The Canada100million Project

@sciohn_fhanne Hi! Thank you for replying and like-wise, I appreciate you engaging with my posts. I value your perspective. As I said in a share, your content brings much-needed candor and straight talk to the conversation.

If I may gently clarify, this is indeed a piece I wrote myself, grounded in my own intimate thoughts and reflections, with AI used only to help polish flow and phrasing during the final editing stage. Yes, I'm a real person, based in Ontario. In any case, I genuinely appreciate you subscribing and engaging with my content!

Canada didn't fail by collapsing. It failed by settling. Built for stability and shaped by comfort, it mastered order but never developed the drive to become formidable. The result is a country that works, but never leads. A place where ambition leaks outward, expectations stay low, and potential remains structurally unrealized. open.substack.com/pub/sciohn/p/o…

@sciohn_fhanne I like the phrase ‘ambition leaks outward’. The book Maximum Canada that I have been posting about unpacks this problem; that most immigration comes from the US, and that Canada also loses a lot of citizens to the US.

@sciohn_fhanne ✅ “Not necessarily through dramatic collapse, but through accumulating stagnation, shrinking horizons, institutional fatigue, generational disillusionment, and widening gaps between potential and lived reality.”

This is going to be one of the more pessimistic posts I've written about Canada. But the more I think about the Laurentian equilibrium, the more I realize how durable systems like this actually are. Not because they're genuinely excellent, which they're most definitely not, but because they produce a society that remains just comfortable enough, just prosperous enough, just stable enough, and just emotionally tolerable enough to prevent mass demand for real transformation. This implies something deeply uncomfortable. And I don't say this to shoot down our builder-minded discourse. Deep civilizational change rarely arrives simply because thoughtful people critique the system, or because ambitious minorities imagine something higher. It usually arrives only once the old order visibly stops delivering the good life it once promised. Not necessarily through dramatic collapse, but through accumulating stagnation, shrinking horizons, institutional fatigue, generational disillusionment, and widening gaps between potential and lived reality. Rupture is the very precondition for a serious, self-authoring post-Laurentian Canada to become thinkable at all.

Here is a citizen willing to take on the chore of public service. He is engaging with the problems, the snags, the accumulated dross of Canadian weariness. We really do need more people! 🎧 Listen to the witness video testimony re: the chaos during the nomination process. 🤦‍♀️

“The abject apathy … from Canadian society forces you to look elsewhere”

“Another notable Canadian leaving Canada.”

Blessed! One couple with 109 grandchildren and 11 on the way!

@NateForOntario Yes, we can do so much better than the spectacle like this.

Why our campaign appealed the results of the SSW nomination race.

It took until 2023 for Canadian population to hit 40 million.

Nominations in Canada have been dodgy for a long time. The process ought to be much more heavily regulated and scrutinized. Offenders should face grotesquely robust penalties. Don’t screw with our democratic institutions.

@KristinRaworth Very true. Thanks for speaking openly.

Unemployment in today’s Canada. My experience. It’s a big read but please read it through. For three years, I helped care for my father while continuing to work full-time. I even moved next door to him so I could better support him as his health declined. I cared for him until he died. Later, while still employed, I went through six months of breast cancer treatment myself. Pretending those experiences didn’t affect my career would be dishonest. What nobody tells you about employment instability is how cumulative it becomes. Caregiving impacts careers even when you stay employed. Illness impacts careers even when you keep showing up. You can still be working while slowly losing professional momentum underneath you. During unemployment, I applied for 65 jobs. Government. Communications. Non-profit. Administrative. Retail. Hospitality. Not one offer. At one point, after years in senior advisory and executive communications roles, I applied at Starbucks. I didn’t get the job. That experience stayed with me. Not because service work is beneath me — some of the hardest jobs I ever had were in restaurants and hospitality when I was younger. But because the economy had somehow decided I was simultaneously overqualified and unemployable. At 44 years old, after years spent working in government and public affairs, there were moments I genuinely started wondering whether I had anything left to contribute professionally. That’s what prolonged unemployment does to people psychologically. The hardest part of unemployment wasn’t only financial. It was psychological. Watching previous accomplishments stop mattering. Trying to explain résumé gaps without sounding damaged. Feeling your professional identity slowly erode in real time. In April 2026, Canada’s unemployment rate climbed to 6.9%. Behind those numbers are people whose lives became complicated. Caregivers. People managing chronic illness. Cancer survivors. People navigating grief, burnout, disability, aging parents, or health crises while trying to maintain careers at the same time. Governments still talk about unemployment mostly through statistics. But people experience the economy emotionally. Through rejection emails. Through grocery bills. Through rent increases. Through the quiet panic of realizing there’s very little room left in modern life for interruption. The labour market increasingly rewards uninterrupted stability. Perfect timelines. Continuous productivity. No visible complications. But real life does not work that way anymore. Parents age. People get sick. Caregiving responsibilities consume years . Disabilities emerge. Mental health deteriorates. And increasingly Canadians are expected to absorb those pressures privately while continuing to perform professionally as though nothing has changed. There’s a growing class of Canadians who did everything they were told to do. I certainly did. Built careers Paid taxes. Earned degrees. Contributed to institutions. Then life interrupted the plan. And the system suddenly became much less patient with them. This is why affordability and unemployment cannot be separated politically. When the cost of living keeps climbing, employment instability becomes terrifying. One interruption can destabilize everything. I have a job again now and I am grateful for that. But the experience changed how I see work, government, and the economy. A lot more Canadians are hanging on by a thread than our politics currently acknowledges.

Growing our population = increasing capacity? That is, more of the world’s small and medium-business owners/employers here in Canada? Why not?

@univrsle @KristinRaworth 💯

@KristinRaworth Oh boy...can I relate. Different specifics, same general story. I think you are right, people are putting up good fronts but there's a lot more fragility than politicians assume....some of it real, some of it the effects of social media that I feel has a real effect on the psyche

@sciohn_fhanne Ha. Yes, roads are terrible. Few are discussing the costs of fixing sewers in major centres, either.

It's an unfortunate but historically recurring pattern that populations deeply habituated to comfort rarely voluntarily reform themselves into seriousness in the absence of immediate crisis. This is not an argument against articulating higher civilizational horizons for Canada, nor a romanticization of collapse, which I frankly find distasteful. But until the pain of remaining the same genuinely exceeds the pain of changing, I foresee the overwhelming inertia of our institutional design and body politic continuing to preserve the familiar equilibrium, even when that equilibrium is visibly stagnating.

@sciohn_fhanne Yes. Another reason to push forward the conversation about why Canada has stayed small.

Some straight talk from “a Canadian imaginer unwilling to settle for Canada as it is.”

@robblue477 Thank you. 🤔

@100MCanada The architects act in Ontario, which governs the profession, had it that one had to be a British subject in order to be licensed. This I believe was the case up to the 80s if not the 90s. I assume this is also true with the other 6 professions.

Canadian citizen = British subject until 1977. There has always been the idea among “upper class” that Canada should be an agrarian and natural resource colony of Britain. That has kept us small population-wise and economically. Maximum Canada, page 102

Would ✔️embracing more skilled immigrants, and ✔️ensuring Canadians can afford a home and a family help Canada remain strong and free? #canada100million

This is sad post and all too common. We need to course correct on Left vs Right: we weren't like this in 2010 Zoom Salons coming soon “Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, esp. not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another”