There is a moment in every country's story when it stops apologising for itself and starts remembering what it actually is. Canada is having that moment right now. And it is magnificent.
For decades, Canada played the role of the polite neighbour. The one who held the door, split the bill, and never made a fuss. It was a role the country wore with genuine grace — but also, perhaps, with a little too much comfort. Then, in the winter of 2025, the neighbour said something that changed everything. He said Canada should become the 51st state. He called the Prime Minister a governor. He put a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods and dared the country to blink.
Canada did not blink. Canada raised its elbows. And in doing so, it remembered something it had quietly known all along: that it is one of the most extraordinary countries on earth, and that its best days are not behind it. They are right now.
This is not a political article. It is a love letter. To the country that gave the world insulin, basketball, the telephone, the Canadarm, peanut butter, the zipper, and — as of December 2025 — a photonic computer that beat a quantum machine at room temperature using five off-the-shelf telecom components. This is a Best Days Ever for a whole country. And it is long overdue.
Elbows Up, Canada
"Enough is enough. Why do we have to make you great again at our expense?"
— Marnie McBean, Olympic gold medallist
"Elbows up" is a hockey term. It means you are not backing down. You are in the corner, you have the puck, and you are not giving it up without a fight. In the winter of 2025, it became the rallying cry of a nation. And the numbers tell the story with remarkable clarity.
A Country That Means It
More than half of Canadians said they tried not to buy from US-based retailers or websites. The Bank of Canada — the central bank — began formally tracking purchases of American goods in its flagship consumer survey. The US wine industry described the situation as being "crushed." Industry experts noted that the trade war had created a "fiercely pro-Canadian" buy-local movement that stigmatised American brands in a way that had never been seen before.
"The biggest surprise," said Steve Mossop, Executive Vice President at Leger, "is how adamant Canadians are about not supporting the USA in any shape or fashion." Most Canadians said they would continue to avoid American goods and services for the next six months. The movement showed no signs of dissipating. It was becoming, in the most organic way possible, a new national identity.
"Canada Is Moving From Reliance to Resilience"
On March 12, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Yellowknife and announced one of the most ambitious infrastructure and defence plans in Canadian history. More than $40 billion. More than $35 billion in federal investments. All directed at a single purpose: to defend, build, and transform Canada's Northern and Arctic region.
The plan includes $32 billion at Forward Operating Locations across the Arctic, two new Northern Operational Support Hubs, $294 million in Arctic airport upgrades, an 800-kilometre highway connecting Yellowknife to Inuvik through the Mackenzie Valley, and Canada's first overland connection to a deepwater port on the Arctic Ocean. And then — in a move that would have seemed unthinkable five years ago — Canada announced it was taking its sovereignty push to space. A $182.6 million investment over three years to establish a sovereign space launch program, cutting dependence on American satellite networks.
"After decades of limited and piecemeal investments in the North, Canada's new government is acting with a scale of ambition worthy of this vast region and its peoples. We are securing every corner of this terrain, unlocking its vast resources, and delivering the strong, connected network of communities that Northerners deserve."
— The Rt. Hon. Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, Yellowknife, March 12, 2026
"We will no longer depend on any one nation," Carney said. "And instead build a stronger, more independent country." It was the kind of language that Canadians had not heard from their government in a long time. It was the language of a country that had remembered who it was.
The Icefields Parkway, Alberta — 232 kilometres of the most spectacular road on earth.
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The Country That Just Beat a Quantum Computer — At Room Temperature
In December 2025, a paper appeared in Nature — one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world — that described something remarkable. Researchers at Queen's University and McGill University in Canada had built a photonic computer using five off-the-shelf telecom components. It ran at room temperature. It consumed a fraction of the power of a quantum machine. And it beat D-Wave's quantum computer on a class of optimisation problems called number partitioning.
To understand why this matters, you need to know what D-Wave requires to operate. The Advantage2 system — D-Wave's flagship machine, built in Burnaby, British Columbia — must be cooled to 15 millikelvin. That is colder than interstellar space. It takes 48 hours to reach operating temperature. It consumes between 12 and 25 kilowatts of continuous power. It is, in every sense, a feat of extraordinary engineering.
The Canadian photonic machine — the Cascade Modulating Ising Machine, or CMIM — runs on a lab bench. It uses light instead of superconducting qubits. It operates at 200 billion calculations per second. And on the problems it was tested against, it achieved a 100 per cent success rate where D-Wave began to fail beyond 32 variables. A startup called Milkshake Technology Inc., based in Kingston, Ontario, is already working to commercialise it.
Top: Photonic Ising machine — light-based computing at room temperature. Bottom: D-Wave's quantum computing facility, Burnaby, BC.
D-Wave is not the only Canadian quantum story. Xanadu, based in Toronto, is collaborating with TELUS on quantum data centre infrastructure. Photonic Inc. in Vancouver has published breakthrough quantum error-correction codes requiring 20 times fewer physical qubits than existing approaches. The Canadian government has committed $1.7 billion over 12 years to attract and support more than 1,000 leading international researchers. And the FABrIC Challenge has deployed $35.6 million CAD into photonics and quantum semiconductor development.
Canada is not a country that stumbled into quantum computing. It has been building this ecosystem for two decades. D-Wave built the world's first commercial quantum computer. Queen's and McGill just built the machine that may one day replace it. Both are Canadian. Both are extraordinary. And both are just getting started.
The Most Beautiful Country on Earth. It Just Is.
Let us set aside the politics and the technology for a moment and talk about the thing that no other country can replicate: the land itself. Canada is the second-largest country on earth by total area. It contains more lakes than the rest of the world combined. It has five of the most spectacular national parks on the planet — Banff, Jasper, Kootenay, Yoho, and Glacier — all within a day's drive of each other in the Canadian Rockies.
The Icefields Parkway runs 232 kilometres through the heart of the Rockies between Banff and Jasper. It passes glaciers, turquoise lakes, waterfalls, and mountain peaks that have no business being as beautiful as they are. It is, without qualification, one of the greatest drives on earth. We gave it its own issue — Issue No. 10 — and we stand by every word.
Vancouver Island has old-growth forests that predate the European settlement of North America. The Sunshine Coast has fjords that would make a Norwegian weep. The Arctic — the vast, extraordinary, largely untouched Arctic — covers nearly 40 per cent of the country's landmass and is now, under Carney's plan, being connected to the rest of Canada for the first time in history. The Mackenzie Valley Highway alone will open up a region the size of Western Europe.
Left: Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta. Right: Canadians rally in support of national sovereignty, 2026.
Canada's Best Days Ever — The Map
Every location featured in this issue. Click any pin to explore.
The Politeness That Turned Fierce
There is a particular kind of Canadian politeness that the world has always found charming and slightly baffling. It is the politeness of a country that genuinely believes in being decent to people. It is not weakness. It never was. It is the politeness of a country that knows it does not need to shout to be heard. But when it does raise its voice — when it raises its elbows — the world pays attention.
The Canada of 2026 is a country that is proud of its healthcare system, its multiculturalism, its Indigenous history and its ongoing work toward reconciliation, its hockey, its poutine, its Nanaimo bars, its coffee culture, its craft beer, its music — from Joni Mitchell to Drake, from Leonard Cohen to The Weeknd. It is a country that gave the world Jim Carrey, Ryan Reynolds, Celine Dion, and Neil Young. It is a country that, in March 2026, is hosting the FIFA World Cup in Vancouver and Toronto, and watching its national team compete on the world stage with a ferocity that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.
And it is a country that, right now, is buying its own wine, drinking its own whisky, skiing its own mountains, and telling the loudest neighbour in the world — with great politeness, and elbows firmly up — that it is doing just fine on its own, thank you very much.
Things Canada Gave the World
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Canada — Best Days Ever
Gerald's Note
I have been writing about best days for a long time now. I have written about mountain bikes in Whistler and espresso in Portimão and the view from the Louvre at closing time and the way the light hits the Amalfi Coast on a Tuesday morning in October. I have written about people who have had extraordinary days and places that make ordinary days feel extraordinary.
But I have never written about a whole country having its best day. Until now. Because Canada — my Canada, the one I grew up in, the one I have driven across and hiked through and eaten my way around — is having a moment that I do not think it has had in my lifetime. It is a moment of clarity. Of pride that is not arrogance. Of strength that is not aggression. Of a country that looked at itself in the mirror and said: actually, we are pretty remarkable. And we are just getting started.
The photonic computer is real. The $40 billion Arctic plan is real. The Buy Canadian movement is real. The elbows are up. The maple leaf is flying. And from where I am standing — on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, with a cup of coffee that is better than anything I have had in California — Canada is having its Best Days Ever.
Best Day Ever. — Gerald