Back in January, I felt like I was living in two countries at once. Trump said he wanted to annex Canada and waged an economic war. In response, Canadians bought local with patriotic fervour. But in Alberta, where I was living, it felt like the opposite sentiment was swelling. I noticed more voices calling for U.S. annexation. On X, I saw posts from former neighbours and friends of friends cheering on the idea of becoming the 51st state. A few were even planning a “patriotic” lunch at Jack in the Box. I didn’t know what future Canada would choose.

Right now, this country is taking a long, hard look at what it is and its place in the world. On instinct, we’ve turned quickly to governments, community leaders and policy experts for direction on how to be a nation. But we’ve forgotten one of our most powerful tools: literature. The Canadian canon offers clarity, a sensibility grounded in reflection and empathy. In the midst of our resurgent nationalism, its stories may just hold untapped potential in shaping our country’s identity.

In the Literary History of Canada, published in 1965, the critic Northrop Frye described a “garrison mentality” as a defining feature of Canadian writing. He argued that early settlers saw themselves as isolated, vulnerable and surrounded by threats—both real and imagined—and that this ethos shaped Canadian literature. Instead of tales of individualism, heroism or conquest, we told stories of endurance, traditionalism and the strong communal bonds that hold people together. Frye didn’t love that. He thought the garrison mentality made for limited, even didactic, art. I disagree. There’s plenty of imagination and complexity in these stories.

More than that, the garrison mentality resists the hyper-individualism of modern life. It pushes back against authoritarianism—not with slogans or policy proposals, but with the everyday ethos of caring for each other. You can’t survive alone in a garrison, and you can’t thrive alone in a country like Canada. The harsh climate forces people to work together. The garrison mentality is a framework for community, a necessary counterbalance to the atomization that defines much of late-stage capitalistic life.

I speak from personal experience. Ten years ago, I moved to Alberta from Russia, a place where literature deeply informs national identity. When I arrived in Canada, I noticed that people didn’t seem to pay much attention to their homegrown novels. But I turned to Canadian fiction to make sense of my new country. It taught me that community is not only central to Canadian identity, but part of what holds us together when everything else falls apart. It was through reading Canadian that I became Canadian.

In 2012, I was living in Samara, a large city with more than a million people in southwestern Russia, nestled along the Volga River. I had just earned a degree in Russian literature and was working as a curator at a large literary museum devoted to Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, a Soviet adventure and science fiction writer and a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy.

If you grew up in Canada, chances are you’ve never been to a literary museum. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a museum devoted to a writer’s life and work. It’s usually set up in a place where the writer spent time—their home, summer estate or place of exile. Inside, there are often archives, manuscripts, personal items and historical artifacts connected to the writer or the literary culture of the region. There are likely several hundred across Russia, from major national institutions to smaller collections housed in schools. Museums like these are one of the clearest expressions of the country’s reverence for the written word.

Alexander Pushkin—Russia’s most revered poet—has around 15 major museums dedicated to him. Some are in sites where he lived. Others are in places he only passed through, like the Alexander Pushkin Memorial Dacha Museum in St. Petersburg, located in the summer home where he honeymooned with his wife for six months in 1831. Literary giants are not the only ones who get this treatment. There are museums for lesser-known writers, too—names that might not mean much outside of Russia, like Dmitriy Mamin-Sibiryak, Gleb Uspensky and Nikolay Dobrolyubov.

These figures are part of everyday Russian life. Even if people don’t read their books, they know their names. Streets and public spaces are routinely named after writers. You grow up on Pushkin Street, go to school........

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