Celebrate hard, wave the flag, eat some cake and ice-cream, then pretend we can ease back into autopilot. But nation-celebrations aren’t just birthday parties, they’re long-term cohabitation of citizens’ events, and we’re held together by work, not nostalgia.

Canada Day came and went.

Now comes the part where we face what’s next, not just politically, but fundamentally.

We’ve got work to do.

No panic, not despair, but focus.

Canada Day, followed by the reality of a tomorrow we partied like we’d never have to deal with until now …

Today was the party, and tomorrow is the time for reconciling what we must do to preserve what we have.

Streets will be quiet again. The flags folded, fireworks fizzled. But the questions, the hard ones, didn’t vanish with the fireworks smoke or dissolve into the echoes of O Canada.

They’re still here, hanging thick in the air like July humidity:

It’s easy to love a country in its party clothes.

Not so easy to ignore the wrinkled old clothes in the laundry basket, the ones we wear the rest of the year. This week, we toasted 157 years since Confederation. July 1, 1867, when Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the old Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec - and the rest of the undeveloped country) linked arms and called themselves something new.

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They formed a federation, a coming together of components of a land mass, a small population and enormous distances, yet those ‘Fathers of Confederation’ as we revere them, achieved greatness - long before highways, airports and shopping malls spread across the landscape, when sod houses and breaking prairie land was part of the ticket to citizenship. And long before the competitive geopolitical landscape of trade, commerce, alliances and disputes of this ‘now time’ could have been imagined.

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