Editor’s Letter

In a 1969 address to the US National Press Club, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau famously declared: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant.” It’s an analogy that has come to define the experience of sharing the world’s longest unmilitarized border. America has been cast as a land of opportunity, as a giant not to be alarmed, and of course, as the major power that sets the agenda for this part of the world. It’s hard to imagine a day when, if the elephant rolls over, Canada wouldn’t feel the impact.

As of last March, however, the elephant has been self-isolating.

With the Us–canada border officially closed to nonessential travel as a result of the pandemic, there has been an unprecedented breach in the usual fluidity between our two countries. And, as the rest of the world watches the US battle its covid-19 outbreak — one of the worst, partly due to mismanagement at the highest levels — it’s hard to escape the sense that the country has become something of an island. Of course, all of this hasn’t happened by itself: it’s had the help of Donald Trump.

The past four years of the Trump administration have had a wearying effect on America’s neighbours and allies — from the anxious negotiation of the cusma trade deal, ratified in 2020, to the country’s official withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, which took effect this past November. The repercussions of actions like the banning of visitors from select Muslim-majority countries and the border separation of parents from their kids will be felt for years. America, you used to be the country that reflected the kind of success every nation hoped to achieve. Today, it feels like we hardly know you anymore.

As I write this, Joe Biden is the president- elect of the United States. Much has been made, throughout the lead up to the recent election, of the ideological differences between him and Trump and the implications of their respective leadership for the future of the US. (Biden has already promised, among other things, that the US will rejoin the Paris Agreement as one of his administration’s first acts.) But, regardless of the changes in the White House ahead, many of the immediate challenges Canada faces remain the same. The economic and social disruptions the pandemic has wrought over the past year mean we’re still forced to deal with lockdowns, quarantines, confusing school guidelines, job losses and interruptions, and the devastating loss of more than 10,000 lives in Canada as of this writing. The pandemic is the real superpower today.

With that in mind, in this issue of The Walrus, we are looking at how to move on.

The pandemic has demonstrated how quickly improvements can be made to Canada’s health care system when we put our minds — and resources — to them.

In this year’s O’hagan Essay on Public Affairs, “The Myth of Universal Health Care,” surgeon and educator Nadine Caron and family doctor and hospital executive Danielle Martin use their observations from inside the medical system to posit what it would take to create a truly universal health care system. Another oft- cited measure of a country’s stability is the state of its middle class. In his essay, “How to Save the Middle Class,” Max Fawcett looks at the conventional metrics used by economists and politicians, such as gdp, with a view to whether they hold up — and lays out the benefits of adapting to a new set of definitions for twenty-first century success and, dare we say it, well-being. (This article is also published as part of Living Rooms, a new series on housing and home, at thewalrus.ca/livingrooms.) And, in “The New Lobster Wars,” Zoe Heaps Tennant reports on the tensions between Mi’kmaw fishers, commercial fishers, and federal authorities in Nova Scotia — ultimately asking, How do we honour treaties that were signed in the 1700s and have never been fully implemented?

As we go into what will likely be another year full of big questions, there is still lightness to be found — some of it informed by lessons from 2020. For this double issue, we invited Canadian artists to illustrate what they’re looking forward to in 2021. The results paint a portrait of optimism, of expectations for change, and more than anything, of resilience. It is our hope that, in uncertain times, through the strength of our community and the scope of our imaginations, The Walrus can provide a bridge into the world to come.

—Jessica Johnson