On "Pax Americana", a speech delivered at the Massachusetts State House, 30 June 2026
I wrote the bones of this speech almost a year ago. I wrote it for Canadians, in the same way that I started this project for Canadians. However, in Canada, it is widely understood that you are only successful if Americans are paying attention, so it is a peculiar feeling to be standing here, talking about Canada to Americans.
A few weeks after President Trump started speaking publicly about annexing Canada in March 2025, I began posting fake historical plaques meant to represent markers from a possible future, one in which Canada had already been taken over by the United States. In this imagining, there had been small pockets of resistance, but the invasion had largely gone smoothly. These signs were written from an American point of view, and were the commemorative plaques that celebrated key moments in that victory and its aftermath.
The first sign I posted was in my back alleyway in Toronto, which gets next to zero foot traffic. I was going to post it somewhere more visible, but chickened out at the last minute. I was terrified. For those of you who aren’t familiar with my larger body of work, I am a conceptual artist, but one whose output has always been contextualized by the safety of an art gallery.
In contrast, making my mark on the landscape of the wider city, no matter how fleeting, felt forbidden.
Of course, there was no response to my back alley artwork, and despite a weekend spent jumping at every siren, it seems the cops had better things to do than arrest me.
In the way of the lawless, I got bolder. I started taking my little crew – husband, baby, and dog – to more ambitious spots, posting bolder texts.
The series, known as “Pax Americana,” caught widespread notice after I posted a sign titled “The Hot Dog Stand” on the Spadina Bridge in downtown Toronto. Someone noticed it and posted it to Reddit, asking what it was. Several online commenters thought it was pro-Trump propaganda. Others thought it was a psy-op for the Mark Carney election campaign. Others felt it was giving too many ideas to a potential American invading force – as if no American had ever set foot in our country or the American military didn’t have access to Google Maps. True to the Canadian national character, others were more concerned that it was posted without a permit.
When Trump first started talking about taking over my country, like many Canadians, I felt shocked and betrayed that a nation we considered to be our best friend could turn enemy overnight.
While I am leery about speaking on behalf of an entire country, I think that Trump’s statements stung so much because they made so many Canadians feel like colossal idiots. Growing up, we were taught with great pride that we shared the world’s longest undefended border with our best buddies to the south.
We were taught to think that Americans were just like us, minus the gun stuff and having to pay to go to the doctor and just naturally being worse at hockey. But that was basically it. All of a sudden that changed. Americans no longer had our backs.
So if we weren’t best pals, where did we stand?
For those of you who haven’t spent much time north of the border hanging out in our igloos, let me give you a crash course in Canadian culture and identity. Much of being Canadian involves a strange mix of defining yourself as “not-American” while also being so deeply embedded in America’s politics and culture that we know it better than our own. We feel every ripple that emanates out from the States, and consider your problems to be our problems.
As an example, when American women’s rights were under attack in 2017, Canadians marched in solidarity. We marched for George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm said that in the postwar era, everyone inhabited two countries: their own and the United States. If every country around the world is, to some extent, Americanized, none is more so than Canada.
I am and always have been envious of your position at the centre of empire. It must be nice to be born powerful.
Since 2025, these complex feelings have been tinged by fear. We have become scared, scared of America and scared for America. It’s been like watching your best friend go crazy and being unable to do anything about it.
I started “Pax Americana” as a call to Canadians to grow up and stop letting America dictate the trajectory of our sovereign country. I realize the enormity and likely impossibility of the task, but it’s humiliating to have to bend the knee to someone who mocks the very legitimacy of our nationhood.
I mentioned earlier that Canadians consider American problems to be their own, but they also consider many Canadian problems to be America’s fault. As Canadians, it’s time to realize that if we’re still living in America’s garage, America didn’t put us there. We invited ourselves.
In creating the Boston instalment of the series, my challenge was how to make Canada and its current situation relevant to Americans. I decided to do a little scholarly research and text some pals south of the border, asking them what they think about Canada and Canadians.
The usual stereotypes emerged – that we were nice, polite, maybe even a bit goofy and naive, and that like something out of Game of Thrones, winter in Canada was a year-round thing. After we got those cliches out of the way, several admitted that they and fellow Americans … hardly ever think of us at all.
As Americans, you are in the rare position that you don’t need to care about what others think about you. You’re too busy fighting with each other to think much beyond your borders.
So what do we share?
We share a front-row seat to the erosion of one of the greatest cross-border relationships in human history. We share a front-row seat to a continuous attack on democracy, privacy, free speech, and decency, as well as the rise of an insidious trend towards me-first narcissism at the expense of our communities and our neighbours.
The initial works in “Pax Americana” began by pointing to the fragility of nationhood for Canadians, but I think the series has come to address the wider fragility of democracy as a whole, for all of us.
Many talk about the current Presidency as an aberration, but I think that’s the easy out. Trump represents all of us – distracted, self-interested, concerned about what people online think of us, and blind in our pursuit of money and status.
If we’re going to change the world, we’re going to have to start with ourselves.
So what comes next? It is often said that we all just need to survive the Trump administration, but what happens after that? Is it better? And better for who? Will we be at the mercy of someone with better soft skills but the same relentless drive to whittle away our freedoms while enriching themselves and their cronies?
One of the other things we share is our togetherness in a massive technological shift, one that is rewiring our and our kids’ brains, rendering us passive and setting us adrift from each other. We are watching as smartphones and the internet change the scope of what it is to be in the world, and to be human. Will we have the fortitude to stand up for what we believe in, in the face of an endless barrage of cheap entertainment, endless shopping and other meaningless forms of self-soothing?
It might not have come through in the chest-thumping first half of this speech, but I don’t actually believe that art can change the world. However, I do believe that it can make us think about things differently, and better yet, encourage us to talk to each other...even if it’s to say how much you hate something.
The artist Hans Haake said that the artist’s job is not to pass judgement, but to point. To illuminate existing systems and assumptions so they become visible. I hope that in this moment of great tension — both politically and interpersonally — at the very least, this show does a lot of pointing.
Making art is a strange business. I am often asked what my work means, and I usually offer a variation of the same answer: it’s none of my business what my work means. After you release something into the world, its meaning ceases to be in your control. The best works of art have multiple points of entry and exit, allowing each viewer to bring themselves as they are in that moment. Often, meanings change over time and after repeated viewings.
I’ve tried to make the exhibition as immersive and site-specific as possible, so much of the work relates to this space, to politics, and to history.
Institutions and ways of life that we have taken for granted are increasingly under attack, and we’re standing inside one of them.
I am not here to tell you how to think, or how to think about this work, but I will say that I hope you enjoy it.
Or at least, enjoy hating it.
On "Pax Americana", a speech delivered at Western University, 2 March 2026
On March 9, 2025, a few weeks after Donald Trump started speaking publicly about annexing Canada, I began a project called “Pax Americana.”
“Pax Americana” is a series of signs meant to represent markers from a possible future, one in which Canada had already been taken over by the United States. In this imagining, there had been small pockets of resistance, but the invasion had largely gone smoothly. These signs were written from an American point of view, and were the commemorative plaques that celebrated key moments in that victory and its aftermath.
When Trump first started talking about erasing the border, like many Canadians, I felt shocked and betrayed that a country we considered to be our best friend could turn enemy overnight.
But this feeling that I was aligned with the national sentiment didn’t last. In my corner of the world, what I noticed was that after some initial panic and hand-wringing, many people turned their focus to commerce, concerned with:
-how they could buy Canadian,
-was anyone selling Elbows Up merch
-was buying coffee at Tim Horton’s actually patriotic since it was owned by foreign investors?
-where would we get strawberries from in the winter months since so much of our luxury produce is grown in California?
It felt less like manning the ramparts, and more like Canadians were trying to shop their way out of a hostile takeover.
The whole thing made me wild with rage, not only because I had recently given birth and postpartum hormones are no joke, but because the whole thing felt so much more monumental to me than buying strawberries.
Through this great frustration came “Pax Americana.”
The term “Pax Americana” refers to an American-led peace — the notion of relative global stability maintained by U.S. dominance after World War II, through its military, economic, and cultural power. As Canadians, we have been incredible beneficiaries of this.
We’ve also ceded huge tracts of our sovereignty in order to maintain that benefit.
Swamped for decades by American media and American commerce, our sense of what it means to be Canadian or why it might be important has atrophied.
For all their faults, I suspect most Americans could fill an hour discussing the ways in which being American matters to them, and how it shapes their lives.
It is hard to imagine many Canadians being able to do the same thing once they’d ticked healthcare and gun control off the list.
It has become fashionable in the last few years for Canadian elites to kick the shit out of Canada. We have become our own favourite punchline – in this conception, we are cultureless, devoid of “good” history, a perpetual younger sibling to a country we resent, but are also obsessed with.
When confronted with one fairly predictable result of that lack of identity - the ease with which we could be erased - it’s only then that people responded with the most knee-jerk sort of patriotism. That’s already fading. It’s hard to keep your elbows up for more than a couple of months at a time.
The first sign I posted from this series was in my back alleyway in Toronto, which gets next to zero foot traffic. I was going to post it somewhere visible, but chickened out at the last minute. I was terrified. For those of you who aren’t familiar with my work, I am a conceptual artist, but one whose output has always been contextualized by the safety of an art gallery.
In contrast, making my mark on the landscape of the wider city, no matter how fleeting, felt forbidden.
Of course, there was no response to my back alley artwork, and despite a weekend spent jumping at every siren, it seems the cops had better things to do than arrest me.
In the way of the lawless, I got bolder. I started taking my little crew – husband, baby, and dog – to more ambitious spots, posting bolder texts.
The series caught widespread notice after I posted a sign entitled “The Hot Dog Stand” on the Spadina bridge in downtown Toronto.
Someone noticed it and posted it to Reddit, asking what is was. Several online commenters thought it was pro-Trump propaganda. Others thought it was a psy-op for the Carney campaign. Others felt it was giving too many ideas to a potential invading force – as if no American had ever set foot in our country or the American military didn’t have access to Google Maps.
True to our national character, others were more concerned that it was posted without a permit.
I don’t believe that art can change the world. At most, and only very seldom, it provokes a brief reflection. But often this is only amongst a sub-strata of our class system. The people who can travel. The people who have the resources - time, in particular - to think about art.
I suspect some of you are coming up with examples right now about the museum show you went to last year on vacation, or the painter you follow on Instagram, because you love culture! And I have no doubt that you do. But I would ask - how much art by artists from this country do you own? How many strong feelings do you have about the recent culture that we’ve produced and continue to produce, and how likely is it that you are going to be asked to share those feelings out in the wild?
This kind of to and fro about the things that make us us is the lifeblood of the body politic. Instead, we’re too busy talking about real estate and whatever is going on in the U.S. today.
I started this project a year ago. In addition to the 18 plaques that I have hung across the country, I have created 20 plaques and 16 books specifically for the exhibition here at Weldon Library. Naturally, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what this series is all about. Though it started from a place of fear and anger at the US, it occurred to me around about plaque 12 that the series is not only an indictment of the current threats coming from south of the border, but a catalogue of our own sins. As the saying goes, we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. I think that to wholly blame the US for Canadian problems is like that 50 year old who can’t stop blaming their current issues on something their mother said decades prior. It’s time to realize that if we’re still living in America’s garage, it’s not America’s fault.
I remain astounded at the way Canadians seethed and are still seething for foreign wars and foreign problems, but cannot rouse themselves for a clear, unmistakable threat repeatedly directed at Canada. In recent years, many Canadians have marched in solidarity to protest injustice in America.
How many Americans have marched for Canada?
I was speaking with a very intelligent and well-informed friend a few months ago. When I expressed my frustration that Canadians hadn’t taken to the streets to protest the threat of annexation, he replied that he didn’t think that he, or Canadians, thought the threat was actually credible. Contrast that with recent protests in Greenland and Colombia. In January of this year, after calls for increased US presence in their country, roughly one-quarter of the population of Greenland’s capital city, Nuuk, marched together. The same month, thousands of Colombians rallied to protest Trump’s comments about expanding U.S. military involvement in the region following Maduro’s capture in Venezuela
When do Canadians start to think about thinking about getting mad?
Over the past decade, Canadians have become ever more divided as a nation. We have become so divided that no one is sure if it’s safe to cheer for our own team. We have lost the ability to be proud of our national identity without needing to qualify it.
Our former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gleefully told the New York Times that Canada might be the “first post-national state” and that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Imagine saying that to an American or a Greenlander or a Ukrainian or just about any other person of any other nationality on Earth. 5
Under these circumstances, it’s fair for the average inhabitant of this country to wonder what they would be fighting for, and whether or not it’s worth it.
Few banners have ever been raised for post-nationalism.
The works in “Pax Americana” are on some level meant to ask “How much do you care about Canada and what would it look like if it disappeared?”
Everyone is free to feel and do as they please, but it seems to me that if we aren’t willing to get serious about preserving this country, that’s a conversation we ought to have now, and not once the drones start coming across the border.
Whether or not you feel comfortable defining Canada, or what it means to be Canadian, would you be sad if these questions no longer applied?
I know my answer.