I. Why a New Journal?
To ponder Canada is to be perplexed. It is in many ways an entity that the tides of history, geography, and economics should have consigned to oblivion long ago. While other nations, particularly those we are so fond of comparing ourselves to, can afford to take their identities and pedigrees for granted, every generation of Canadians must ask themselves why they exist, and the answers have always been strikingly varied and maddeningly contradictory.
This indeterminacy may seem like a flaw, a sign of the flimsiness at the heart of our national project, perhaps even suggesting the impossibility of Canada. And yet it has also proven to be a paradoxical source of strength, ingenuity, and purpose: an invitation to treat nationhood and patriotism as labours worthy of the highest exertions of collective will and imagination; indeed, Canada’s finest hours have been the ones in which the will converged with the imagination perfectly to meet the challenges of the time.
Canada stands again at such a juncture: nearly every facet of our national life, every pillar upon which our comfort and prosperity have rested for decades, is now unsettled, irrevocably so, for there is no hint of an easy resolution or a return to the old status quo in sight. To recognize this fact plainly may be dispiriting, especially for the rising generations.
If you have your life ahead of you but look around and feel yourself living amongst the ruins, in the wreckage of something once great, of a society and nation doomed to futility and disappearance, it is easy to despair and perhaps even seek greener pastures. But amongst the ruins, love can spring anew. To live here is to ground oneself, create families, establish roots, build friendships, establish communities, and through these intimate bonds participate in something larger than mere survival.
The uncomfortable and driftless state we find ourselves in today is real, but it should also be invigorating, most of all for the young. For it means a chance to act, to create, to renew, to venture beyond the familiar, to join hands in the making of something higher and nobler than our atomized selves will allow, to reshape institutions in our image and interests, and to be once more a nation with a claim on the future. We can begin to set our sights beyond Canada as it is and upon Canada as it could be. This is our call to greatness as Canadians, and it is to these ends of common renewal that we have decided to create this publication: the 2067 Journal.
The name is meant to beckon readers toward the country we can be by the 200th anniversary of Confederation, a destination as well as an exhortation to think in terms of a positive national enterprise and the difficult but rewarding paths needed to get there.
We wish to foster a new kind of cultural criticism, one that will be allied to action rather than navel-gazing; aimed at the pursuit of culture as a constructive binding force rather than a site for reductive culture warring and polarization; dedicated to reshaping not just the messages Canadians exchange but the very medium that structures our conversations, that is, the technological environments, inherited worldviews, and epistemic assumptions that all go woefully unexamined in our usual discourse.
As Canadians face crises in housing, our standard of living, our industrial and state capacities, it is clear that what we lack is not so much policy; our thinking classes excel at writing technocratic blueprints and there are probably enough proposals out there to solve most of our problems at a purely technical level. We are missing something more elemental: we lack the cultural resources needed simply to cohere and there is no more urgent task for us than recovering that vital ability.
We believe that one’s generational outlook is far more meaningful and consequential than one’s party or stated position on the Left–Right spectrum, and this insight will animate our work and inform the decisions we take. This is not a journal of conservative or liberal thought, and we explicitly eschew such labels. We will necessarily publish authors who do not agree with each other on policies and philosophies. We do not promise unity for its own sake but seek to stimulate new debates, new dissents, and new cleavages that will better reflect the tensions and complexities of this Canada, not the one of 1967 or 1988 or 2000. We will feature voices and perspectives in such a way as to not only diminish but invalidate what we believe are outdated (and in many cases imported) ideological categories that distort more than they clarify.
We are a journal of Canadiana. This means we will publish eclectically, on politics, philosophy, art, history, public policy, music, education, folklore, urbanism, nature writing, culture, sport, myth, and imagination. For to be sovereign is not merely to be divided by lines on a map, or to exist as a tributary to a greater power; it requires a sovereignty of consciousness where we are able to think of ourselves and understand ourselves in the world not just in relation to a neighbour, but on our own terms.
II. Certain Ideas of Canada
Caught between empires, Canadian elites have ever aspired to prove their worthiness before the great metropolitan centres, lest they look backward, unlearned, provincial. Yet the result of this cosmopolitan conceit, this drive to imitate, whether conscious or unconscious, is a conspicuous neglect and even derision toward our own still untapped intellectual wellsprings. As a result, Canadian frames of reference remain anchored in foreign philosophical soil, and the heritage of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, George Grant, Eric Havelock, Donald Creighton, Northrop Frye, Charles Taylor, Louis-Edmond Hamelin, Ursula Franklin, among others, is, to borrow a phrase from the energy sector, “kept in the ground” and tragically wasted. Our goal is to drill down into the spiritual and intellectual reservoirs buried under our feet.
Indeed, “the world needs more Canada” may be an old cliché but the underlying sentiment, particularly with respect to these Canadian prophets of technology and national selfhood, rings truer now more than ever as the flattening forces of digital homogenization threaten to overwhelm what’s left of our communal and individual humanity. The 2067 Journal will endeavour to resuscitate this national canon of thinkers and visionaries, whose uniquely Canadian ideas and insights can be our best defence against wholesale cultural erasure.
The moment calls for a new nationalism, not of bloodlines or ideologies, but of recognition and loyalty—to the land itself and the forms of life that grow from it. For just as the very act of living in Canada, of sustaining a nation here, entails a certain aptitude for risk, fortitude, resilience, and adaptability—against the harsh climate, the impossible distances, the dissonances of regions and languages, the myriad imbalances that can never be entirely resolved—so too does our claim to nationhood demand mental qualities of defiance and indomitability in the face of the ever-present temptation to simply desist and dissolve into someone else’s imperium.
Being Canadian is not something that can be passed down unthinkingly like a simple inheritance, though it is that too, but rather something that has to be refined and reforged at many turns; it is not something that can be created ex nihilo, for it has been in our character to reject abstract revolutionary resets and we are not the sum of our negations, nor is it something that can be frozen in amber or suspended in some imagined golden age of simplicity, for the law of historical change has been no less of a constant in our national story. Striking that dynamic mean between fidelity to our finest traditions and innovation in pursuit of a better future shall be one of our defining aspirations.
For too long, Canadians have been weighed down by a mindset in which inertia, mediocrity, derivativeness, and reflexive deference still reign and where genuine cultural renovation and originality are usually resented, whatever else we tell ourselves about how far we’ve evolved. We want to, in our own small way, provide a hospitable platform for the Canadian mind and spirit to dwell.