bold vision I would suggest for the future of Canada is to work to truly embody a Canadian ideal – that of democracy. A truly democratic system could nourish vibrant, resilient, communities across Canada. To be truly democratic, we need to fundamentally change the power balance of our society.

We need to reshape our economy–eliminating poverty has been within our power as a country for a long time, but it has not been considered profitable. The economic system that we have creates and profits from poverty. It creates and profits from environmental destruction. Poverty and extreme wealth are not acceptable and demand a price that we cannot afford. No one should have to choose between paying for medicine or buying food. No one needs to stay with their abuser because they can’t afford to leave with their children. No one should work full time and still have to rely on food banks.

We need to take steps to build resilience and abundance in our communities. We need to empower and enable communities to put their human creativity and ingenuity to work to face our common problems. To truly fulfill our democratic ideals, to work towards social and environmental justice, we need to build relationships of trust and collaboration with those on the margins. The voices of a few have dominated for too long. We cannot afford to continue to marginalize people – we need the voices and perspectives of everyone to meet our common problems. The change needs to come through community –we need to do the hard work of recognizing the wounds that we have inherited from our history and build alternatives that don’t repeat the mistakes of our ancestors. Inclusion takes a lot of work, and it is challenging, but in the process we learn about ourselves, about our assumptions, and we build relationships and we build trust. To create a democratic Canada, we need to face the wounds of our history, and we need to recognize the blindspots in our world view. As a nation, we must work towards our common survival and we need a vast spectrum of human creativity and wisdom to succeed.

Merray Gerges: 

Hi Becka,

After I messaged you last, I went back through previous bits of research and transcribed conversations and it became clear to me that I must use this opportunity to give space for someone who’s considerably more frustrated than I am. I spoke with Pamela Edmonds, a Toronto-­based curator of colour, a few months ago for a piece about tokenism in the Canadian art world that I was working on. I selected a few quotes from our conversation that I feel respond to the question at hand far more eloquently than I ever could. Feel free to pick and choose according to your needs. I’ve also attached the resulting piece for context:

“I strived to bring art that connected to different ethnic and cultural communities. I felt somewhat tokenized, and I still do even now, 15 or so years later. But that’s just the place that we’re at. We’re still not there. I learned that you take three steps forward and then there’s two back. But at least you got one ahead. That’s the price that you pay to be within the mainstream. I always try to be somewhat subversive within the programming that I do.

“You can’t just pick and choose and have everyone in this equal place because that’s not how it is in reality. You have to recognize that there’s discrimination that’s not being recognized. It’s sort of disingenuous. People don’t really believe it. I don’t think they really believe the exoticisation of cultures. On multicultural day, you sample the food. It’s not an understanding of that culture in terms of their contributions. It’s a nice idea. I wouldn’t want to give it up. But it has to be a critical multiculturalism somehow.

“It’s important to reach diverse communities but vital to reach the art world too to say, ‘I’m sorry but you’re gonna have to give up some of your power.’ People have to be ready for that dialogue at some point. It’s gotta happen. Recognition of that oppression is not easy to deal with. But I think it will happen because people will change over the generations. Might not be in my lifetime. That foothold of the white middle class male? It can’t keep up. It’s too multicultural of a world for that to stay. I don’t see it staying that way. We have to look at what art is in a different way, because the west­-centric art idea has changed. I don’t want to be in response to you, or intervening anymore. I just wanna go in and do stuff. Why do you have to reinterpret European art? Just forget about it. It’s tired. I don’t wanna respond to that anymore. I just wanna go about my business.”

Talk soon,

M

Diana Hosseini:

The Canada of tomorrow, the one that perhaps my great grand­children will grow up in, will be a place where they will never feel culturally alienated. No one should ever feel ‘other’ and thus strive to strip away and reject their home culture(s). I do not think that our society fully understands the potential social and psychological damage of today’s form of assimilation nor the fact that it even exists. We may not be in a situation where assimilation is forced and the process at hand is different than that of the shameful part of our history. However, it peaks its ugly head when people introduce themselves with alternate names or when a mother tongue is lost from one generation to the next. A name may seem like a very simple thing however they are our very first markers of identity. When a person provides a different name or a different pronunciation of a name, they sense that this is a requirement in our society, which means that their true self is excluded. Step by step, there are changes in the self, some of which are unfortunately irreversible or take years to heal. In terms of the mother tongue, it is a loss of knowledge and a sort of break in communication between parent and child. Remember that a translation may always have deficiencies.

There needs to be a superior level of understanding amongst us. At the end of the day, besides the Native population, we are all immigrants. Some of us can trace our Canadian lineage far back while some of us have just begun creating one. Being Canadian may mean something different for each of us but we are all here because our parents, our ancestors or we sought something better. Let us not be ignorant of differing languages, foods and perspectives on life. Instead, we should embrace the greatest privilege that we have and that is to be able to live amongst a multitude of cultures. We should be aware and respectful of our differences, it is by doing so that no one is excluded or feels ‘other’. In the Canada of tomorrow, I would hope that we have finally reached a stage where we can without hesitation claim to be a true model of multiculturalism.

Mireille Eagan:

“Under the eye of God, near the giant river,
The Canadian grows hoping.
He was born of a proud race,
Blessed was his birthplace.
The sky has noted his career
In this new world.”
–Translation of the original version of “Ô Canada” (1880)

It is said that Walt Disney is cryogenically frozen at the point just before death, under the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at the theme park that bears his name. When science is willing, Disney will be revived. The story may be a rumour, but it is far more interesting to imagine that it’s true. It speaks to the quality of our time – a result of 150 years of fluctuations between the apocalyptic and the romantic.

In Canada, for instance, a robust optimism informed the late­1800s to mid­1900s. It was predicted that Canada, with its harsh climates and vast natural resources, would forge a hardy people, a “True North, Strong and Free.” An indicator of the time is found in its art, in the celebration of (some of) Canada’s rugged landscapes. The whole thing was a myth, of course, intended to provoke a national identity. The next 50 years would assert the errors found in this approach, that just beyond the frame of the painted solitary trees were people ­ among them First Nations, immigrants, and women.

It is the nature of progress that we respond to what came before. Future people will, therefore, find us misguided, confined by the ideologies of our time. It is humbling to consider that all our current predictions, fear stories, and saccharine antidotes may be charming relics.

If all goes well in terms of science and rumour, Walt Disney will be our ambassador to the future. A product of his time in many ways, he adapted old stories and fairytales to eliminate the macabre, and invoked happy endings where they may not have been before. As Disney hobbles around the future in his freezer-­burnt body and antiquated moustache, I hope that he will realize that he has become what he gave us, what we want—a reminder. In his words: “People look at you and me to see what they are supposed to be. And, if we don’t disappoint them, maybe, just maybe, they won’t disappoint us.”

The voices represented by the ­co-authors—Diana Hosseini, Helaina Lalande, Merray Gerges, Marie Fox, Josie Baker and Mireille Eagan—are a small selection of people. I acknowledge that some key demographics/communities are missing including but not limited to francophone, indigenous, senior citizens, disabilities, varied genders… this essay is an attempt to present a theory in practice, and is not claiming to be all encompassing. I actually feel that this essay’s approach is reflected in the A Bold Vision anthology’s structure and very existence.

My vision for Canada over the next 150 years requires that as a nation, we forgive ourselves for eagerly consuming a diluted sense of ourselves. Our story has been simplified to invoke happy endings for a powerful few. A homogenous wash over a complex and difficult history. But this isn’t the end, the Canadian narrative continues, and we all play a part its’ creation. Let us embrace our failures, acknowledge the complexity of a truly multi­-peopled culture, look to the silenced and listen for possibility.

To be Canadian shouldn’t be comfortable. It should be unstable, disruptive, and unrelentlessly challenged by difficult discourses that are propelled by the far reaches of accepted reality.