December 1st, 2025 | Grant Johnson

If you think about it, The Glass Is Half Full

We still have it better than we realize.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom in Canada lately. Our economy is on the ropes and, depending on who you ask, it’s the fault of Trump tariffs or homegrown shitlib policies. Truth is, both are to blame, but there’s more to it all than even that. There’s a malaise across the country, and people feel it without being able to completely identify it. Our prosperity is stalling. Our social cohesion is fraying. Our future is darkening.

And yet we carry on.

I am susceptible to doom-and-gloom thinking. It seems more realistic and gritty somehow. It can, however, be used as a crutch to explain away cowardice and sloth. It can excuse a lack of ambition because the purveyor of the viewpoint is just too-cool and in-the-know to be fooled by optimism and hope. It’s definitely a quality I try not to let get the best of me. At the ripe age of 47, I feel like I’ve got a nice balance of gritty realism and striving, bright side hustle. I’m not young and naive, but not an old curmudgeon always seeing half-empty glasses everywhere.

This leads us to the state of Canada today.

We are in a state of managed decline, and it is very likely that Mark Carney and his Net-Zero fantasy future will fail us all. But Canada is bigger than Mark Carney and you, as an individual, have an enormous amount of agency. 

Steven Pinker wrote Enlightenment Now back in 2018 in order to illustrate to people that we as a species are hardwired to look for threats and dangers. It’s how we evolved to survive. It can also lead us to negative thinking, even in the face of tremendous progress. He then goes on to show us how much better our lives are today than in the past, but we have trouble accepting that because the hedonic treadmill allows us to take for granted that which we are accustomed to, and yet our hard-wiring keeps us negative to optimize for future survival.

The lament of many young people today is the unaffordability of homes, the high cost of groceries, the lack of interesting or lucrative jobs, the difficulty in the dating game, the fear of having children, and the debt of an education that can not be properly commodified. 

Sure, these are all problems. But with a little perspective, we should be shamed into counting our blessings more than cataloguing our complaints. 

I’ve recently started reading Dominion: The Railway and the Rise of Canada. It recounts life in Canada before the Canadian Pacific Railway was built. Here’s a lengthy passage detailed by Robert Whyte in 1847 near Quebec City as thousands of starving Irish immigrants poured off the transport ships…

“Frightful” and “horrid,” and appalling,” he sputtered. He related how, during the mandated quarantine before disembarking, the passengers had stood in the hold ”up to their ankles in filth. The wretched emigrants crowded together like cattle and corpses remain long unburied.”

Once they made it ashore, there was scant improvement. There were “hundreds…literally flung on the beach, left amid the mud and stones to crawl on the dry land how they could.” Even those discharged as healthy soon succumbed as they staggered off, shivering, eyes burning from fever, children crying for their lost or dead mothers. Some just lay out in the open, while others were able to struggle to sheds or tents to await processing by officials.

“After a voyage of two months’ duration we were to be left still enveloped by reeking pestilence, the sick without medicine, medical skill, nourishment or so much as a drop of pure water - for the river…was polluted by the most disgusting objects thrown overboard from the several vessels. In short, it was a floating mass of filthy straw, the refuse of foul beds, barrels containing the vilest matter, old rags and tattered clothes, etc.”

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants with similar stories washed up in Boston, New York, Quebec, and Montreal, many wandering farther west to take low-paying jobs as domestic servants and labourers, some enduring horrible abuses and exploitation. Many famously worked upon the railways… - pages 22-23 - Dominion.

Welcome to Canada in 1847.

Imagine how bad it must have been in Ireland for people to get on those boats to risk everything to arrive in those conditions and under those circumstances in the first place. Today, Ireland is one of the best places in the world in which to live, and one of the biggest problems they face is that too many modern versions of what they themselves once were are scrambling from abroad to arrive inside their borders for much the same purpose that Irish folks were leaving two hundred years previously.

Back to Canada…

My own great-grandfather came to Western Canada during the land rush of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The “populate or perish” policies of developing a nation in a mostly frigid and hostile part of North America were enough to attract my grandfather to Saskatchewan at a time when there was almost nothing built there. 

When he finally arrived alone and received his section of land, he realized he wasn’t going to have time to build a proper shelter himself so he dug a hole in the ground and that was where he spent his first Canadian winter. 

It’s hard to impress upon people in this day and age just how insanely hardcore people were, even a hundred years ago, compared to what we take for granted today. When it’s cold outside and I’m getting up for work at 5 am, I leave my cloud-like mattress and I step into the bathroom and run a hot shower to wake me up more than anything else. Minute after minute of steaming hot water pours onto my head before I head upstairs and grab my lunch, which consists of about as many calories as I want to consume. Clean water pours out of the tap and into a bottle, and I get into my car and drive to work with my heated seats and a caffeinated beverage for the drive, during which time I listen to podcasts talking about how shitty Canada is and how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. My great-grandfather would’ve loved to wash his hands with hot water and have the luxury of traveling about in a heated car. He would be baffled at the notion that the electrified city with heated buildings and functional plumbing somehow represents decline. 

Politics is fun, and it’s fun to be pissed about politics, but sometimes (more often than most choose to) we need to check ourselves and keep perspective. Are there problems in Canada? Absolutely. Will there always be problems in Canada? Absolutely. If you gauge things by decades rather than days, life is getting better and better all the time. 

A lot of Gen Z like to mock the Boomers for having it so easy back in the '70s and '80s. I was born back then and I can tell you, it wasn’t all easy. I saw my parents' generation struggle and live much smaller lives than what ordinary people today take for granted. These pictures you see online of what “average” one-income households could afford back in 1987 or whatever are nonsense. Are houses expensive? Yes. They always have been, depending on how you measure “expense”.

A fun experiment to do is to visit Heritage Park in Calgary. This park is like stepping back in time and one of the fun aspects is to see what a house looked like between roughly 1880 and 1930. I always enjoy venturing into the sodhuts and trying to imagine living life with that as my fundamental residence. It was only about 120 years ago that Albertans experienced this as a common standard baseline.

Now, of course, there’s more to life than hot showers and modern medicine and material excess. People today still struggle with the basic needs, but far less so than the more timeless problems of things like relationships, loneliness, betrayal, disappointment, regret, desire… pick your issue. At the end of the day, it’s better to feel sad because a friend you like doesn’t like you back than to be in a situation in which a friend you like doesn’t like you back and you’re both dying of diphtheria. 

We’ve come a long way in a short time, and there is much to be thankful for. This Christmas, take a time out from day-to-day politics and appreciate the bigger picture. 

Thanks for reading PostCanadian, and in the new year, we’ll be back with lots of snark-filled hot takes you can’t get anywhere else.

Merry Christmas and a fruitful 2026!