Parenting & Family Quote by Romeo LeBlanc

"A long time ago, in the future" is a politician's dream of a time machine that runs on civics. Romeo LeBlanc borrows an Inuit proverb (or what he was told was one) to collapse past and future into the same moral space, then pivots to the real ask: public memory as public policy. The phrasing does two clever things at once. It flatters modern audiences with the idea that Indigenous wisdom holds a deeper, non-linear understanding of time, and it smuggles in a warning: the choices we call "history" are being manufactured right now.

LeBlanc's second sentence - "Let the children see our history" - is not a neutral appeal to education. It's an argument about custody. Who owns the story of a country, and who gets to hand it down? In the Canadian context, where national identity has often been curated through commemorations, museums, and school curricula, "children" functions as the cleanest, least contestable constituency imaginable. If you can justify something as for kids, you can bypass adult ideological trench warfare.

The subtext is reputational and remedial: history isn't only remembrance, it's repair. Coming from a senior public figure, it carries the gentle coercion of state-building - a nudge that "our history" should be made visible, coherent, and shareable so the future can be steered. The Inuit reference adds authority and moral warmth, but it also raises a harder question the line leaves unspoken: which histories get centered, and which are finally allowed to interrupt the national script.