Cultural Sovereignty Is a Creative Act

It’s time for bold cultural policy that treats artists as civic leaders and public imagination as a resource worth protecting.

As chaos reigns south of the border, we Canadians are asking: Who do we want to be? What is this moment asking of us?

What it means to be Canadian is nearly impossible to define. But to explore this question is nothing short of a creative act.

Despite our reflex to define ourselves as Not American, our cultural identity has long been shaped by the dominance of the American ethos - culturally, politically, economically. As fellow Substack writer and futurist Jesse Hirsh points out in The Americanization of Canadian Minds, “Canada is not being annexed through force or law. What we’re experiencing is far more subtle—and in many ways, far more effective. We are absorbing American political culture through our screens, our parties, our news cycles, and ultimately, our imagination.”

If Canada doesn’t actively invest in cultivating and sharing our own distinctive cultural expressions—both domestically and globally—our identity risks being left to the imagination of others.

What would it take to move beyond the old narrative of the mosaic and embrace a more complex, inclusive view of who we are and who we are becoming?

In recent years, we’ve confronted the deep harm of our colonial history and its narratives. We’re learning that the stories we once told about ourselves are not only unjust, but also insufficient. The process of reconciliation and decolonization has only just begun. Today’s Canada is pluralistic—messy, layered, and alive. We contain multitudes, and it’s one of our greatest assets.

To embrace our plurality, we can’t merely live side by side in polite tolerance. (Though politeness can be a helpful quality.) If we aspired to live in a generative, dynamic relationship with one another, weaving together our diverse social, political, creative, and ecological landscapes, we might better align ourselves with mutual thriving. In this imagination, we are not a collection of parts. We are a whole—a web of interrelations, grounded not only in our diverse cultural identities and histories, but in our connection to the diverse landscapes that make up our expansive country.

As Jennifer Brandel writes in Invisible Landscapes, “The structure of the interstitium is fractal; it exhibits the same pattern at various scales. It’s unified. [It is] a conceptual skeleton key, unlocking a more sophisticated, accurate way of seeing everything in the environment.” Like the connective fascial tissue that holds the human body together, Canadian culture is all of what holds us together. It’s subtle, but essential. And as we face growing threats from south of the border, that connectivity is becoming more visible, more critical. We may disagree, but we still care for one another. And we will not allow a foreign power to make us turn on each other. Sorry.

While hockey, maple syrup, mounties, poutine, and unnecessary apologies are recognizable symbols of Canada, it is our artists who do the heaviest lifting when it comes to expressing and reflecting the diversity of what it means to be Canadian.

Though the status of the artist in Canada has been steadily eroded, it’s through stories, songs, rituals, and creative acts that we share who we are. It’s there in the mural on the side of the community centre, the theatre production that made you cry in the dark, the story that helped you understand someone else’s experience, and yes—even in the national anthem, which we don’t just read but SING to feel a sense of connection and solidarity, (especially when our hockey players are on the ice and everything feels like it’s on the line, eh?). That’s the power of collective expression. Art is the oldest technology we have for sharing with each other what it means to be human.

And yet, how can arts and culture meet this moment when the sector is in its most precarious state in recent history? The crisis is not just economic—it reflects a broader erosion of our critical social infrastructure. It is a predictable outcome of a neoliberal capitalist society.

In the neoliberal paradigm, the finger is always pointed back to individual actors (people and organizations) to respond and adapt to the further extraction of time, attention, and labour the system inflicts in the name of profit and the false promise of collective prosperity. The system itself (through the policies that govern it) never seems to take any responsibly for the harm that these extractive practices exact. This is not just happening in the arts. It’s happening in all the sectors designed to facilitate social interaction, well-being, and community development - education, health care, housing, journalism, and more.

Canada cannot build or sustain its cultural sovereignty without attending to the interconnected systems that make art possible: stable funding, yes, but also affordable housing, fair wages, accessible healthcare, trusted journalism, and protections against digital ownership of artists’ intellectual property.

It also requires cultivating a society that values and benefits from a creative life.

The job of culture is to make life livable, meaningful, and coherent—not only through consuming art, but through making it, participating in it, and sharing in the commons it nurtures.

In The End of the Public: From Collapse to Commons, Jesse Hirsh warns of the shrinking spaces “where citizens could influence power, hold leaders accountable, and care for one another beyond private interest.”

As public infrastructure is hollowed out, “Democratic institutions are increasingly symbolic. Decisions are made not in parliaments, but in corporate boardrooms, venture capital funds, and opaque algorithms. The state, once imagined as the guardian of the public interest, is now the junior partner to private power.”

In this landscape, it becomes an existential imperative to support meaningful human connection—and art is one of our most powerful processes for doing that.

Where rational discourse collapses into ideological binaries, art holds space for metaphor, complexity, empathy, and moral imagination. It helps us see each other and ourselves more clearly—and more compassionately.

As we accelerate into a technological age, we need artists more than ever to engage the public imagination—not only through their work, but through creative processes that AI and algorithms simply cannot replicate. This work is intimate and collective. It helps individuals see themselves in the whole—and that’s the foundation of any truly sovereign society.

As we approach our next federal election, Canada must create the conditions for a reimagined commons where we can dream our future together. This is an opportunity to shed the logics of old systems that rely heavily on extraction, competition, and commodification. Orienting ourselves toward the mutual thriving of people and planet is an existential imperative.

This work cannot be left to the private sector alone. Nor can it be ceded to foreign-owned tech and media companies that act without ethical guardrails, profiting from shaping our beliefs and behaviour.

Yes, “Buy Canadian” campaigns matter. But as a stand-alone strategy, they reduce us to consumers. And we are not just consumers—we are citizens. People. Neighbours. Co-creators of a shared civic life.

If we don’t engage with creative expressions of who we are in public, we remain stuck in a defensive posture, forever defining ourselves by what we are not.

Sovereignty isn’t just a legal state of nationhood. It’s an imagination of what holds us together. And it becomes real through the creative expressions of who we are—in all our layered complexity. Only art can get close to that truth. Because art is the most powerful process of meaning-making that we have.

It’s time we recognize that, and give artists what they need to help build the most urgent project of our time: cultivating a vibrant cultural commons. A shared public imagination that is just, inclusive, and beautiful. One that lets us be ourselves - a people who live together, unapologetically, on this land we call Canada.