Part 3 of 3

A Celebration of Canada, America, and the Friendships That Outlast Everything

Every year on July 1st, I raise a glass to Canada — not as a courtesy or a diplomatic gesture, but because North Bay, Ontario is one of the places in the world where my family’s story lives, and because some of my closest friends on earth are Canadian. People I have known for more than three decades. People whose children grew up alongside mine.

This July I will be there again, celebrating Canada Day with them. And a few days later, on July 4th, I will celebrate my own country’s birthday — without apology, without diminishment of theirs, and with the full knowledge that they will raise a glass right along with me. That, more than anything I could write in an essay, is the thing I want people to understand.

Two Nations, One Summer

In the early 1990s, my wife Kim and I lived in North Bay for four years. Our children were young. We celebrated July 1st with fireworks and neighbours and the particular warmth of a Canadian summer. We watched our kids run across the same lawns, eat the same corn, and stay up too late watching the same sky light up — and a few days later we did it all again, this time for America’s birthday.

Nobody made it complicated. Nobody had to choose. Two nations, one summer, one sky, and one family of friends who accepted us completely and let us be fully who we were.

I think about those summers often, especially now, when the relationship between our two countries is carrying more weight than it has in a long time. Trade tensions are real. Political rhetoric has been sharp and, at times, disrespectful in ways I have personally felt were wrong and unnecessary. My Canadian friends are not just frustrated — some of them are genuinely hurt. I understand that, and I don’t dismiss it.

But I also know something that those years in North Bay taught me, and that thirty-four years of friendship have confirmed: the bond between Canada and the United States is not a policy arrangement. It is something much older, much harder to break, and much more important than any tariff schedule.

Different Paths to the Same Place

July 4th celebrates a revolution. July 1st celebrates a confederation. Those are genuinely different stories, and Canadians are right to be proud of the distinction. Canada did not break from Britain in anger — it negotiated its way to nationhood through patience, compromise, and a deeply characteristic preference for getting things right over getting them fast.

America declared its principles loudly, in the summer of 1776, in language that was radical and imperfect and astonishing all at once. Canada built its institutions quietly and pragmatically, over generations. Both approaches reflected the character of the people who chose them.

What is remarkable is where both paths arrived. Two nations sharing the longest peaceful border on earth. Two democracies that have, through very different temperaments, arrived at the same fundamental commitments: rule of law, individual rights, peaceful transfer of power, freedom of expression, and a belief that government exists to serve people rather than the other way around. These are not small things. Measured against the sweep of human history, they are extraordinary ones.

The current tensions do not change that. Disagreements between close partners are not the same as conflict between adversaries. Canada and the United States have argued before — over trade, over foreign policy, over the environment, over hockey — and the relationship has held. It will hold again. The foundation is deeper than any dispute.

What Friendship Across Difference Teaches Us

I have spent years thinking about human flourishing — what it actually takes for individuals, communities, and societies to thrive. One thing I have come to believe deeply is that the practice of genuine friendship across difference is not just a personal virtue. It is a civic skill, and a rare one.

My Canadian friends and I do not agree on everything. We have sat on back porches, coffee in hand, and navigated real disagreements about politics, economics, and the state of the world. What has made those conversations possible is not that we pretended to agree, or softened our views to avoid friction. It is that we chose, a long time ago, to be genuinely curious about each other — to seek understanding before seeking to persuade, and to protect the friendship as something worth more than winning any particular argument.

That is not a small discipline. Most of us, when we feel strongly about something, want to make our case. The harder practice, and the more generative one, is to stay curious a little longer. To ask what someone else sees from where they stand. To let their perspective land before you respond to it.

I sat on my friend’s patio last summer, during a time when Canada-US tensions were running high, and I made a deliberate choice to listen more than I spoke. I learned things I would not have learned any other way. That did not require me to abandon my own views. It just required me to make room for his.

The Human Flourishing Project

America’s 250th anniversary is not a moment for uncomplicated celebration. The Declaration of Independence was a flawed document produced by flawed men who nonetheless articulated something true about human aspiration — that people are endowed with inherent dignity, that freedom is a condition for flourishing, that the purpose of governance is to protect rather than diminish the possibilities of a human life.

That idea did not stay within America’s borders. It traveled. It was borrowed, adapted, argued over, and built upon by people and nations around the world — including Canada, which took those same underlying convictions and expressed them in its own way, through its own history.

At Human Flourishing, the work we do is grounded in the belief that human flourishing is not an American project or a Canadian project or a Western project. It is a universal one. The conditions that allow people to live lives of purpose, connection, and meaning — safety, freedom, dignity, opportunity, belonging — are not culturally specific. They are what human beings need, everywhere.

The Declaration of Independence matters because it gave those conditions political form and named them as rights rather than privileges. The Canadian tradition matters because it demonstrated that the same values could be built through a different and equally legitimate path. Both matter because the human flourishing project is bigger than either country, and we need all the evidence we can gather that it is possible.

An Invitation for Everyone

I am aware that not everyone reading this will have a thirty-year friendship across the border, or memories of watching fireworks in two countries in the same week. But most people have something analogous — a friendship, a family relationship, a colleague — whose national background, political identity, or cultural frame differs from their own.

The question I want to leave you with is a simple one: what would it look like to celebrate who they are, without diminishing who you are?

Not to paper over real differences. Not to pretend that policy disagreements are trivial. But to hold the relationship as something worth protecting — to choose curiosity over dismissal, understanding over scoring points, genuine connection over the comfort of talking only to people who already agree with you.

That practice, at scale, is what human flourishing actually requires. It is what makes democracy work, what makes good neighborhoods and good organizations and good countries. It is what my Canadian friends modeled for me, without ever calling it anything.

This July, I will be in North Bay. We will watch fireworks on July 1st, together, and I will feel what I always feel: gratitude that this particular stretch of the world let my family in, that these particular people chose to be our friends, and that thirty-four years later we are still raising glasses to each other.

A few days after that, I will be the American in the room on the Fourth of July. They will let me have it — the patriotism, the pride, the celebration of a document and an idea that I believe in. And I will carry it lightly, aware of how much I have been given by a country that is not mine.

Two flags. One July. One friendship that has outlasted every difficulty.

That is the human flourishing project. Right there.