"Have you ever, on a cloudless night, looked down from a passing aircraft flying over Canada? Endless, glowing strings of cities, towns, and homesteads. Stretching on and on, one province to the next. With only the stars in the distance"
About this Quote
From 30,000 feet, Paul Martin turns Canada into a sentence you can read: lit-up “strings” of settlement, stitched province to province, holding together a country famous for its distances. It’s a politician’s aerial sublime, but not the empty kind. The image does real work. It takes an abstract national project-federalism, redistribution, the quiet machinery that keeps remote places connected-and makes it visible, almost touchable, as if the nation’s legitimacy is literally glowing in the dark.
The intent is inclusion by way of infrastructure and demography: not Canada-as-wilderness, but Canada-as-lived-in. “Homesteads” sneaks in a founding myth of perseverance and small proprietorship, while “endless” insists that the story doesn’t stop at the familiar urban corridor. That’s a pointed corrective to a recurring Canadian anxiety: that the country is either too big to govern or too thin to matter. Martin flips the anxiety into reassurance. Look, it’s all there.
The subtext is also managerial. This is the view of someone who believes in systems: grids, roads, public services, markets underwritten by the state. The stars “in the distance” are a deft rhetorical feint. They enlarge the scene, yes, but they also relativize it: against cosmic emptiness, the human pattern becomes precious, even fragile. That note of fragility nudges the listener toward stewardship-an argument for keeping the lights on, literally and politically.
Contextually, it fits Martin’s brand of nation-building liberalism: Canada as a practical moral achievement, not a romantic accident. The poetry is strategic; the policy is the punchline.
The intent is inclusion by way of infrastructure and demography: not Canada-as-wilderness, but Canada-as-lived-in. “Homesteads” sneaks in a founding myth of perseverance and small proprietorship, while “endless” insists that the story doesn’t stop at the familiar urban corridor. That’s a pointed corrective to a recurring Canadian anxiety: that the country is either too big to govern or too thin to matter. Martin flips the anxiety into reassurance. Look, it’s all there.
The subtext is also managerial. This is the view of someone who believes in systems: grids, roads, public services, markets underwritten by the state. The stars “in the distance” are a deft rhetorical feint. They enlarge the scene, yes, but they also relativize it: against cosmic emptiness, the human pattern becomes precious, even fragile. That note of fragility nudges the listener toward stewardship-an argument for keeping the lights on, literally and politically.
Contextually, it fits Martin’s brand of nation-building liberalism: Canada as a practical moral achievement, not a romantic accident. The poetry is strategic; the policy is the punchline.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wanderlust |
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