(Thomas Froese Photo)
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, June 28, 2025)
I’m out for some fresh air, in Niagara, eating breakfast in a historic house with creaky floors and vintage cameras older than I am. Beside me are Raymond and Dorothy. I learn that they’ve travelled from Maine to explore Quebec and Ottawa before arriving in Niagara Region.
Raymond’s hat has a maple leaf. Dorothy often wears a Canadian flag on her lapel. It’s us and our eggs and coffee and conversation. They ask about a nearby house with a Canadian flag and “Elbows Up!” banner out front. Yes, I took a photo, I say, before explaining the meaning.
Days prior to that, breakfast is with about 500 others at Carmen’s Event Centre, a community prayer breakfast to pray – imagine – for our community leaders and our economy and our larger societal fabric. There I’m reminded what it means to be human as much as Canadian.
Because people feel less grounded in our time of quickening change, broad strokes, not just in Canada. Prayer is another way of getting out. The demons, it seems, hate fresh air. Prayer somehow changes us inside as much as it changes things out there.
Days prior to that, my meals are in Pennsylvania at a reunion, years coming, for friends and youth who as children ran through the banana patches in East Africa while growing up there. Now, my own kids included, they’re running to career studies and freshly-minted adult lives.
We all gather near Pittsburgh in the borough of Sewickley – Mario Lemieux and Sydney Crosby live there – with one host family feeling so self-conscious that they take down their American flag, Old Glory, gone, even on Memorial Day weekend, so that my family, the only Canadians in the re-united group, won’t be offended.
Or consider this, the stranger, an American museum curator, who, upon learning we’re Canadian, hugged my wife for a long moment before apologizing for the U.S. president. Gosh.
Nearing Canada Day 2025 these are the experiences showing a glass that’s half full as much as half empty. If we keep this in mind, never a given, it will help our way forward.
Because people have a way of trumping politics. Not through power as we commonly understand power, but through the routine flow of daily unfoldings. This is life’s charm. You’re especially reminded when looking across the table at someone with butter on their chin.
Of course, these days it’s easy to get our elbows up. It’s been good political rhetoric. But it’s second-rate table manners. And even in hockey it’s a shaky way of going about things.
You may give your opponent a good bruising which, sure, can give you some terrific, if not short-lived, satisfaction. But you might get an elbowing penalty. Or a black eye in return. Or you might simply lose focus on the goal to use your smarts to get the puck in the net for your team.
Long-serving New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said as much in a recent interview with Steve Paikin on the TVO Today Live episode “Canada, the U.S., and Elbows Up Globalization.” Friedman’s advice for Canada on Trump? “Wait him out.” People aren’t made to last forever. Politicians even less so.
So about that photo of the Niagara front porch with the “Elbows Up!” banner. When I took it the owner, strangely enough, came out with his own flying elbows and belligerent expression. (Okay, I might have put a toe on his property. Even so.)
The point is that it’s also easy to fall into cultural ruts. Nobody hears their own accent. So let’s not spend more energy explaining to ourselves or the world what we’re not. (Yes, yes. “We’re not American.” Got it.)
It’s more hopeful to develop our identity with the higher aspirations of who we are, and, with any amount of luck and grace, who we will still become. This is what makes Canada so worthy. And there’s no need to apologize for it.