W.B. Yeats once wrote that “the centre cannot hold.” In Canada’s case, this is increasingly true.
The country isn’t collapsing under the weight of competing separatist projects. Rather, it’s quietly dissolving under the acids of institutional unraveling, political incoherence, and a growing sense that regional interests and identities are more important than any sense of “Canadianness.” The problem, therefore, is not one of a dramatic crisis. It’s more one of incremental balkanization. Provinces aren’t formally breaking away from the Canadian confederation. Rather, they’re just increasingly doing their own thing – irrespective of Ottawa and the national vision that that city represents.
