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On Being Canadian: With Elbows Up, and Arms Outstretched
I am Canadian because my parents embraced the country’s values
By Elizabeth May
June 30, 2025
The core pride Canadians feel in our identity is often derived from comparison to the United States. We are proud of universal health care, even when the system is under strain. We are proud of a legacy of embracing difference and of, no doubt, an air-brushed version of our own history.
Donald Trump’s outrageous assertion that Canada should be the 51st state has brought out the best in us. We are more unified in response.
This moment gives us a chance to embrace our love of country —not defined by what we are not, but by embracing the best of what and who we are.
We are not comfortable with jingoistic bravado. I remember the late Ottawa Mayor Marion Dewar remarking how thrilled she was to see Canadian athletes on the podium, Olympic medals planted on their chests while O Canada! played. What delighted her was how few of them knew all the words.
Another national trait is self-deprecation. I first noticed this aspect of Canadian identity when I was still an American kid, before my family moved from the US.
I was watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite reporting on a White House press conference with President Lyndon Johnson and Lester B. Pearson. It was 1964, more than a year before their famous Camp David confrontation over Vietnam.
In the clip I recall so vividly, LBJ referred to Pearson as “Prime Minister Macmillan.” Rather than look offended or take umbrage, Pearson had a good laugh. It made an impression on me. I think Walter Cronkite made a comment about the graciousness of Canadian Prime Minister Pearson.
I am constantly grateful that I am Canadian. I was born in the United States of a British father and a New Yorker mom. My parents settled in Hartford Connecticut, but they never really agreed on which country attracted their fealty.
My dad disliked almost everything about the US and my mum found the UK sexist and hidebound. Still, as she became ever more of an activist than a conventional 1950s housewife, she found the politics of the US increasingly unlivable.
She had played a key role in the movement to end nuclear weapons testing, engaged in the civil rights movement and then fought the years of anguish of napalm and mangled lives protesting the war in Vietnam. She felt she did not fit in the land of her birth.
So, the notion that Canada is different — that it is more than an extension of the United States separated by an “artificial border” — isn’t an abstract one to me. It informed the event that made this country my home.
My parents discussed a move to New Zealand, where neither of them had ever been. What set in motion the impetuous move that uprooted our lives was less that my parents finally agreed on where to live than that they fell head over heels in love with Cape Breton Island.
Summer vacation 1972 made the decision for us. I was a Cape Bretoner before I was Canadian. I still find the best of what I love about Canada in my Cape Breton roots.
My daughter, Cate, and granddaughter, Lily, at Margaree Harbour beach, Cape Breton
To me, Canada is captured in the fact that my brother Geoffrey — now a fluent Gaelic speaker — and his wife host a Gaelic language radio programme on the community radio station, CKJM, run for an Acadian French audience in Cheticamp. The entrepreneurial station manager heard about government funding for community radio to be franchised internationally. So, the minority language component of Acadian radio is Gaelic and the voices of Cape Breton choirs are heard in the Scottish Highlands.
We are a country so very different from our southern neighbour, with characteristics that de Tocqueville noted hundreds of years ago. We are not an every-man-for-himself, dog-eat-dog kind of society. We embrace compassion and community. Grotesque wealth is not to be celebrated, though we are at risk of sliding in that direction.
There is a cynical notion of the “Canadian dream” that is a cartoon version of the “American dream”. It is a narrative that feels forced; that does not strike a chord for many Canadians — especially those who still miss the voice of Stuart McLean and his Dave and Morley stories as the epitome of a certain bedrock definition of Canadian values, beginning with a definition of success that has nothing to do with disposable income.
My favourite way to see Canada — from a train, with my husband, John Kidder.
I know this country now like I know myself. As a lover of train travel, I’ve criss-crossed Canada by Via Rail more times than I can count, mostly eschewing hotels for the spare rooms of friends and supporters and seeing the heart and soul of the country in its small-town backyards, inner cities, Prairie farms and gobsmacking Rockies. The Canadians I’ve met on the train, the unforgettable moments I’ve shared with people in every corner of this country — not just talking politics but talking jobs, kids, dreams, and tragedies — have given me a visceral sense of who we are.
We are a country that knows not to leave anyone behind. I think of the brave first responders and police of Fort McMurray facing that beast of a fire in 2016 who managed to keep hundreds of cars on the one highway moving south. If a car ran out of gas, it was pushed to the side and doors of other cars immediately opened to take more on board.
Meanwhile, in another climate disaster, Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 event that devastated New Orleans, hundreds of police left in advance, many of them taking their cars with them. An estimated 15% of the New Orleans police force left. And the poorest African American neighbourhoods were left to drown.
This time, there is a far greater American disaster looming and we cannot leave our American neighbours to their fate. We must be compassionate. We must be prepared to do more to save lives around the world; to end conflict with diplomacy, soft power and generosity. We cannot arm ourselves to a safer world. We need to open our doors to those in need, seeking refuge and rights.
I embrace the spirit of “Elbows Up!”, but I add “and arms outstretched.”
I am so grateful and blessed to be Canadian — as are we all. Happy Canada Day!
Policy Contributing Writer Elizabeth May is leader of the Green Party of Canada