Michael Keoshkerian

Companies from around the world build teams in Canada. They come from the US, from Europe, from Asia. They've done their homework. They know that Canadian talent is world-class. They recruit here because the people are excellent.

So let me tell you what's strange. The companies I work with treat Canadian talent as a strategic asset. They fly across oceans for it. They restructure their operations around it. And Canada itself barely seems to notice what it has.

This piece isn't about immigration. It isn't about student visas or temporary foreign workers or the familiar debate about how many people we should let in. It's about something more specific and more urgent: the experienced, proven, mid-career and senior talent that Canada either produced and lost, or could attract and hasn't. The researchers, the executives, the founders, the operators. People at the peak of their powers who could be building the next generation of Canadian industry, if anyone bothered to ask them.

Right now, those people are in play. And everyone except Canada seems to understand what that means.

In May 2025, Dan Yang, one of the world's leading neuroscientists and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, left the University of California, Berkeley after thirty-five years and moved to Shenzhen. Within weeks, Lu Wei, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, followed her to the same institute. Then Shan Liang, an HIV researcher from Washington University, made it three. One research institute in southern China recruited three world-class scientists from American institutions in a single summer. That wasn't luck. That was a strategy.

The same pattern played out across the Atlantic. The University of Aix-Marseille in France launched a program called Safe Place for Science, flew in dozens of senior American researchers for interviews, and began making offers with eighteen-month start windows and a push to create a new immigration status: "scientific refugee." The European Research Council saw applications from senior US-based researchers jump from 23 to 114 in a single year. Austria's Academy of Sciences launched its first-ever fellowship program for researchers at US institutions, funded with money originally seeded by the Marshall Plan, offering half a million euros per recipient. Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Australia: every serious country published a strategy, named a number, and started recruiting.

The EU committed over half a billion euros to, in their words, "make Europe a magnet for researchers." The UK put up $66 million. Australia's Academy of Science declared an "urgent and unparalleled opportunity to attract the smartest minds." German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said it plainly: "The American government is currently using brute force against the universities. This is a huge opportunity for us."

This is not a gentle competition. This is a global draft for the most valuable people in the knowledge economy, happening right now, in real time. And Canada?

Canada announced the Global Impact+ Research Talent Initiative in December, a $1.7 billion program to attract a thousand researchers over twelve years. That's real money and it deserves credit. But the registration deadlines don't begin until March 2026. The chairs won't be filled for months after that. In a market where France is making offers in weeks and China is closing deals over a single summer, Canada is building a twelve-year program. The instinct is right. The clock speed is wrong.

And that's the good news. The bad news is that in the same month Canada launched its talent initiative, it killed its Start-Up Visa program. A backlog of over 42,000 applications. Processing times that had stretched to ten years. Ottawa pulled the plug on December 19 and promised a replacement pilot sometime in 2026. Details pending. This is a country that simultaneously announced it wants to recruit the world's best researchers and shut down its only pathway for entrepreneurial talent, on the same calendar page.

Meanwhile, Mark Carney told Canadian expats there has never been a better time to come home. The data suggests they disagree. Statistics Canada found that 106,134 people left the country for good in 2024, the highest number since 1967. A Leaders Fund study found that only 32 percent of Canadian-led high-potential startups founded in 2024 were still headquartered in Canada, down from 67 percent before the pandemic. The senior people, the people with options, the people every country is trying to attract, are voting with their feet.

The problem isn't that Canada lacks a talent program. The problem is that Canada treats talent attraction the way it treats most strategic priorities: with announcements, committees, and timelines measured in years, in a world where the best people are being recruited in weeks.

What would it look like if Canada actually competed?

It would look like Singapore, which processes its ONE Pass applications for senior professionals in weeks, not months. Singapore didn't just top the Global Talent Competitiveness Index for the first time in 2025 by accident. It built a system designed for speed, density, and retention: fast entry, livable cities, deep ecosystems, and the conviction that every world-class person you attract makes the next one easier to recruit.

It would look like the UAE, which offers ten-year Golden Visas to researchers, scientists, and skilled professionals, backed by a nationally coordinated strategy that treats talent attraction as core economic infrastructure, not a side project of the immigration ministry.

It would look like a country that understood that the most important talent isn't twenty-two years old. It's forty-five, with two decades of expertise, a professional network, a family, and very specific requirements about where they're willing to uproot their life. These people don't respond to generic immigration portals. They respond to a phone call from someone who knows their work, a package that respects their seniority, and a timeline that doesn't insult their intelligence.

Canada has one enormous advantage that it chronically underuses: its diaspora. There are hundreds of thousands of experienced Canadians working in the United States and around the world. Many of them left because the opportunities were better elsewhere. Many of them are now watching American institutions come under political attack, watching the cost of living in major US cities become absurd, watching the H-1B system get deliberately bogged down, and quietly wondering whether it's time to come home. But "come back because it's nice here" is not a strategy. And coming back to discover that the ecosystem is thinner than it was when you left, that the compensation gap has widened, that career progression still stalls at the Canadian ceiling, that's not a homecoming. That's a trap.

Other countries are offering their diaspora targeted packages: financial incentives, fast-track pathways, research chairs, infrastructure commitments. Canada has a prime minister who says the right words and a system that hasn't caught up.

I've spent years watching global companies discover what Canada has to offer. They come here because the talent is real. They build teams here because the people deliver. The question I keep coming back to is why Canada doesn't recruit for itself with the same energy that these companies recruit from us. Why we watch the best researchers in the world get picked off by Shenzhen and Marseille and Vienna while we're still finalizing registration deadlines. Why we produce brilliant people and then act surprised when someone else offers them something better.

The talent is out there. A lot of it is ours. The window is open, and every serious country in the world is climbing through it. The question is whether Canada will move with the urgency this moment demands, or keep drafting twelve-year plans while the world moves in twelve weeks.

The Canadian Moment

Something shifted in American venture capital around 2020. A generation of investors who came up funding consumer apps and enterprise software started writing checks for defense contractors, nuclear startups, and semiconductor fabs. They called it "American Dynamism"—a bet that the most important companies of the next decade would build physical things that mattered for national security and industrial capacity.

The thesis wasn't subtle: great power competition is back, supply chains are strategic, and the country that makes things will have leverage over the country that merely consumes them.

Canada watched this happen. We've been politely interested.

That's no longer sufficient. Rising geopolitical tensions, fracturing supply chains, and the global race for technological sovereignty demand a distinctly Canadian response. Not a copy of American ideas—we lack the defense budget and venture ecosystem to simply replicate what Andreessen Horowitz is doing. But a response that captures Canadian strengths while confronting Canadian weaknesses.

That response rests on two pillars: Talent (mobilizing our people) and Energy (leveraging our power).

These aren't abstract categories. They're the two areas where Canada has genuine global advantage—and where we've been most complacent about squandering it. We produce elite engineers, then wave goodbye as they board flights to San Francisco. We sit on critical minerals the world desperately needs, then ship raw ore for others to refine into value.

A serious national strategy would treat these as reinforcing assets. Ambitious energy projects attract ambitious people. Talented people drive innovation in energy and resources. The loop compounds—or, in our case, it could, if we chose to make it.

This is pragmatic yet aspirational. Call it a vision for national resilience. Call it building a stronger dominion.

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Pillar 1: Talent—Mobilizing Our People

The Brain Drain Problem

Canadian universities punch far above their weight. Waterloo's computer science program rivals MIT and Stanford. The University of Toronto helped pioneer modern deep learning. Our engineering schools feed talent into the world's most demanding technical organizations.

Then those graduates leave.

The pattern is so familiar it barely registers as a problem anymore. A bright engineer finishes her degree at McGill, accepts an offer from Google or Meta, relocates to the Bay Area, and never comes back. She might retain a vague fondness for Canada—somewhere to visit family at Christmas—but her productive years, her taxes, her startup ideas, and eventually her own hiring decisions all happen somewhere else.

The numbers are stark. Software engineers in San Francisco earn 1.5–2x their Canadian counterparts, even adjusting for cost of living. The most interesting work—the frontier AI labs, the ambitious hardware companies, the defense tech startups tackling hard problems—clusters in the U.S. Canada becomes a farm system, developing talent for others to deploy.

This isn't inevitable. It's a policy choice we've made through inaction.

The Defense Tech Opportunity

A thriving defense technology sector would change the calculus. Not because patriotism alone keeps people home—it doesn't—but because ambitious engineers want to work on hard problems that matter. Missile guidance systems. Autonomous drones. Satellite constellations. Cyber defense at nation-state scale. These are genuinely interesting technical challenges, and they're currently being solved almost entirely in the United States.

Canada has more latent capacity here than most people realize. Our startups submitted more applications to NATO's DIANA innovation accelerator than any other country in its first cohort. Companies like MDA have built world-class space technology for decades. Reaction Dynamics in Montreal is developing rockets. The talent and ambition exist.

What's missing is the ecosystem to support them.

American defense tech founders have access to specialized accelerators like AFWERX and In-Q-Tel, a CIA-backed venture fund that has seeded dozens of successful companies. They have a Department of Defense willing to act as early customer, providing revenue while products mature. They have venture capitalists who understand the sector's longer timelines and are willing to underwrite them.

Canadian founders get none of this. Our venture capital community—historically cautious, oriented toward capital-efficient SaaS and fintech—views defense and hardware startups as too risky, too slow, too weird. Government procurement systems are designed to minimize risk and controversy, not cultivate domestic capability. The result is a structural disadvantage that talent and ambition alone can't overcome.

Fixing this requires deliberate intervention: a Canadian defense technology accelerator with real funding and mentorship, procurement pathways that let startups sell to DND without drowning in bureaucracy, and venture capital willing to take defense seriously. When our best founders see genuine support for building in Canada first, they will.

Building Dual-Fluency Professionals

Defense technology doesn't just need engineers. It needs bridge-builders—people fluent in both technology and the language of defense, government, and national security.

These hybrid professionals are rare and valuable. A reservist with a computer science background who understands both military doctrine and machine learning architectures. An aerospace engineer who has spent time consulting with the Air Force and grasps how procurement actually works. A policy expert who can translate between uniformed personnel and startup founders.

This connective tissue barely exists in Canada. We've siloed our technical community from our defense community so thoroughly that they often can't communicate effectively, let alone collaborate.

Building this capacity means creating pathways: education programs that combine engineering with security studies, exchange mechanisms between DND and the tech sector, and cultural shifts that encourage respect between uniformed and civilian innovators. It means treating "dual fluency" as a skill set worth cultivating, not an accident that occasionally happens.

Evolving Ontario's Manufacturing Base

Southern Ontario's manufacturing heritage is both asset and vulnerability. For decades, the region's identity centered on automotive—the assembly plants, the parts suppliers, the engineering firms clustered around Detroit's orbit. That model is fragmenting as vehicles electrify and supply chains reorganize.

But the underlying capability remains. Ontario has skilled machinists, precision manufacturing know-how, and industrial infrastructure that most regions would envy. The question is what we point it toward.

Some of the transition is already happening. Volkswagen's $20 billion EV battery gigafactory in St. Thomas will create thousands of jobs and position Ontario as a key node in the electric vehicle supply chain. That's a meaningful win. But it's also, in some sense, familiar—a new version of the old model where Ontario makes components for vehicles designed and sold elsewhere.

The more ambitious play is defense manufacturing. Ontario's factories could produce next-generation military equipment: electric armored vehicles, satellite components, advanced materials, autonomous systems. The mechanical engineer in Windsor should be able to imagine designing the next military EV platform, not just the next sedan. That requires deliberate effort to connect the defense tech startup ecosystem with the manufacturing base that could actually build what they design.

Finding Canada's Champion

Ecosystems often need a catalyst—a visible success that proves what's possible and inspires imitators.

American defense tech had Palmer Luckey, whose company Anduril demonstrated that a startup could build serious military hardware and win major contracts. Whatever one thinks of Luckey personally, Anduril's success unlocked a generation of founders who saw a template and followed it. Success breeds success.

Canada needs an equivalent story. Not necessarily a single individual to lionize, but proof of concept that cutting-edge defense technology can be built on Canadian soil, by Canadian founders, serving Canadian and allied interests. When that story exists, dozens of founders currently on the fence will make different decisions.

This is partly about funding—Canada lacks dedicated defense venture funds or an In-Q-Tel equivalent. But it's also about narrative. Few Canadians know about the genuinely impressive work happening at companies like MDA or emerging players like Reaction Dynamics. We're bad at celebrating our own innovators, and that cultural modesty has costs.

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Pillar 2: Energy—Leveraging Our Power

Energy as Strategy

Energy is the foundation everything else rests on. Economic vitality, military readiness, industrial capacity, and quality of life all depend on reliable, affordable power. For a resource-rich country like Canada, energy represents both strategic advantage and strategic responsibility.

The global context has shifted. For decades, energy policy was primarily an economic and environmental question—how to balance development, cost, and emissions. Geopolitics intruded occasionally but could mostly be managed through markets.

That era is ending. Russia's invasion of Ukraine exposed Europe's vulnerability to energy dependence with devastating clarity. Supply chain disruptions during COVID revealed how concentrated critical manufacturing had become. The U.S.-China technology competition has made semiconductors, rare earths, and battery materials into strategic assets subject to export controls and industrial policy.

Energy security is now national security, and Canada is better positioned than almost any country on earth to thrive in this environment.

The Critical Minerals Advantage

Critical minerals are the new oil—essential inputs for the technologies that will define the coming decades.

Electric vehicles need lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite. Semiconductors need gallium and germanium. Clean energy systems need rare earth elements for magnets and specialized alloys. Defense technologies depend on all of the above.

The problem is that China dominates processing and refining for most of these materials. Even when minerals are mined elsewhere, they typically flow through Chinese facilities before reaching manufacturers. This concentration creates strategic vulnerability that Western governments are only beginning to address.

Canada's position is extraordinary. We are the only Western Hemisphere nation possessing all the minerals required for EV batteries. We rank among the top U.S. suppliers for many critical materials. Recent analyses suggest Canada could build the world's leading battery supply chain, potentially overtaking China.

But potential isn't performance. Capturing this opportunity requires action across the value chain: fast-tracking responsible mining projects instead of letting them languish in permitting purgatory, building domestic refining capacity so we process our own materials, and incentivizing downstream manufacturing so the value-add happens here rather than abroad.

The security imperative is clear. These minerals are vital for defense technologies, from fighter jets to guided missiles to secure communications. A supply chain controlled by strategic competitors is a supply chain that can be weaponized against us. By developing our own capacity, Canada can supply itself and allies while reducing dangerous dependencies.

The Nuclear Edge

Ontario has quietly built one of the most impressive nuclear energy systems in the world. Approximately 60% of the province's electricity comes from nuclear plants—clean, reliable baseload power that has operated safely for decades.

Now Ontario is leading on the next generation of nuclear technology: Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

The Darlington SMR project will be the first grid-scale SMR in the G7, connecting 300 MW of capacity by 2030. Eventually, four reactors will provide 1,200 MW of carbon-free electricity. The project will create 18,000 construction jobs and add an estimated $35 billion to Ontario's GDP over its lifecycle.

But the strategic significance extends beyond a single power plant. SMRs hit multiple objectives simultaneously: decarbonizing our grid without sacrificing reliability, ensuring energy independence using Canadian uranium, creating a high-skilled industrial workforce in nuclear engineering, and opening export opportunities as other countries seek similar technology.

Success at Darlington positions Canadian firms to export SMR technology worldwide. Countries across Europe, Asia, and the developing world need clean baseload power and lack the expertise to build it themselves. Canada could become a global supplier—not just of reactors, but of the engineering services, fuel supply, and operational know-how that accompany them.

This is industrial policy at its most strategic: build capability at home, prove it works, then sell it to the world.

A Holistic Energy Strategy

Energy security encompasses Canada's entire resource base, and a serious strategy treats it holistically.

While transitioning toward cleaner energy, our petroleum sector remains economically significant and can fund innovation in carbon capture, hydrogen production, and emissions reduction technologies. Writing off oil and gas entirely would mean abandoning revenue, expertise, and infrastructure that could be redirected toward strategic goals.

Our vast hydroelectric capacity—especially in Quebec and British Columbia—provides some of the cleanest electricity on earth. This is already attracting energy-intensive industries seeking to reduce their carbon footprint. Data centers, aluminum smelters, and battery manufacturers all want access to abundant clean power.

The key is treating energy as a strategic asset rather than just an economic commodity or environmental problem. A country with plentiful, affordable, clean energy can power industries others can't, attract investment others won't, and maintain sovereignty others lack.

This means hardening infrastructure against physical and cyber threats. It means maintaining strategic reserves. It means developing exportable expertise in areas like battery recycling and portable military power systems. It means regulatory processes that provide certainty and move at the speed investment requires.

Energy abundance is a competitive advantage Canada already possesses. The question is whether we leverage it deliberately or let it dissipate through neglect.

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From Vision to Action

The Reinforcing Loop

Talent and Energy aren't separate strategies. They're two halves of a single flywheel.

Cutting-edge energy projects attract talented people. Engineers want to work on first-of-kind SMRs, next-generation battery technology, and critical mineral processing facilities. The problems are hard, the stakes are real, and the work matters. When those opportunities exist in Canada, fewer people leave.

Talented people, in turn, drive innovation in energy and resources. They start companies, improve processes, develop new technologies, and train the next generation. Human capital compounds.

The same logic applies to defense tech. A thriving defense sector attracts engineers and entrepreneurs who want to work on hard problems with national significance. Their presence strengthens the ecosystem, attracts capital, and creates success stories that inspire imitators.

Right now, these loops are running in reverse. Talent leaves because opportunities are elsewhere. Opportunities are elsewhere because talent left. Breaking this cycle requires deliberate intervention—creating the initial conditions that let the flywheel start turning in the right direction.

What This Looks Like

Several initiatives could catalyze the shift:

A coordinated effort to recruit Canadian expatriates back home. Thousands of talented Canadians work in Silicon Valley, often in exactly the technical domains—AI, hardware, defense—where Canada needs capacity. Many have family ties, cultural affinity, and latent interest in returning if the right opportunity arose. A deliberate program identifying these individuals and matching them with competitive roles, research positions, and startup funding could reverse meaningful portions of the brain drain.

A Canadian Defense Technology Accelerator providing funding, mentorship from military and industry veterans, and fast-track access to DND. Coupled with a government venture fund or In-Q-Tel equivalent, this could seed dozens of companies over five to ten years. The model exists elsewhere. Canada simply hasn't built it.

A cultural narrative shift. Somewhere along the way, Canada became embarrassed about building physical things—factories, power plants, military equipment—as if these were retrograde activities for less enlightened nations. The opposite is true. Advanced manufacturing, energy infrastructure, and defense technology are markers of sophisticated, capable societies. Countries that make things have leverage. Countries that don't are subject to the decisions of those who do.

Policy alignment across the federal government. Procurement reform enabling SMEs to sell to government efficiently. Industrial and Technological Benefits from defense purchases directed toward Canadian startups, not just established primes. Regulatory certainty for mining and nuclear projects, with clear approval timelines that let investment flow.

None of this requires unprecedented budgets or radical policy departures. It requires focus, coordination, and the political will to prioritize Canadian strategic capacity.

Starting Local, Scaling National

Toronto and Southern Ontario represent the natural starting point. The region is Canada's business and technology capital, with a critical mass of talent, capital, and institutions. It also has a manufacturing base actively seeking new direction as automotive transforms.

Success here—the first grid-scale SMR at Darlington, battery plants in St. Thomas, a defense tech startup ecosystem taking root—creates templates for nationwide replication. Other provinces have different advantages: Quebec's hydropower, Alberta's energy expertise, British Columbia's Pacific trade links. A model that works in Ontario can adapt to these contexts.

But starting somewhere matters more than starting everywhere. Focus creates momentum. Momentum attracts resources. Resources enable scale.

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The Mission

This isn't a policy white paper. It's a statement of conviction about what Canada could become.

We have the ingredients for genuine strategic capacity: world-class talent, abundant resources, democratic stability, and alliance relationships that matter. We've simply failed to convert these inputs into outputs. That's a choice, and choices can change.

The goal is becoming a connector and champion—linking talent to opportunities, capital to projects, and advancing a simple narrative: Canada can and must build important things. Defense technology. Energy infrastructure. Advanced manufacturing. The hard, physical, consequential work that secures prosperity and sovereignty.

The next generation of Canadians should be able to work on breakthrough technologies without leaving the country. They should see a domestic ecosystem that supports ambition instead of funneling it elsewhere. They should inherit a Canada that builds, not just a Canada that consumes what others have built.

We face real challenges. Arctic security requires capabilities we don't currently possess. Grid stability will determine whether electrification succeeds or stalls. AI development is concentrating in a handful of American and Chinese labs, with Canada watching from the periphery.

But with focused investment in Talent and Energy—the two areas where our advantages are clearest—Canada can punch above its weight. Not through wishful thinking or national vanity, but through deliberate effort to convert latent potential into strategic reality.

This is the Canadian moment. What we do with it is up to us.

The Gap

I started paying attention to Lux Capital a few years ago. Here was a private U.S. firm writing serious checks into defense tech, autonomous systems, and space startups, explicitly framing it as protecting American economic security. They backed Anduril early, before defense tech was fashionable. Their thesis was simple: the most important companies of the next decade would build physical things that mattered for national security. No government anchor required. Just conviction and private capital.

Now they manage $7 billion. Their portfolio includes some of the most consequential companies in aerospace, defense, and frontier tech.

Then I looked for the Canadian equivalent. There isn't one.

No dedicated defense-tech VC fund of meaningful scale. A venture community that views defense as risky, slow, and vaguely distasteful. Procurement systems so dysfunctional that founders describe them as actively hostile to new entrants.

Meanwhile, our allies are building this infrastructure deliberately. The U.S. has poured $130 billion into emerging tech firms through DoD contracts since 2021. Andreessen Horowitz launched a billion-dollar "American Dynamism" fund for founders building in aerospace, defense, and public safety. Private capital is flowing toward national security because investors finally recognize it's a massive market, not a niche.

Canada has watched this happen. We've been politely interested.

We produce world-class talent in AI, cybersecurity, quantum, and robotics. Exactly the domains that matter for modern defense. We just don't have the capital infrastructure to keep that talent building here.

What Others Have Built

Lux Capital proved you don't need government money to build a defense-tech powerhouse. You need a thesis, patience, and the willingness to back hard problems. They systematically mine academia and government labs for what they call "technological gems," then fund the founders turning those breakthroughs into companies. Their explicit goal: "reintroduce the Pentagon to Silicon Valley."

They're not alone. Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and a growing cohort of U.S. firms have recognized that defense and dual-use technology represent one of the largest addressable markets in the world. The private sector figured out what governments have always known: security is where serious money flows.

The UK established a National Security Strategic Investment Fund. Australia launched a $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund with defense carve-outs. NATO stood up a €1 billion Innovation Fund, and twenty-four allies committed capital. Canada didn't.

Israel built an entire economy around dual-use innovation. Elite military units spin out commercial ventures in cyber, drones, and AI. Toronto-based AWZ Ventures saw this model clearly enough to focus on Israeli security startups, explicitly aiming to "strengthen national resilience" through those investments. The model works. Canada just hasn't built its own version.

The pattern across leading nations is clear: private capital is flooding into defense and dual-use tech because the returns are real and the market is growing.

Why We're Behind

It's not that nothing exists. The BDC launched a $200 million Deep Tech Venture Fund in 2019, then shut it down a few years into its twelve-year mandate. A major blow to hard-tech founders who'd counted on patient capital. Deeptech ventures need long runways. Inconsistency from major institutions kills them.

One9 Venture Partners, founded in 2013 by Glenn Cowan while he was still serving in JTF2, tried to fill the gap. They targeted $50 million. Raised $10 million. Still managed to back winners: Tomahawk Robotics sold for $120 million USD, and Strider Technologies raised a $55 million Series C. In April 2025, Kensington Capital acquired One9 to build a defense tech platform.

Progress. But as Kensington's Rick Nathan put it: "There are not any other VC funds in Canada dedicated exclusively to defence tech... there is stuff here, it's just not focused, and it's not that much."

The cultural problem runs deeper. Canadian investors historically view defense as niche at best, unsavory at worst. Our tech community excels at SaaS and fintech but treats hardware and defense as exotic. Government procurement matters as a demand signal, and ours is designed to minimize controversy rather than cultivate capability. Painfully slow timelines, complex regulations, extreme risk aversion. Startups that try to sell to DND describe the process as soul-crushing.

The result is a chicken-and-egg problem: weak capital supply, weak demand signal, and founders who look south out of necessity. Glenn Cowan called raising a defense-focused fund in Canada "a tough lift." The market constraints are real.

What Lux North Could Be

Canada needs a dedicated dual-use deeptech fund. Call it Lux North. Model it on what Lux Capital built in the U.S.: private capital, a clear thesis, and the conviction to back companies building technology that serves both commercial markets and national security.

This isn't about waiting for government to write checks. It's about private investors recognizing that the same opportunity Lux Capital seized in the U.S. exists here. The technologies reshaping the world (AI, autonomy, space systems, cyber, biotech) are inherently dual-use. A satellite constellation serves commercial customers and Arctic sovereignty. A cybersecurity tool protects banks and critical infrastructure. An autonomous drone fights wildfires and conducts reconnaissance. The line between civilian and military application barely exists anymore.

The thesis has to be explicitly dual-use: companies that can scale commercially while meeting defense and public-sector needs. Civilian markets provide revenue breadth and reduce dependence on government procurement cycles. Defense and government customers provide validation, early adoption, and access to problems worth solving.

Patient capital is non-negotiable. Deeptech companies take longer to mature than SaaS startups. Lux Capital structures for long horizons and follows companies from seed through growth. A Canadian equivalent needs the same discipline. Investors willing to hold through the valley of death rather than seeking quick exits.

The mandate should target domains where Canada has talent and strategic need: cybersecurity, autonomous systems, space and satellites, AI and data analytics, advanced materials, energy resilience, biotech. These aren't speculative categories. They're where Canadian researchers and engineers already compete globally.

And while Lux North wouldn't depend on government funding, it would benefit from a functional demand signal. Working with DND to create pathways for startups to test and deploy technology would accelerate commercialization. Fast-tracking security clearances, building flexible contracting vehicles for pilots, using programs like IDEaS and NATO DIANA to validate technology. These aren't capital asks. They're process improvements that make the market more attractive for private investment.

The Opportunity

The latent capacity is there. Canadian startups submitted more applications to NATO's DIANA accelerator than any other country in its first cohort. MDA has built world-class space technology for decades. Emerging players are developing rockets, autonomous systems, and AI tools that compete globally. Canada hosts DIANA's North American office in Halifax.

What's missing is the capital infrastructure to support this at scale. A fund that backs ten to twenty dual-use startups annually. Investors with the patience and expertise to navigate defense markets. A thesis that treats national security technology as a feature, not a bug.

Defense tech isn't a niche anymore. Private capital is flowing into it globally because investors finally see what Lux Capital saw two decades ago: this is where serious companies get built. The U.S. venture market for defense and dual-use technology has exploded. If Canada doesn't provide a platform, our best founders will keep taking their ideas elsewhere. If we do, we position ourselves as contributors to allied innovation, not just consumers of technology developed by others.

The Ask

This won't happen by accident.

Canadian investors (pension funds, family offices, institutional capital) need to recognize that strategic tech is a real category with real returns. The One9 portfolio proved the thesis works. Kensington's acquisition signals that mainstream capital is starting to pay attention. The question is whether Canadian LPs will back a dedicated fund or keep watching U.S. firms capture the opportunity.

Entrepreneurs and researchers need to connect with investors who understand the space and with defense stakeholders who can validate technology. Many hard problems are waiting for solutions. The talent exists. The ideas exist. What's missing is the bridge.

And yes, government has a role. Not as funder, but as customer. Procurement reform, clear signals that non-traditional players are welcome, and a willingness to actually buy from startups would make private investment more attractive. The prevailing risk aversion has to shift.

Canada's future security and prosperity aren't separate goals. A Lux North that channels private capital into dual-use innovation serves both. The technology is coming regardless: AI, autonomy, space systems, cyber tools. The question is whether Canadian founders build it here or somewhere else.

We have the talent. We have the strategic need. What we lack is the capital infrastructure and the conviction.

That can change.

The View from Here

I spend my days convincing companies to expand into Canada. The pitch used to be straightforward: proximity to the U.S. market, talent, quality of life, favorable exchange rate. Access to 500 million consumers through NAFTA, now USMCA.

That pitch has gotten harder. Not because Canada changed, but because the assumptions underlying it did. When a founder in San Francisco asks me whether building in Toronto still makes sense given tariff uncertainty, I don't have a clean answer. The honest response is: it depends on what you believe about where this relationship is headed.

To answer that question, you have to understand how we got here. The current confrontation isn't unprecedented. Canada and the U.S. have been through this cycle before. What's different now is the structural shift in American trade policy, which may be more durable than previous swings.

The Long Pattern

The idea of free trade between Canada and the U.S. is not a NAFTA-era invention. It debuted in 1854, when Britain and Washington signed the Reciprocity Treaty eliminating tariffs on natural resources. For a decade, cross-border commerce boomed. Then the U.S. Civil War soured relations, and American protectionists killed the treaty in 1866. Canada's response was to turn inward and consolidate. The colonies of British North America united in 1867 partly to foster internal markets and present a united front to U.S. expansionism. Losing free trade helped push Canada into nationhood.

For the next several decades, high tariffs defined Canadian policy. John A. Macdonald's National Policy of 1879 imposed steep protective tariffs to nurture domestic manufacturing, coupled with transcontinental railroads and western settlement to create an east-west economy rather than a north-south one. These protective tariffs remained a pillar of Canadian policy well into the mid-20th century.

The pattern repeated in 1911. Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier negotiated a new reciprocity agreement with the U.S., which would have eliminated most tariffs on natural products. It triggered a nationalist backlash. Conservatives warned that freer trade would make Canada economically dependent on the United States. They found ammunition when U.S. Congressman Champ Clark declared he looked forward to the day "the American flag will fly over every square foot of [Canada] up to the North Pole." Laurier's government was swept out of power. Talk of free trade ended for decades.

The Great Depression brought the pendulum to its protectionist extreme. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 jacked up U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods. Canada retaliated. U.S. exports to Canada plunged from $948 million in 1929 to $395 million in 1931. Both economies spiraled deeper into crisis. Canada pivoted to the British Empire, embracing Imperial Preference. The lesson reinforced: when the U.S. turns protectionist, Canada's instinct is to diversify.

The postwar decades brought liberalization. The 1965 Auto Pact eliminated tariffs on cars and parts, treating the U.S. and Canadian auto sectors as an integrated whole. By the 1970s, automobile manufacturing had become Canada's largest industry. The Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit carried over 25% of all trade between the two nations. Integration worked.

By the 1980s, Canadian business and political elites concluded that rather than fight integration, Canada should formalize it. The 1988 battle over the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was one of the most divisive in Canadian political history. Liberal leader John Turner called it "the Sale of Canada Act." Mulroney's Conservatives championed it as a leap into prosperity. This time, unlike 1911, the pro-trade side won. The FTA came into effect in 1989, superseded by NAFTA in 1994.

NAFTA undeniably contributed to an explosion of trade. Total Canada-U.S. commerce roughly tripled from the late 1980s to the late 2010s. But it remained politically controversial, coinciding with painful manufacturing restructuring that left parts of both countries feeling left behind.

The Current Break

By the mid-2010s, North America's trade architecture seemed settled. Then Donald Trump's election upended everything. He called NAFTA "the worst trade deal ever made" and forced renegotiation, producing USMCA in 2018. More destabilizing than the renegotiation itself was Trump's willingness to use tariffs as a blunt weapon. His 25% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum in 2018, justified on absurd "national security" grounds, signaled that even close allies weren't safe.

Trump's return to the White House in 2025 escalated the confrontation. Within weeks of his inauguration, he imposed 25% tariffs on virtually all Canadian imports, with a partial exception for energy. He framed it as leverage on immigration and drugs, but the subtext was economic coercion. He even floated the idea of Canada becoming "the fifty-first state."

Canada retaliated in kind. Trudeau announced matching 25% duties on American goods. Public opinion hardened. Anti-American sentiment flared in ways rarely seen. Trudeau delivered the most impassioned speech of his career, declaring that Trump's goal was "the total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us. That is never going to happen."

Then Trudeau stepped aside. Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, won the Liberal leadership by a landslide and led the party to another term. He ran explicitly on standing up to U.S. pressure. His victory speech was direct: "America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape, or form."

Carney has maintained retaliatory tariffs, hinted at leveraging Canada's position as America's top energy supplier, and declared that Canada's "long and deep friendship" with the U.S. "is over." He's pursued trade diversification aggressively, visiting Europe to shore up CETA and positioning Canada as a like-minded partner to the EU.

At the same time, Carney is a realist. Fully 75% of Canadian exports go to the U.S. That kind of integration cannot be unwound overnight. A former Canadian diplomat once observed that Canada "can disagree with the United States but not reject it." Carney has cited this line. The question is how much distance is possible, and at what cost.

Three Futures

No one can say with certainty how this evolves. But we can sketch plausible scenarios based on the drivers at play.

Scenario 1: Reconciliation. Economic realities and domestic pressure push both sides to step back. The U.S. lifts tariffs after extracting token concessions. USMCA reasserts itself. Regular forums smooth irritants. Companies on both sides lobby for relief. The strategic imperative of a unified North America against China provides rationale for cooperation. Supply chains remain integrated, perhaps with some new rules around critical minerals and defense production. The relationship heals, not to pre-2016 warmth, but to functional partnership.

Scenario 2: Controlled Decoupling. The breach proves too wide to mend. USMCA persists on paper but becomes a shell. Canada aggressively diversifies: fast-tracking export infrastructure to ship resources overseas, deepening ties with Japan, Korea, and Europe, completing CETA ratification. Over a decade, Canada shifts perhaps 10-15% of exports away from the U.S. The relationship becomes more transactional. Both economies adapt, but there's a persistent drag on growth. Canada becomes more like other mid-sized countries that spread trade across multiple partners.

Scenario 3: Muddle Through. Neither reconciliation nor serious decoupling. The current trade war de-escalates somewhat, but chronic sectoral disputes continue. Friction is constant but contained. Companies build in buffers and diversify supplier bases. The two countries manage their interdependence without fully trusting it. A kind of cold peace, with periodic skirmishes as the new normal.

What This Means

For businesses making location decisions, the honest answer is that North American integration is no longer a safe assumption. It might persist. It might erode. Planning for optionality makes sense: diversified supply chains, flexibility on where to build capacity, attention to non-U.S. markets.

For Canada, the policy implications are clear regardless of which scenario unfolds. Removing interprovincial trade barriers, investing in export infrastructure to Europe and Asia, moving up the value chain rather than shipping raw resources. These are prudent whether the U.S. market stays open or not.

The deeper question is whether this moment represents a temporary swing or a permanent structural shift. American trade policy has moved from bipartisan support for liberalization to bipartisan skepticism. Even Democratic administrations now pursue industrial policy and "Buy American" rules. The U.S. may simply be a less reliable partner going forward, regardless of who occupies the White House.

Geography still matters. The sheer volume of Canada-U.S. commerce creates constituencies on both sides that want to maintain ties. Millions of jobs depend on it. That acts as glue. But glue can weaken.

The Canada-U.S. trade relationship has weathered many storms. Each time, the two nations found a new equilibrium. This time may be no different. Or the equilibrium may look quite different from what came before.

The next chapter is being written now.

There are things you carry that weigh more than they should. A phrase someone said once, a particular quality of light on a particular afternoon, a colour. Not because any of them were objectively remarkable, but because of when they happened, and the fact that they can't happen again. You hold onto them precisely because your hands can't close around them.

I think most people have a version of this. Some object or memory that means far more than its contents justify. A ticket stub, a voicemail you never deleted, a sentence that someone said to you offhandedly that somehow became one of the most important things you've ever heard. The weight has nothing to do with the thing itself. It has to do with the fact that the moment that produced it is gone, and the thing is all that's left. You protect it the way you'd protect something fragile, because it is. Not physically, but in every other way that matters.

Colour is like this too, or at least it used to be. Most colours just exist, ambient and unremarkable, part of the furniture of the world. Blue is the sky. Green is the grass. We don't think about them because they don't ask us to. But purple was different once. Purple used to be something that could change your life, or end it. It used to matter in a way that no colour does anymore, and the story of how it lost that power is not really a story about economics or empires. It's a story about what happens when something irreplaceable disappears, and what it means when the thing that replaces it isn't the same.

The Phoenicians discovered, thousands of years ago, that a small gland inside a sea snail produced a pigment that, when exposed to sunlight, turned a violet so deep and so permanent that nothing else in nature could match it. The colour didn't fade. If anything, it grew richer over time. Twelve thousand snails for a single gram of usable dye. Worth more than gold by weight. The workshops lined the coast of what is now Lebanon, and the Phoenicians guarded their monopoly with the seriousness of people who understood exactly what they had. This was not just a colour. It was a strategic resource, and for centuries it underwrote an entire civilization's wealth.

The Romans took it further. They made it law who could wear purple and how much of it. "Born to the purple" was not a figure of speech. It described children born in the emperor's purple-draped chamber. To wear the colour without permission could get you killed. For a thousand years, across multiple civilizations, a single colour carried that kind of authority. Not because of anything inherent in the pigment, but because of what it took to produce it and the world that had to exist in order for it to be made at all.

I think about the people who wore it and knew what it cost. Not the money, but the specificity of it. A particular snail on a particular coastline, a technique passed down through generations that could vanish at any moment. They must have understood, at some level, that they were wearing something the world might not always be able to give them. That awareness would have been part of the experience. The colour wasn't just beautiful. It was temporary, in the deepest sense. The entire apparatus that made it possible was fragile, dependent on knowledge and ecology and political stability, all of which could disappear.

And it did. Constantinople fell, and the knowledge fell with it. The workshops closed. A technique refined over millennia simply disappeared. For four hundred years, no one on earth could produce that colour. It existed only in the memory of old textiles, fading slowly in cathedral storage rooms and royal collections. The most powerful colour in human history became a ghost.

Then eventually, as with most things humans lose, someone found a way to approximate it. A chemistry student in London stumbled onto a synthetic version by accident, and within a generation you could buy purple for almost nothing. But it wasn't the same purple. It was the colour without the history, the pigment without the world that had produced it. Like hearing a song re-recorded by someone who doesn't know what it was originally about. The notes are all there. The meaning isn't.

That's the part that stays with me. Not that purple became common, but that what made it what it was could never be recovered. The snails, the coastline, the generations of knowledge, the civilization that cared enough to build an economy around a colour. All of it gone. What we have now is a replica, and replicas can be perfect in every measurable way and still feel like nothing.

We do this with everything, not just colours. We treat impermanence as proof that something mattered. A conversation means more when you sense it might be the last one. A place means more after you've left it. We carry certain memories more carefully than others, not because they were the happiest, but because they were the ones that couldn't stay. The finitude is where the meaning lives, and no amount of rationality seems to touch that.

This is not a comfortable thing to admit. It suggests that some part of what makes life beautiful is the fact that it ends, and that we wouldn't trade that, not really, even if we could. That the things we hold closest are the things we've already started to lose, or have lost, or know we will. The anticipation of absence sharpens everything. It makes colours more vivid and words more important and ordinary afternoons into something you'd give anything to have back.

Maybe that's what specialness actually is. Not a quality inside the thing itself, but the awareness that it won't always be here. That everything you love is on loan. The Phoenicians understood this, even if they understood it in the language of commerce. The Romans understood it, even if they expressed it through control. And we understand it too, in the way we hold onto phrases and places and people long after the rational case for holding on has dissolved.

Purple is everywhere now. It asks nothing of us and we give it nothing in return. The colour has been solved. You can have as much of it as you want, forever, and it will never mean what it used to mean.

But sometimes someone tells you everything will be ok, and you believe them, not because the words are rare but because the person saying them was, and because the moment was, and because you understood already that you wouldn't always have it. That's what makes it stay with you long after it should. That's what gives a simple phrase the weight of something ancient and irreplaceable, something no factory or formula can reproduce.

Everything will be ok. Not because it's true. But because someone meant it once, and that has to be enough.

About one month ago, I fell off my motorcycle. Well, fell off is not the most accurate way to put it. Neither is dropped or crashed. I guess I could say I fell with my motorcycle, ending up underneath it.

I was riding up in Northern Ontario. The air was super crisp and the skies were clear. There's nothing like cruising through the side roads smelling the nearby forests.

Honestly, I wasn't going that fast. The sweet spot for my motorcycle is around 70 to 80 km/h. Any more than that and it gets a little buzzy. It was my first long ride, and I was avoiding the major highways for that reason. I chose to take it slower and to finally let my cruiser-style motorcycle go for a proper cruise.

The total journey was about 3 ½ hours. I was already taking longer. I stopped for some breaks here and there. Mostly to re-orient myself as I made a wrong turn (or three). I also wanted to experience silence. It sounds corny, but the quiet rustle of the trees and the absence of any human noise really felt special. I didn't take off my boots and socks and feel the earth between my toes, but the feelings were along those lines.

I first saw the construction signs going into another set of curvy side road. A re-paving project of some kind. Naturally, not a construction worker in sight. Nor anyone else. It was too deserted of a road. It was during a week-day, early afternoon. Perhaps they were taking a break, or working elsewhere. Either way, the signs said to slow down. The first stretch of construction was a smooth, fresh paved road. I had music in my ears and the sun was coming through the trees making a perfect balance against the cool air. I was overconfident, carving through the turns.

There were more warning signs up ahead, and embarrassingly they barely registered in my mind. Then the road surface changed to gravel. Rough and unpaved, the sudden transition startled me. It wouldn't have if I was paying attention and slowed down.

From what I remember, it felt like I was riding over a million tiny speedbumps. I think my right hand tightened on the front brakes instinctively, but unfortunately it was the wrong instinct. By pulling the front breaks and not slowly stepping on the rear brakes, I unbalanced the bike. I don't remember what happened after that.

Not until I was laying up looking at the sky with my motorcycle laying over my left leg, pinning me. The motorcycle was still running but it soon flooded and stopped. My left arm had carved a gouge in the gravel, and that's the first pain that hit me.

I struggled to get up and realized I was stuck. I took my helmet off and tried pulling my leg again. No movement. While the pain in my arm (and the blood) was uncomfortable, another strange feeling came over me. A weird sense of peace and resignation. I was stuck, and it seemed like there was nothing I could do.

I laid my head back down. It was almost like I was taking a rest break.

The gravel was surprisingly comfortable, or maybe I was just too tired to care. My helmet sat a few feet away, the visor scratched. I could hear the wind moving through the trees. No cars. No people. Just me, pinned under 400 pounds of steel and chrome on an empty construction road in Northern Ontario.

I should have been panicking. That's what you're supposed to do, right? But instead, there was this strange clarity. I thought about how I'd probably miss my planned destination. The thing is, no one would have even been waiting for me. I looked at my arm. The scrape was worse than I thought, bleeding steadily into the gravel. I didn't realize how deep a hole one could make in their elbow. Not terrible, but not great either.

The motorcycle's engine had died, but I could smell the fuel. That snapped something in me. Not quite panic, but enough discomfort to try again. I pushed against the bike with my free leg. Nothing. I tried pulling my trapped leg. Still nothing. The weight wasn't crushing, but it was absolute. I was genuinely stuck.

And that's when the resignation deepened. Not into despair exactly, but into a kind of acceptance. Fine, I thought. This is where I am. This is what's happening.

I lay there for what felt like twenty minutes but was probably five. Watching clouds. Listening to nothing. Part of me was waiting for someone to show up—a construction worker, another rider, anyone. But the other part of me knew I was alone. Really alone. And that this was mine to figure out.

The pain in my arm started to feel less sharp and more insistent. A dull throb that wouldn't let me stay comfortable in my resignation. My leg was starting to go numb under the bike's weight. These weren't emergency-level problems yet, but they were problems that weren't going to solve themselves by lying still.

I took a breath and tried to think practically. The bike was on its left side, pinning my left leg. My right leg was free. Both arms worked, even if one was bleeding. I couldn't lift the bike. Not from this angle, not with this leverage. But maybe I could shift it. Maybe I could wiggle free.

I started small. Pushing the bike with my hands, seeing if I could rock it even an inch. It barely moved, but it moved. I tried again, this time coordinating with my free leg for leverage. Another inch. The pain in my trapped leg sharpened as the pressure shifted, but that meant movement was possible.

It was slow. Pathetically slow. Rock the bike. Rest. Breathe. Push with my leg. Rock again. I was sweating now despite the cool air. My arm was leaving a larger blood stain in the gravel each time I pushed. At some point I started talking to myself—or maybe to the motorcycle. "Come on. Just a little more."

After what felt like forever, I felt my boot shift. Not free, but looser. I gave one more push, harder this time, and pulled my leg at the same angle. It slid out. Without the boot, but I was free.

I lay there for another minute, this time by choice. My left leg hurt but worked. My arm was a mess. I was covered in dust and blood and some motor oil. But I was out.

Getting up was its own challenge. Everything hurt in new ways once I tried to move. But I stood. The motorcycle lay there like it was taking its own rest break. I checked myself over. Nothing broken. Nothing that couldn't heal. Lucky.

It took me another ten minutes to get the bike upright. It started on the fourth try, as I had flooded the engine. But once started, it seemed like nothing had happened. I sat on it for a moment, not quite ready to ride, just processing. The same road stretched ahead. Still gravel, still unpaved, still marked with warning signs I should have paid more attention to.

I thought about turning back. Taking the long way around. But that felt wrong somehow. Not because I needed to prove something, but because I'd already made it this far. The road would turn back to pavement eventually. I just needed to go slowly. Pay attention. Do the thing I should have done in the first place.

So I did. I rode the rest of that gravel stretch at maybe 30 km/h, standing slightly on the pegs to absorb the bumps, focused entirely on the road surface. When I finally hit pavement again, I didn't speed up right away. I just kept going.

The rest of the ride was unremarkable. I stopped once to clean up my arm at a gas station bathroom. I felt embarrassed. It looked worse than it was. The attendant asked if I was okay. I said yes. He didn't seem convinced, but he didn't push. I don't blame him, I'd be cautious asking too much of a scruffy, blood and dirt covered, tired looking stranger too.

By the time I got back to Toronto, the adrenaline had worn off completely. I was just tired. Sore. My left leg was stiff and the bruise looked gnarly. I was ready to be done for the day.

I've thought about that moment a lot since. Lying there under the bike, feeling stuck, choosing resignation over panic. There was something almost peaceful about it, letting go of control I didn't have anyway. But there was also something dangerous about it. That comfort in being stuck. That ease of just staying down.

Getting out required something different. Not heroic effort or dramatic revelation. Just small movements. Persistent, uncomfortable, incremental pushing until something shifted. And then doing it again. And again.

I'm not going to pretend the motorcycle accident is some grand metaphor for life. But I can't deny the feeling was familiar. That moment of lying still, accepting being stuck, waiting for something external to change. And then the slow realization that nothing was coming. That if I wanted to move, I had to move myself.

The scrapes and bruise healed in about a month. The motorcycle needed some minor work, some scratches I didn't bother fixing.

And I'm still riding, though I slow down for construction zones now.

Every so often, you catch it. Someone close to breaking. It's not loud or dramatic. There's no scene. Just a small fracture at the edge of their face, the kind we've all carried at some point. They might be sitting a little too still, or speaking in a tone that feels almost too careful, as if any sudden movement might cause the whole thing to crack open.

It's subtle enough that you could miss it entirely if you weren't paying attention. And most people do.

In those moments, you face a choice. You can look away, because that's the easier thing to do. The thing we've been trained for. You can give them their space, pretend you didn't notice, tell yourself you'd only make it worse by stepping in. We convince ourselves that's the polite option, that it's what they would want.

Or you can do the harder thing.

Not the big, dramatic, world-saving thing. Just the quiet, human act of not letting someone carry the full weight of their invisibility. That doesn't have to mean a grand gesture. It might simply mean holding their gaze for a moment longer than you normally would. Or saying something small and soft, in a way no one else can hear. Or offering a resource, a nudge, a reminder that they're not completely alone—even though you may never know whether it helped.

Because you don't know what people are carrying. You don't know how close someone might be to breaking. And you may never know what difference it makes when you choose to notice. But it does make a difference.

I think about these moments long after they pass. The person on the bench. The colleague whose words sounded a little too measured, as if they might splinter if pushed even slightly. The friend at dinner who pushed food around their plate and smiled at all the right times but never truly joined the conversation. I may not know the full story of what they were carrying, but I do know I was able to offer something small. A word, a resource, a quiet moment of acknowledgment—and I hope it lightened things for them, even just a little.

It's not about changing the world. It's not about a lesson. It's about one person noticing another, just long enough for them to feel less alone. That's all.

Because strength isn't always about holding your own line. Sometimes it's about holding the line for someone else, even for just a moment, without them ever having to ask.

That's not about being a savior. It's about being human.

And the truth is, those moments don't just help the other person. They shape us too. They remind us that the people around us are more than passing shapes in a crowd. They remind us that we are all, at different times, the one holding it together by a thread.

Maybe that's the quiet purpose of it all. To be the kind of person who notices. To step just slightly outside the cultural script that tells us to stay separate. To take the risk of showing a small act of care, even when it would be easier not to.

Because we never know when that one small choice might mean more than we can imagine.

I've always needed a way to quietly leave. Not escape—just reset. This piece is about the walkabouts I take when I need to be nobody for a little while. Not a productivity hack. Not a routine. Just a quiet return to myself.

There's a certain rhythm I've had to relearn—one that isn't scheduled, optimized, or announced. It's not something I talk about often, because it doesn't lend itself to a calendar invite or a thread. But it's shaped everything that matters.

I call them walkabouts.

Not the kind with hiking boots or backpacks or photo evidence. Not exercise. Not even "getting steps in." My walkabouts are quieter than that. More selfish. They are when I leave—not for long, but long enough. Out the door. Down a street. Sometimes nowhere. Sometimes somewhere very specific. A bench. A railing. A stoop that catches the light.

And I just walk.

These are not breaks from work. They are breaks from identity. From the version of myself that's required—on calls, in family rooms, in messages, in roles. There are days when I need to stop holding my life up like it's a tray I'm carrying with careful balance, and instead set it down beside me and look at it without needing to perform inside it.

That's what a walkabout gives me: a chance to step outside the story I'm in, without needing to end the story entirely.

I started doing this in moments of emotional crisis. Days when I couldn't hear myself think inside the house. Nights when I was a little too known by the people I loved. I'd say, "I need to go for a quick walk." Sometimes I wouldn't even say it. Just go.

And I noticed something. After ten minutes, I was no longer thinking about what had happened. I wasn't even thinking about who I was supposed to be. I was seeing things again. A light bouncing off a window. The precise cruelty of a dead branch on a perfect tree. The teenager yelling into his headphones. The brief permission to feel like nobody in particular.

That anonymity made space for something else to emerge: a kind of slow inner honesty that doesn't show up in meetings or journal pages. The truth that waits for silence. The part of me that doesn't interrupt. That just… watches.

And it didn't take long for that to become essential.

I don't know how to explain this without sounding like I'm romanticizing loneliness. But walkabouts aren't lonely. They're private. They're intimate in a way that's hard to describe—like slipping into bed alone and knowing your body again. Like returning to a part of yourself that doesn't need translation.

The best ones don't solve anything. They don't end with a conclusion. There's no big insight, no pivot, no profound decision. Just a kind of cellular reset. Like my mind sighs. Like I can come back inside without dragging all my shadows behind me.

We don't talk about that enough, do we? The small, unsponsored rituals that keep people sane. The ones that don't scale. That don't get published or posted or tracked. The sacred habits that don't look impressive but quietly hold your life together.

For me, it's walking.

It's not a routine. It's a returning.

It's the thing that reminds me I exist outside of anyone's expectations, outside of productivity, outside of even who I've told myself I am. A walkabout is not a retreat. It's a re-becoming. And I need it. More than I admit.

So if you ever see me stepping out without warning—don't ask where I'm going. I won't know until I get there. And I won't be gone long.

But when I come back, I'll be a little more myself again.

When I started working at Canadian Tire—my first real job—I ended up shadowing this guy named Kevin. He wasn't management, but he ran the floor like it was his. Everyone liked him. He always had a joke ready, remembered customers' names, and could charm a frustrated senior into buying the wrong socket wrench and thanking him for it.

But here's the thing: Kevin didn't actually know that much about tools. He'd ask me questions about SKUs that I, a 17-year-old barely trained seasonal hire, had to guess my way through. But it didn't matter. Kevin understood people—and in retail, that's 90% of the job.

He couldn't explain how he did it. You just had to watch. I did.

From Kevin, I learned how to throw compliments like darts—fast, effortless, and mostly accurate. How a little physical presence—like walking beside someone or handing them the item they were looking for—could build micro-trust. How not to challenge people's assumptions, but to lean into their version of the story.

He taught me that you didn't need to be good all the time—just memorable in the moments that mattered.

The result? Kevin could sell snow shovels in July. He was magnetic. And I wanted to be like him.

So I learned the tricks. I learned how to manage a room, how to read moods and mirror them, how to switch gears depending on who I was with. And it worked. It worked in retail, it worked in interviews, it even worked at parties.

But when it came to actual friendship—real, lasting, show-up-when-it's-bad friendship—it fell apart.

The truth is, you can't game long-haul relationships. You can't endlessly adapt and expect depth to grow. If you're constantly tweaking yourself to be more appealing, you're also telling yourself: who I really am isn't enough.

And worse, it's exhausting.

There are people in your life—maybe just one or two—who always make you feel like you have to be "on." Where hanging out feels like a low-stakes audition. Where you rehearse your stories a bit more, where your shirt fits a little tighter. And maybe at first, it feels like winning. You're in. You're admired.

But you do it 10 times. Then 50. Then 100. And suddenly the whole thing feels like emotional cardio: high effort, low reward.

Every time you shift a little to fit someone's frame, you add friction. It's tiny, at first—just a sliver of self-betrayal. But friction adds up. One day, you'll choose ease over effort. You'll stop texting back. You'll ghost the group chat. And you'll tell yourself you're just "too busy." But really, you're just tired of shape-shifting.

What I've come to believe is that the real killer of meaningful relationships isn't distance or disagreement—it's the slow, subtle erosion of self over time. Because eventually, we all run out of stamina for pretending.

Imagine climbing a mountain with a backpack full of water bottles that aren't yours. That's what curated relationships feel like. You think you're being generous. But you're just making the climb harder, and lonelier.

The people worth building with—the ones you actually want around in ten years—won't need the theatrics. They'll want your messy, quiet, smart-ass, distracted, ridiculous self. Not your "customer-facing" version.

I used to think Kevin was winning. But eventually I noticed he spent most of his shift in the stockroom, scrolling his phone, cracking jokes with whoever wandered back. That charisma wasn't free—it came with a price. And downtime was how he paid for it.

He was recovering. From the weight of the role he had to play.

I've played that role too. For a long time. I wanted to be impressive, magnetic, indispensable. I wanted people to think, "Damn, I need that guy around." And maybe they did—for a while. But it wore me down. Because the second you build a relationship on the performance, you're stuck performing just to keep it.

Real connection is quiet. It's who still shows up when there's nothing left to impress.

So now? I'm aiming for friendships where I don't have to rehearse. Where I don't need a costume. Where being me is—somehow—still enough.

Because the people I want around aren't my customers. They're the ones I'll hike with, over and over, for the rest of my life. And for that kind of trip, I need to pack light.