Conan Reis 🇨🇦

Be extreme, Canada.  That is not an ideological plea, but an appeal to a forgotten inheritance and a hope that we find it within ourselves to be extreme, again. It is a recognition that to be Canadian is to hold two opposing truths in your mind at once: Canadians are mild and moderate but Canada itself is harsh and brutal. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Canada is that test, made manifest. Canada is not gentle. It is not mild. It is not moderate. It is extreme in scale. Extreme in climate. Extreme in beauty. Extreme in wealth—of resources, of land, of possibility. It is a country that demands resilience from those who inhabit it, whether they admit it or not. And so we arrive at the paradox: a people perceived as restrained, living within a landscape that is anything but. This is not a contradiction. This is the source of Canadian genius. Because what emerges from this tension is not weakness. It is control. It is discipline. It is a quiet form of ambition that does not need to announce itself to be real. It’s breaking your leg, helping your team score 6 goals and waving to the crowds as you’re carted out on a stretcher. To be a Canadian extremist, then, is to embrace both halves fully. It is to reject the caricature of smallness while also rejecting the need for bluster. It is to understand that politeness is not passivity, and that restraint is not the absence of ambition, but often its most disciplined expression. It is to build in a way that reflects the land itself: vast in scope, resilient in structure, and uncompromising in its standards. Canada does not need to become something else to compete. It does not need to abandon its character to achieve scale. The path forward is not to resolve the contradiction, but to lean into it—to recognize that the tension between humility and enormity is precisely what makes this country capable of extraordinary things. The nations that shape history are often the ones that understand their extremes. Canada’s mistake has been to ignore its own. I am a Canadian extremist because I refuse to.