“Canada began as an obstacle, blocking the way to the treasures of the East,” Frye wrote in the conclusion to 1965’s Literary History of Canada, “to be explored only in the hope of finding a passage through it.” It’s a matter of hospitability. The United States has the Atlantic seaboard, like a streetfront with many entrances; Canada has the St. Lawrence. “The traveller from Europe edges into Canada like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale,” wrote Frye. Taking in the size of the country as a whole is daunting.
Frye’s essay became famous for including a new idea: that our literary tradition emerged as an outgrowth of a “garrison mentality,” an embedded framework of anxiety about managing the landscape in every direction and a dominant U.S. to the south. It’s true that a garrison is inherently defensive. But rather than only seeing protectiveness, I have always found the notion fundamentally romantic, for what is a garrison but a marker of the farthest edge of curiosity? It’s a safe home base to anchor you while you wander even farther out to explore.
When someone tells me they’re planning to visit their cottage for the weekend, I reply in the same way, every time: “How long is the drive for you?” People tend to offer up the name of a nearby town to orient me—“It’s up near Keswick,” they’ll tell me or, “It’s a bit past Bancroft.” I understand and appreciate the civic reference point, but I ask that question because I am trying to gauge something else: commitment. How much stretching does being at your cottage require of you? How much time do you have to set aside just to arrive and settle in? How much labour do you pour into just the journey?
This math ripples out. I envision all of the family members who choose to gather at your cottage, the ones who have a longer drive, the ones who have to set aside twice as much time to make it to the cottage for one visit every summer. Or perhaps you make the biggest commitment, enduring a six- or seven-hour drive for a chance to share a carefree laugh with a person you love.
Perhaps your cottage is itself a little garrison—perhaps surrounding you is a wide, shimmering lake or a beckoning forest. Daunting, disquieting, but still beckoning. Perhaps the friend visiting for the weekend has never been this far from the city, or this close to the magisterial hush of the wilderness that surrounds you. I envision, too, all the firsts these gatherings contain. Someone’s first tube ride, first time using an outhouse, first time eating a fish right after it was caught. Someone’s first time lighting a fire, someone’s first heartbreak to heal by the water.
I am saying a few things. Sometimes, without knowing it, we are invited beyond our own boundaries, past our comfort zones. I am saying that distance is easy to take for granted, but we traverse a big country to someone else’s cottage in what can be an act of love, an act of choosing to extend ourselves as far as another person’s garrison. I am saying that sometimes without knowing it, we make each other braver.
Here is another question, the one I am avoiding: at what point does a country become too big? So diffuse that it becomes harder to spread a comforter and cover all of it, without leaving a toe hanging out, wondering if everything belongs under the same unifying structure? The fantasy of a coherent Canada is appealing, and there are days that I too would like to believe in it without complication. But we know better, you and I, don’t we?
There are at least two provinces, Alberta and Quebec, that have a credible separatist current to their politics. A great deal of the disputes at their core are related to how big the country is—whether it’s over pipelines or culture, both of these strains of separatism argue that the tent that constitutes Canada is too big, and thus contains too many contradictions of interests.
This is a tenuous line for Canada. On the one hand, the size of the country has allowed B.C.’s lumber industry and Saskatchewan’s agriculture and Alberta’s oil to join forces, all rolled into one and packaged as one of the biggest economies in the world. Our size made us into an international presence.
On the other hand, we have been co-owners of what we proudly declare as the largest undefended border in the world. It’s a claim we used to make with pride alone—that we are such good friends with our neighbours we don’t even need to defend the border. But since the annexation threats of early 2025, we have come to see another reality in this claim: it’s an admission of an impossibility—the border is far too big, and we don’t have the resources to defend all of it. Here, our size is the very source of our vulnerability. Just because we keep choosing each other despite our size, doesn’t mean that choice will always keep us safe—it doesn’t even mean it will always keep us together.
We should not let the past off the hook so easily. If Canada has built an identity out of surviving an “unsurvivable” vast landscape, this illusion depends on erasing Indigenous Peoples who have not only survived but thrived here for thousands of years before the establishment of Canada. To give ourselves over to the survival mythology is lazy work. Settlers learned how to survive here from the first people to inhabit this place.
What the country has done, though, is pull together stubbornly independent nodes and cajole them into one coherent thing. We are a country built on wrangling identities under one tent, insisting there’s room for more, always.
I can understand all the ways it is easy to take that for granted, too, but I do not—I am a product of that wrangling. I was born in Khartoum, Sudan, and I moved to Canada when I was 12. I didn’t speak English. I barely understood why my family left home. It felt impossible to belong anywhere other than the place of my birth and the place of my (roughly) 3,142 boisterous cousins.
And yet.
What no one tells you is that in order for Canada to work at all, it needs to be big in more ways than one. Big in size, yes, but more importantly, big in scope and big in ambition and big in the expansive and elastic ways that can contain so many people who come with every kind of national baggage. It’s a philosophical kind of bigness, tender and full of softness. A country can be big. A country can also be too big. Can a country be big-hearted?
In this, too, there are choices—to accommodate, to make room, to join forces, to embolden, and to hold. “They were holding their arms outstretched in love towards the further shore,” wrote Virgil. It’s a big country. All you have to do is stretch.