Glen Pearson Journeys Podcast
Glen Pearson has spent his entire adult life in pursuit of public service, democracy, and the primacy of citizenship. But those words can sound abstract until you see what they really mean over the course of a human life. They mean showing up when others turn away. They mean believing that communities are not held together by systems alone, but by moral commitments — by ordinary people who decide, day after day, that the lives around them matter.
Over decades of work in politics, humanitarian service, community leadership, and writing, Pearson has come to understand something that modern society often forgets: a healthy democracy is not primarily built in legislatures, media studios, corporate towers, or in algorithms. It is built in the quiet habits of citizenship. It is built whenever people choose responsibility over cynicism, contribution over withdrawal, and neighbourliness over isolation.
For much of his life, he has tried to give language to those truths. Through more than seventy books, countless articles, podcasts, and his long-standing column in the London Free Press, Glen has chronicled not merely political events, but the deeper moral and social currents moving beneath them. His work consistently returns to the same central question: how do human beings remain connected to one another in an age that so often pulls them apart?
That question has become especially urgent in our time. We live amid extraordinary technological advancement and unprecedented material convenience, yet many people move through life carrying a quiet loneliness. Institutions that once formed identity and belonging have weakened. Public life has grown harsher, more performative, more tribal. Too often citizenship itself has been reduced to outrage, branding, or consumption, as though democracy were simply a marketplace of grievances rather than a shared moral project.
Pearson’s life and writing offer another vision.
He argues that meaning is not found in endless self-preoccupation, but in service. That purpose emerges when people dedicate themselves to something larger than personal advancement. That communities flourish when citizens stop asking only what they are owed and begin asking what they are called to give.
Again and again, his work points toward the small but transformative acts that renew societies: feeding neighbours, mentoring children, protecting institutions, listening across differences, creating spaces where dignity can survive. He believes the future will not ultimately be saved by ideology or spectacle, but by the patient rebuilding of trust between people who learn once more how to see one another as fellow travellers rather than enemies. Thus the title of this site – Journeys.
At the heart of Pearson’s message is a profound faith in human possibility. Not a naïve optimism that denies suffering or division, but a deeper conviction that people are capable of moral courage when summoned toward a worthy purpose. He reminds us that citizenship is not merely a legal status. It is a moral vocation. Democracy survives only when enough people choose to carry one another through difficult times.
In an age searching desperately for meaning, Glen Pearson invites us back to the enduring truths that make both lives and nations worth building: service, decency, sacrifice, community, and love.
Glen Pearson Journeys Podcast
Unravelling - Chapter 5
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When Canada once built for everybody
I'm Brian Pearson from The Journey Podcast. Joining me as we do a deep dive into my new book, The Unraveling, about how Canada lost its way. I hope you enjoy these episodes.
SPEAKER_02Picture this.
SPEAKER_01Right near a little Ontario village.
SPEAKER_02And you are watching this man, a guy named Girard Trumblay. He's just sitting there at the controls of this massive bulldozer, right? And the steel blade is just biting deep into the earth.
SPEAKER_01Meanwhile, the river is just rushing by right beyond the levees.
SPEAKER_02With terrifying force. And the thing is, Girard isn't sitting there thinking about, you know, the macroeconomic statistics of what he's doing.
SPEAKER_01Right. He's not calculating the GDP impact of his bulldozer.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. What he knows is the specific resistance of that wet clay. He knows he's building something so colossal that, I mean, decades from now, his grandchildren will literally point at the water from a car window and say, you know, your grandfather helped make that.
SPEAKER_01Which is such a powerful image.
SPEAKER_02It really is. And Girard didn't know it, but that single bulldozer blade was kicking off an era of absolute unshakable confidence. So welcome to today's deep dive. We are pulling from a really fascinating stack of historical research today.
SPEAKER_01Specifically looking at a chapter titled Building the Nation.
SPEAKER_02Right. And the mission today is to figure out how a young country essentially paraformed an entire continent in the years following World War II, and more importantly, why they felt they had the right to do it.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Yeah, the central thesis we're looking at really hinges on that exact word, confidence, because the 1950s and 60s in Canada were defined by this, the author calls it an architecture of physical possibility.
SPEAKER_02The architecture of physical possibility. I love that phrasing.
SPEAKER_01It's great, right. And the historical record shows this stark contrast between the mindset of that era and, well, the way infrastructure is handled today. The leaders, the urban planners, the engineers back then, they just did not agonize over decade-long environmental reviews. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Right. They weren't drowning in red tape.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. They didn't commission, you know, endless feasibility studies to see if public investment might accidentally crowd out private capital. They operated with the absolute certainty of a generation that had literally just watched collective government-directed action win a global war.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Wow. Yeah. That context is everything.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell It is. They look at a map, decided what the country physically needed to modernize, calculated the raw materials, and they just started digging.
SPEAKER_02They just built it. There was no institutional hand-wringing at all. But, you know, to truly understand that raw, almost aggressive ambition, we kind of need to zoom out from Gerard Trumblay's bulldozer and look at the actual project he was breaking ground on.
SPEAKER_01The St. Lawrence Seaway.
SPEAKER_02The St. Lawrence Seaway, exactly. Because conquering that river, um, it wasn't just about moving water. It was about moving the raw materials of an entire economy.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell And the Seaway really is the perfect lens for this era. I mean, a navigable deep water channel connecting the Atlantic Ocean straight into the Great Lakes. That had been discussed since the 17th century.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Wait, really? The 17th century?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. French Jesuit missionaries used to look at those rapids and dream of a clear path. And by the 1890s, there were serious, highly viable engineering proposals just sitting on desks in Ottawa and Washington.
SPEAKER_02But they didn't build it then.
SPEAKER_01No. For 50 years, those plans went absolutely nowhere.
SPEAKER_02And here's where it gets really interesting. Because they were blocked by a massive entrenched monopoly. It's um it's kind of like trying to build a massive, publicly funded, open source internet today, right? Right. And having to fight a ruthless lobbying war against modern big tech.
SPEAKER_01That is a really good analogy.
SPEAKER_02Except back in the early 20th century, the undisputed kings of capital were the railways. Big rail knew that a seaway would just completely destroy their freight monopoly.
SPEAKER_01Because if ocean freighters could bypass the eastern ports and sail straight into the interior, the railways lose millions.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So they used their massive political weight to kill the project for half a century, funding opposition campaigns, pressuring politicians, you name it.
SPEAKER_01And it took a huge geopolitical shock to finally break that log jam. Following World War II and entering the Korean War, American and Canadian strategic interests suddenly, you know, they aligned perfectly.
SPEAKER_02Because they needed steel.
SPEAKER_01Right. Steel mills in places like Hamilton and Chicago desperately needed a reliable inland route for iron ore coming out of Labrador. And simultaneously, Ontario and Quebec were facing this acute post-war manufacturing boom.
SPEAKER_02So they desperately needed cheap electrical power.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. The economic pressure simply overwhelmed the railway lobby. So in 1954, the international agreement was signed, and construction started, I mean, almost the next day. Which is wild. And the logistics of the build are still difficult to process, even by modern standards. They excavated 210 million cubic yards of earth and rock.
SPEAKER_02Okay, wait, 210 million cubic yards? How do you even visualize that?
SPEAKER_01Well, if you piled all that dirt in one single place, it would form a solid mountain that would be visible from miles away.
SPEAKER_02That is just mind-boggling. And they had to coordinate all of this in a pre-digital age. We're talking about managing a workforce of 22,000 people in Canada alone.
SPEAKER_01Coordinating across an international border, no less. They had to build massive temporary coffer dams just to hold back the crushing weight of the St. Lawrence River so they could pour concrete on dry bedrock.
SPEAKER_02Unbelievable.
SPEAKER_01They constructed seven new locks on the Canadian side, which are essentially these massive aquatic elevators to lift ocean-going vessels 183 feet above sea level.
SPEAKER_02It's like science fiction for the 1950s.
SPEAKER_01It really was. And they partnered with New York State to build the Moses Saunders Power Dam, which stretched 3,300 feet across the river. It generated over a million kilowatts of electricity.
SPEAKER_02So they fundamentally reshaped the geography of North America.
SPEAKER_01Literally creating a 3,700 kilometer port system reaching deep into the heart of the continent.
SPEAKER_02This is an undisputed engineering triumph. But you know, I want to pull back the curtain here for a second, because our source material makes a very deliberate point to step away from this blind, triumphalist narrative.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it definitely does.
SPEAKER_02Because building a 3,300-foot dam requires water to pool behind it. To make the seaway work, they had to permanently flood 38,000 acres of prime farmland. Right. They completely erased seven entire communities known as the lost villages. Places with names like Altsville, Milroches, and Moulinette just wiped off the map. Over 6,500 people were forced out of their homes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, families were literally jacking up their wooden churches onto flatbed trucks.
SPEAKER_02Moving gravestones stone by stone to higher ground before the waters rose. And um, it gets darker. Look at the Mohawk community of Aquasasny. They lost irreplaceable islands, traditional lands, fishing grounds, and the historical record shows they were offered absolutely zero consultation. Not at all. So my question is: how can the historical planners possibly square this devastation with their supposed democratic ideal? This idea that these public megaprojects were built for the benefit of all people.
SPEAKER_01Well, the author of our source doesn't try to neatly reconcile that tragedy, mostly because it just can't be reconciled. Instead, they present it as the inherent tragic flaw of majority rule infrastructure.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Meaning the many benefit at the extreme expense of the few.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Large public projects carry catastrophic local costs, and historically, those costs are almost never distributed equally. The people sitting in the cabinet rooms making the engineering decisions, they were not the fifth generation dairy farmers in the lost villages. Right. And they certainly weren't the indigenous peoples whose relationship to that specific stretch of river preceded European contact by millennia.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they were totally insulated from the fallout.
SPEAKER_01So the text asks us to hold two conflicting, uncomfortable truths at once. The seaway was a transformative modernizing achievement for the broader economy. And it was a brutal act of displacement inflicted upon those with the lead political power to resist it.
SPEAKER_02It really forces you to look at the surface of the river and realize what is literally buried underneath it. But um, once they conquered the waterways and secured the electrical power and the iron, they had a new problem.
SPEAKER_01The land itself.
SPEAKER_02Right. Canada is a geographically fractured country. How do you physically stitch together the people living on the Pacific Coast with the manufacturing hubs in the east? You can't just rely on rivers anymore.
SPEAKER_01No, you have to blast through the continent's brutal land and sky.
SPEAKER_02Which leads directly to the Trans Canada Highway. The very name of the project kind of encodes its ambition, right? 7,821 kilometers of continuous paved road.
SPEAKER_01It was officially authorized in 1949, but the final, most punishing stretch wasn't completed until 1962. And the crown jewel of that entire endeavor was the Rogers Pass section in British Columbia, cutting straight through the Selkirk Mountains. Yeah, they spent millions to literally tunnel through the solid rock of the mountain instead.
SPEAKER_02But the government of the 1950s decided, no, we want a surface highway you can drive your family station wagon on.
SPEAKER_01Which is insane. Private capital would never have touched a project with that much risk.
SPEAKER_02Never. So to keep the road open, they essentially declared war on the weather. They developed a permanent ongoing military operation.
SPEAKER_01Right, the avalanche control program.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. The military literally sets up 105 millimeter artillery pieces and fires explosives into the snowpack above the highway to trigger controlled avalanches before the snow can build up and wipe out the cars below. They are actively bombing the mountains to keep the economy moving.
SPEAKER_01And the mechanics of that avalanche control program, they perfectly illustrate the operational mindset of the time. The immense physical difficulty and the total lack of private return on investment, those were not considered valid reasons to abandon the route.
SPEAKER_02The public need was all that mattered.
SPEAKER_01To the planners, the fact that citizens on both sides of those mountains needed to be connected was the only justification required.
SPEAKER_02And this relentless ambition didn't stop at the tree line either. It extended straight up into the jet age. They started pouring concrete for massive airport expansions, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Malton in Toronto.
SPEAKER_01And we see massive provincial highway projects too, like Ontario's 401, which was designed with such foresight that it now carries half a million vehicles a day.
SPEAKER_02Because the source also details the creation of Mirabelle Airport outside Montreal, and Mirabelle was a spectacular disaster.
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02To build it, the government expropriated 97,000 acres of land. That is an area larger than the city of Montreal itself. They displaced 11,000 people to build this futuristic super airport based on projections of endless passenger growth.
SPEAKER_01Growth that never materialized.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. The airlines hated it, the passengers hated the commute, and today the passenger terminals have literally been demolished. It's just a cargo hub now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a ghost town.
SPEAKER_02So if they had just done a boring, rigorous, modern cost-benefit analysis, they could have prevented that entire tragedy. How can the author possibly view this era's blind confidence as a positive trait when it leads to a catastrophe like Mirabelle?
SPEAKER_01Well, it is a massive failure. And you're right, the source doesn't shy away from that at all. Mirabelle is the ultimate failure of projection. Planners took the incredibly steep economic and population growth curves of the 1960s and basically just assumed they would continue on a straight upward trajectory forever.
SPEAKER_02Right, completely failing to anticipate the oil shocks and economic turbulence of the 1970s.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. But the author uses Mirabelle not to endorse blind wasteful spending, but to highlight the sheer magnitude of the era's willingness to act. Even as a failure, Mirabelle represents a scale of public ambition that the author argues our current, highly risk-averse society has entirely lost.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_01The argument isn't that Mirabelle was a good airport. The argument is that it was the byproduct of a society that wasn't paralyzed by the fear of getting it wrong. They swung for the fences and, well, sometimes they missed terribly.
SPEAKER_02Okay, I see the distinction there. They valued the attempt over the safety of doing nothing. So up to this point, we've been talking about infrastructure that moves things, ships full of iron, cars through mountains, planes across the sky. But when you look at the historical data, a really fascinating pattern emerges. Pouring concrete for a dam and building a social welfare state were treated as the exact same project. Yes. The physical infrastructure was designed to elevate people.
SPEAKER_01The physical builds were the mirror of the new social contract. Let's look at the hospital sector, for instance. Following the passage of the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act in 1957, the federal government essentially agreed to split the cost of hospital care with the provinces. Which was huge. Massive. And with that funding secured, the country embarked on a staggering building spree. They weren't just passing laws, they were pouring foundations. Between 1948 and 1971, the number of hospital beds in Canada increased by more than 60%.
SPEAKER_0260%?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. They built small regional hospitals in rural centers and massive state-of-the-art teaching hospitals in the urban cores. The source explicitly argues that the bricks and mortar of these hospitals were the physical embodiment of a new moral proposition.
SPEAKER_02The idea that health was no longer a private commodity, but a fundamental public good. And they applied that exact same philosophy to the human mind. The demographics of the country were exploding, the first waves of the baby boomers were coming of age, and the old educational infrastructure just couldn't handle it.
SPEAKER_01Not even close.
SPEAKER_02University enrollment skyrocketed from just 35,000 full-time students in 1945 to over 300,000 by 1970. That is an almost ninefold increase in just 25 years.
SPEAKER_01And the really interesting part is how they chose to accommodate that massive influx. Because they didn't just add a few new dormitories to the old Ivy-style institutions that had historically served a very narrow, wealthy professional class. Right. They built entirely new universities from scratch on undeveloped greenfield sites, institutions like York University, Trent, the University of Calgary.
SPEAKER_02And the Source spends time specifically on Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. They hired the visionary architect Arthur Erickson, and he designed this extraordinary, brutalist concrete campus that looks like a futuristic temple just perched on top of a mountain.
SPEAKER_01It's an incredible piece of architecture.
SPEAKER_02It really is. And they built these striking monumental campuses using public money specifically to democratize higher education. They wanted to make sure that the children of the steelworkers who built the seaway and the children of the farmers displaced by it had a place to study engineering and science.
SPEAKER_01It was a massive calculated investment in human capacity. And alongside the hospitals and universities, the historical record brings up an initiative that might seem, I don't know, a bit disconnected at first glance, but it perfectly aligns with this philosophy the massive expansion of the natural park system.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Banff, Jasper, the massive reserves in the Maritimes. I love how the author frames this because they make it clear that creating a national park isn't just about protecting pretty trees. No, not at all. The text calls the national park a communitarian proposition of the first order. In plain English, they believe that the most beautiful, most valuable land shouldn't just belong to the guy who is rich enough to buy it and put a fence around it. Think of it like a massive public library. A library is a space designed specifically to remove the barrier of personal wealth from the acquisition of value, in that case, knowledge. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01That's a great way to put it.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell And the parks did the exact same thing for nature. They generate immense value, aesthetic, ecological, spiritual, but the free market simply doesn't know how to price that value because it can't be bought or sold. So the democratic public steps in and claims it in perpetuity for everyone.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell That library analogy perfectly captures the mechanism at play. By expanding the park system, the government was intentionally subordinating private resource extraction, logging, mining, private real estate to the collective interest.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell It was a physical geographic manifestation of the belief that some things have a legitimate claim on public policy even if they don't produce immediate taxable financial returns. But okay, here is the elephant in the room. As we run through this list, highways, seaways, airports, hundreds of hospitals, entirely new university systems, millions of acres of national parks. How on earth does a young country pay for all of this at the exact same time without instantly going bankrupt?
SPEAKER_01We're at the money question. To answer the mechanics of that, the source brings the narrative full circle, right back to workers like Girard Tromblay sitting on his bulldozer.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01The author argues that this wasn't merely a construction boom. It was the largest, most sustained program of peacetime employment in the country's history. And this is where the text explicitly details the Keynesian economic philosophy that drove the governments of the era.
SPEAKER_02Ah, Keynesian economics.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah. The planners didn't view public investment as a burden on the National Treasury. They viewed it as the primary engine of the economy.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell The famous multiplier effect. Let's trace how that actually worked on the ground, just to make it concrete.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02The federal government pays a strong union wage to a carpenter working on the St. Lawrence Seaway. Because that carpenter has job security and money in his pocket, he buys a new house, he buys a new car manufactured in Ontario, he buys groceries from the local market. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Right, the money circulates.
SPEAKER_02Trevor Burrus Exactly. That intense consumer demand sustains the local retail and manufacturing economy. Those thriving local businesses then generate the tax revenue that the government collects to fund the next hospital or the next stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway. It's an incredible closed loop of prosperity.
SPEAKER_01It really is.
SPEAKER_02But you know, from a critical perspective, I do have to wonder: was this truly a universal economic law of public expenditure, or was it just a highly unique byproduct of a post-war bubble?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell That's a very fair question.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Because in the 1950s, Canada's manufacturing sector had very little global competition. The industrial bases of Europe and Asia were still literal rubble from World War II. Plus, supply chains were hyper-local. When that carpenter bought a fridge, it was made down the street, so the money stayed in the country. Today, that money immediately leaks out into the global supply chain.
SPEAKER_01That is precisely the right critical lens to apply to this history. And staying strictly within the bounds of our source text, the author actually doesn't deeply interrogate the lack of global competition or the unique closed loop nature of the 1950s economy.
SPEAKER_02Oh, really?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Instead, the focus is entirely on the absolute conviction the policymakers had in the philosophy of collective capacity.
SPEAKER_02So they just believed it worked.
SPEAKER_01Completely. To the planners of the 1950s, the mechanism of the multiplier effect was not viewed as a fragile historical coincidence. It was seen as a proven law. They described it not as a theoretical abstraction in an economics textbook, but as the lived experience of communities that watched a massive public project arrive in their town and felt the economic energy radiate outward for decades.
SPEAKER_02And the text really champions this Keynesian stance as the definitive reason the nation was able to physically manifest its grandest social ideals. Yes, exactly because it's a powerful narrative of collective will. But um it brings us to the author's final rather sobering conclusion. We started this deep dive in 1954, but the text ends very much in the present day.
SPEAKER_01And it comes with a stark warning about what we are doing with our inheritance. Yeah. The author provides very explicit political and economic diagnosis of our current era. The argument laid out is that for the last 40 years, society has been actively, intentionally dismantling both the physical and social architectures that were so painstakingly built in the 1950s and 60s.
SPEAKER_02So they see this as an act of dismantling, not just neglect.
SPEAKER_01Right. The source views crumbling bridges, deferred maintenance in our hospitals, increasingly precarious labor markets, and severe housing crises not as separate isolated administrative failures. Rather, they are symptoms of a single underlying disease. The author calls it a diminished political imagination.
SPEAKER_02Wow, a diminished political imagination.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. The author argues that modern society has allowed itself to be persuaded by a new economic orthodoxy that we can no longer afford to maintain, let alone extend, the magnificent infrastructure our grandparents built.
SPEAKER_02It's a really heavy critique. And the text leaves us with this lingering image of Gerard Tromblay moving Earth that simply needed moving, and it poses a direct challenge to the modern landscape. The author asks, can society find the collective will to pick up the bulldozer blade again?
SPEAKER_01It demands that we look at our current crumbling infrastructure and recognize it not just as a lack of funds, but as a fundamental failure of collective confidence.
SPEAKER_02As you go about your day, whether you are driving on a massive highway, walking past a university campus, or just enjoying a public park, I want to leave you with one final thought to mull over.
SPEAKER_01Always good to have something to think about.
SPEAKER_02Definitely. If the 1950s were about building the physical infrastructure of a nation, the dams, the roads, the hospitals, what is The invisible infrastructure of our current era. Today we are laying the digital roads and building the AI ecosystems that will define the next century.
SPEAKER_01Very true.
SPEAKER_02But unlike the TransCanada Highway or those national parks we talked about, this new digital infrastructure is almost entirely privately owned and operated for profit. Are we letting modern tech companies become the invincible railway monopolies of the early 1900s? And if we were to channel that 1950s ambition today, what would a genuinely public democratic mega project actually look like in the digital age?
SPEAKER_01A truly fascinating question to carry forward.
SPEAKER_02It really is. Thank you for taking this deep dive with us today. Keep asking those big questions, and we'll see you next time.