At the Edge of Empire

I was born in Renfrew, Ontario, a small town in the heart of the Ottawa Valley, in 1979. My parents were young, each from a family of seven kids. In the years before I showed up, my dad had played bass in a rock band, gigging at a bar called the White House among other places. After he became a father, before he became a draftsman, he worked all kinds of jobs to support the family. Construction, manufacturing, driving a cab. We moved a lot: to Pembroke, a bigger town, home to my mom’s family; Petawawa, where my dad’s father had been stationed at the Canadian Armed Forces base; other, smaller places—Carleton Place, Arnprior, Barrie, Westmeath.

Eventually we landed in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, a grey city with a mean streak, in spite of the impressive grandeur of Canada’s Parliament buildings and their crown jewel, the Peace Tower. Representing a peace built on bloody wars and treaties and indigenous genocide, but a peace nonetheless.

Canada. If you take the time to listen, you can hear the echoes of the guns, the screams, the crackle of burning homes below the placid surface of the name.

*

My maternal grandpa and his son, my uncle—he’s big, alternately stone-faced and laughing, with ice-blue eyes—did a lot of hunting. Moose and partridge, mostly. They would take the long guns from the cabinet: smooth, glossy .30-.30 rifles for the moose, 12-gauge pump and 20-gauge double-barrel over-under shotguns for the birds, the handle of the over-under beautifully engraved with woodland scenes. That was the first gun I ever fired, at fourteen; the silent flash of fire and explosion of smoke like musket fire, followed by the roar of the discharge and a soreness in my shoulder. My grandpa also packed his 9mm handgun, “for bears”, which would be used quickly pop-pop-pop in a bear’s face at close range if one came by the tent, since there would be no time to get the rifle.

My grandpa and my uncle would head north to the hunt camp, and on the return trip they would drive 1,600 kilometers with a gigantic, bloody moose corpse in the bed of my grandpa’s brown GMC pickup, its severed head and fresh antlers proudly displayed on the grille of the truck. The felled animal represented six months’ worth of meat to feed a family. My grandma would bundle it up into the deep freezer. I adored the moose meat softened in tomato sauce.

*

My paternal grandpa manned artillery guns against Italian fascists in WW2 and fought in Korea alongside American allies. My dad was born at the Canadian Forces Base at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, but he grew up on the Royal Canadian Air Force Base in Cold Lake, Alberta, before his family was moved and finally stationed at CFB Petawawa.

As far as I know, my paternal grandpa didn’t hunt; his rifle from the war stayed in a rack in the basement, while he chain-smoked and chain-drank, watching hockey, lighting cigarettes even when he got up to urinate at night. Maybe he’d already seen enough blood and guts.

His sons, my uncles, were army brats, they were cool. My uncle Rick took me out to the sand pits with a bolt-action .22 rifle to teach me to shoot. He arranged tiles from his construction jobs in the sand and we positioned ourselves, sniper-style, on an adjacent dune. I learned that .22 short rounds, basically the smallest bullet you can buy, will punch a hole through porcelain tile, but .22 long rounds, slightly larger, will blow the tile to pieces.

My dad and I spent many nights winter camping when I was a kid, out in the bush with no tent and minimal supplies. He showed me how to build a quinzhee, and after a few mistakes, I learned how to sleep like a baby, cozied up under a pile of snow, without fear or discomfort, under the stars.

*

To a working-class kid like me who had never travelled any great distance, America was always more of a concept than a place. We’d never been. The one time we tried to go over the border for a day of shopping in New York state (a common Canadian pastime), my dad’s 20-year-old conviction for being busted with a joint came back to haunt him. The U.S. border patrol tore apart our car, found nothing, and sent us back the way we’d come. After that we stayed away.

By the time I was a teenager, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I knew America was the world’s sole superpower. But I didn’t really understand anything about it until I heard the music: Dead Kennedys. N.W.A. Bad Religion. Misfits. These started to open my eyes to the tension and danger and shocking capacity for violence and hypocrisy at the heart of the American endeavour. But I wasn’t political at all, even as I sang Bad Religion lyrics. I wasn’t thinking about what these messages meant, what truths they revealed, what warnings they contained for the future. I was absorbing their content, their vibration and portent.

On 9/11, I was sitting in the living room of the small apartment I shared with my dad, smoking cigarettes and watching TV. The broadcast was interrupted by footage of the second plane crashing into the WTC. Like everyone else, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. More importantly, I couldn’t understand what it would mean. 

I called my boss at the local bingo hall to ask if the attack meant I had the day off; terrorists could attack Ottawa at any time, I reasoned. He told me to get to work. I donned my blue shirt, lit another smoke, and headed over.

A couple years later,  I was desperate to start a band and escape the dead-eyed cynicism of Mechanicsville, my neighborhood in Ottawa, which was defined by a fuck-you attitude, illegal boozecans, and a prominent clubhouse for the Outlaws motorcycle club. Bolstered by an inheritance of $2400 from my grandpa the Nazi-fighter—some of the money he’d been posthumously awarded after helping clean up the nuclear accident at Chalk River—I moved to Montreal and never looked back.

*

Some days, it’s all I can think about: are we safe here? Look at a map. America is a stone’s throw away. We’re close to Bernie Sanders’s Vermont, sure, but Washington D.C. is just a little further. Fort Bragg is too close for comfort.

It’s impossible to even put together a plan of action for if, because there’s no way of knowing which if is going to happen or when, if anything happens at all.

It’s been tempting to dismiss Trump and Musk’s annexation talk as bluster. But after months of belittling and insulting the leader of our country, months of these sociopaths saying very clearly they intend to take Canada by some type of force, there seems to be no more room for interpretation. I understand abusive relationships better now, because the language these people use—“you’re nothing, we don’t need you, you’re not a real country, you’re imaginary. But we would cherish and love and respect you as our 51st state”—tells the whole story. Spoken like a rapist.

Other days, it’s like I forget it’s even happening, like my mind decides to take a vacation from the ever-increasing threat. Only in these moments does it occur to me to do things like play guitar, or make plans for the future, or think about a creative idea.

I once read that right wing publisher Andrew Breitbart was obsessed with the idea that “politics is downstream from culture”—meaning, if you want to change the political landscape, you must first change the cultural landscape to accommodate the politics you want to see. They accomplished that in America, and now we’re seeing the results. Let me tell you, it feels like shit to be on the receiving end of memetic warfare.

*

You can call the border an imaginary line, but everything created by people is imaginary. You’d just as accurately call a Tesla an imaginary car or Donald Trump an imaginary president. But crossing imaginary lines has real-world consequences. Some smart folks say it can’t happen, or that it’s not advisable, or that if it did happen it would be a total fucking disaster for everyone involved. All I know is that I’m sick of thinking about it.

I check out r/50501 and I feel the panic and rage and defiance there, and I see the town halls and the statements from Good Americans that they are so sorry, that they love us, that the country “isn’t behind Trump on this.” I am heartened by the Bernie and AOC rallies. But then I remember Vietnam, and how much of the country wasn’t behind that either, and I remember the millions of people who marched against the invasion of Iraq, and I remember protests and resistance, and I remember that the Machine rolled on regardless, immune, a bulldozer of brutality, and in the jungles of Vietnam soldiers resorted to fragging their officers but the machine didn’t stop until many years later, and even then, only because it was finally understood that the cost had, at last, become too much to bear.

*

I’m a city kid, not into hunting myself, and I can’t throw a punch worth a shit. But I think back to my childhood and I remember having visions: visions of defending the city with my friends, of us blasting rifles at some undefined enemy. Kid stuff, maybe all boys are like that, glimpses of past lives, warrior DNA hidden not-so-deep in our coding. Or maybe I was seeing the future.

In 2019, after I moved to the small town of Saint Eustache, I was looking out over the frozen river, dotted with ice-fishing huts, and I had another vision, a narrative: one day America would demand more electricity from Quebec. The province would agree but the restless population would not; a prolonged protest movement would topple the government, at which point the Americans would invade and occupy to secure those energy supplies. (In the story, after the American soldiers come, they spend time in Montreal on R and R, terrorizing the population. They eventually harm the wrong girl, whose boyfriend is a drug dealer supplying American soldiers. To get revenge, he laces a shipment of cocaine with fentanyl. Soldiers die, and the U.S. Army then expands the global War on Drugs into all of Quebec society.)

I wrote the vision into a novel. No one wanted to publish it so in 2023 I published it myself. It was for sale on Amazon until I deleted my Amazon account as part of our boycott of all things American. Now it’s a rare, prescient record, and out of print. 

*

Saint Eustache is an exceptionally well-run town: my kids’ school is brand new, as are the library and the local swimming pool, and the lines on the road are repainted every year. There’s a deep pride in the history of the town, because during the war between the English and the French, it was the site of a brutal and decisive battle between the English and the rebellious Patriote movement. Every year that battle is re-enacted on the streets, with muskets blazing, scaring my children.

*

Here’s the thing: every time Donald Trump or one of his piece-of-shit lackeys talks about my country, they threaten my family. They insult my grandfathers. They spit on my identity. They say we are nothing, and that they will do whatever they want with us. This inspires something in me—not hatred, but rather a grim sadness that I may be called upon at some point to defend my family in a war against fascists, as my grandpa and his generation did. All I want is peace. But I, and millions of Canadians, don’t have it in us to kneel before a bully. We’ll do whatever we have to do.

I used to have dreams, and maybe they were selfish, but now I have only one overwhelming desire: to ensure my kids grow up with the same rights, values, freedoms and opportunities that I had. I’ll do whatever needs to be done to achieve that goal. Elbows up is where we’re at. I hope it doesn’t have to go any further.

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