Nico Williams, Bingo, Fondation PHI, 23 April — 14 September 2025

“Americans say no to drugs. Canadians say no thank you.”
—Susan Musgrave, You’re in Canada Now, Motherfucker.

I flew in July 2006 from Montreal to Victoria and drove from there in a rented Toyota about 25 kilometers south to a small municipality called Metchosin. The purpose of this trip was to interview one of the most famous incarcerated Canadians, the bank robber-turned-author Stephen Reid.

Reid at the time was a ward of the William Head Institution, known colloquially as Club Fed, a minimum-security correctional facility constructed at the lonely end of Vancouver Island’s southernmost tip.

Originally built as a 19th century immigration quarantine station, William Head might have been among the most picturesque sites for a prison, a remote and rugged stretch of oceanfront property perfumed with Douglas Fir and the saline breeze.

Reid was imprisoned, this time around, for the brazen robbery of a Victoria bank in 1999. But he had already earned a storied reputation as a member of The Stopwatch Gang, a crew of Canadian career criminals who had in the 1970s and ‘80s successfully pulled heists throughout the United States, making off with millions.

The gang earned their nickname in the newspapers because they carried stopwatches instead of guns, completing their jobs in under 90 seconds and escaping gracefully before law enforcement could respond to the 211.

What could be more Canadian than non-violent larceny? Reid told me they never failed to say ‘thank you’ to the guards as they strode out the door carrying Yankee Doodle’s hard-earned dough.

Catch Step HYA remix featuring Lunice (with EENO T and Magnanimous), La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 22 April 2025

“By walking I found out
Where I was going.”
—Irving Layton, “There Were No Signs.”

Over the past several months, and intensifying during the Federal Election campaign, Canadians of all political stripes have been engaged in some deep soul-searching to define specifically what characterizes Canada as a sovereign nation.

“Not American” is of course the most obvious answer. But we can’t simply identify ourselves by what we are not. We must, rather, assert Canadian-ness as a series of distinct and affirmative characteristics.

It may be a surprise to learn that the Scottish have a version of poutine appropriately called “chips and cheese and gravy.” The British are also known for being polite. So, what makes Canadian poutine — or politeness — any different?

African-American Sound Recordings with SlowPitchSound and Dumb Chamber, Société des arts technologiques, 27 April 2025

“A Canadian is someone who drinks Brazilian coffee from an English teacup, and munches a French pastry while sitting on his Danish furniture, having just come from an Italian movie in his German car. He picks up his Japanese pen and writes to his Member of Parliament to complain about the American takeover of the Canadian publishing business.”
—Campbell Hughes, 1973.

Canadians pride ourselves on our inclusivity and the doctrine of multiculturalism enshrined in social policy since the first Trudeau’s term in office. We congratulate ourselves with the fact that slavery was never legally practiced in Canada, that ours was and continues to be a safe-haven nation for people escaping bondage and other forms of systemic oppression.

As opposed to the American melting pot, Canada is a mosaic, a puzzle that doesn’t just scramble disparate identities into one uniform nationality but instead incorporates each of them into a rich and panoramic tapestry.

Still, just because Canada never practiced slavery doesn’t mean that racism and discrimination didn’t exist here. They did — and continue today as we strive to shake the legacy of colonialism and reconcile historical injustices perpetrated on Indigenous land.

And yet, the present condition requires evermore nuance because Canada is not only composed of colonizers and the colonized.

My ancestors, for instance, were displaced in the late 1920s when Russia was actively colonizing the Indigenous people of Ukraine. First-person accounts by the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants, collected in a book called Land of Pain, Land of Promise, are filled with stories of gratitude for Indigenous peoples’ assistance adjusting to life in Canada.

An underlying monstrosity remains, however. The American writer William S. Burroughs described this irrepressible abomination as “The Ugly Spirit.” Righteous retribution for genocidal expansion from coast to coast to coast.

The Ugly Spirit is a stateless entity, unrestrained by borders, floating northward like a ghost or a virus, the immigrant to end all immigrants. Thinly veiled beneath the respectable surface of unblemished bureaucracy, white linens and starched shirts and sunny ways, peace, order, and good governance, savagery lurks.

Oscillating Spaces launch with curator Anneke Abhelakh, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 24 April 2025

“Canadian history could be a drug-free alternative to anaesthesia.”
—Mike Myers, Canada.

One of the most frequent adjectives used to describe Canadians internationally is “nice.” Nice isn’t boring, although we are known as that, too. Nice isn’t kind, although kindness could be considered a constituent component of being nice.

What nice really means in practice is milquetoast. When threatened, we tend to back down. When attacked, we prefer to concede defeat than to offend our aggressors with a fight.

There’s nice and there’s naïve. The most extreme example of the perversion of niceness is the departed Canadian author Alice Munro’s apologetic acceptance of her daughter’s sexual abuse. Munro would rather have overlooked horrible transgressions against her kith and kin than to upset the larger family order in protest. In her own mind, was she just being nice?

Tolerance is one of Canada’s most admirable virtues. But when we tolerate violence against us, we should discard our national reputation for being nice and adopt a tough and just disposition. In significant ways, the Orange Cheeto’s 51st state rhetoric is forcing Canada to grow a backbone, to stand our ground, even if it means abandoning some of our soft-touch image.

Così fan tutte, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025

“‘Cause in the forget-yer-skates dream
You can hang your head in woe
And this diverse-as-ever scene
Know which way to go.”
—Gord Downie, “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken.”

It is appropriate that the “Elbow’s Up” rallying cry galvanizing Canadians originates from hockey, Canada’s undisputed national pastime.

There was no question which country I was in when, during the intermission at an opera, the woman seated next to me leaned over and asked if I knew the score in the Habs game. On the ice, playing arguably the most brutal organized sport, is where Canadians exchange our mannerly habits for altogether snottier, bloodier, and more dangerous conduct.

Unlike baseball, which participants can play overweight and drunk, hockey demands strength, skill, speed, guts, grit. Like revenge, hockey is best served cold. The rink is the site of inspiring Canadian victories over both doppelgänger superpowers Russia and the United States.

Interviewing Stephen Reid in jail in 2006 was like playing in the Stanley Cup final for a writer and lover of good stories. Reid was simultaneously terrifying and charismatic, cunning and cultured, a formidable conversationalist and true Canadian captain on our proverbial national team.

Goal-scoring could be considered analogous to bank-robbing in the sense of slipping one past the authorities, armed with little more than will and determination, and grace, too.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Nico Williams, Uncle, 2023, 10/0 Japanese glass cylinder beads and 11/0 seed beads on thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread, mother-of-pearl buttons, 124,5 x 73.7 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.}