The School Question: Why Canada Asks Where You're Going.

Downtown Toronto, 2022, a mixer for younger professionals. In the circle of conversation, somebody Irish asked a Canadian which school they had gone to.

The Canadian was polite about it. Then they said the thing I have not stopped thinking about since: nobody had ever really asked them that before.

Not which university. Which school. Anyone who grew up in Dublin knows the question and knows what it is for. It sounds like small talk. It is a sorting mechanism. The answer tells the asker whether you paid, whether you played rugby, which side of the Liffey, and roughly what your parents did, and it does all of that in the four seconds before you have said anything about yourself. Irish people abroad ask it constantly. I have heard it defended as curiosity. It is curiosity the way a credit check is curiosity.

The Canadian’s answer was better than any joke would have been. In a room full of people who had come from everywhere, the question did not exist. There was nothing to sort.

What the question does

Every society asks strangers a first question, and the first question tells you what the society is organised around.

Britain’s version is not a question at all. It is the accent, then the school, then the postcode, and the apparatus has finished its work before you open your mouth. Ireland’s version is the school. Both are ways of asking where you are from, and both carry a verdict, which is why they are asked so early. I have a phrase for it: dead by eleven. By eleven, the path is more or less chosen. Not in law. In expectation, which is worse, because expectation is what everyone acts on. Eleven is the age at which the English state once formally sorted its children, and the sorting has outlived the exam. It decides which doors get held open and which rooms you never learn exist, and it is enforced not by villains but by people being curious.

I went to a community college in Templeogue, which is a comfortable suburb, and my school is a good school. The question was still asked of me, and I could still watch the filing happen as I answered. It sorts everyone, not only the people it is unkind to.

It is curiosity the way a credit check is curiosity.

The Canadian first question is different, and the difference is the whole point. It is some version of: what are you working on, where are you headed. Heritage was respected in Toronto. People were interested in it and asked about it. But it was not a badge you were made to wear for life. Where you came from was context. Where you were going was the subject.

I moved to Toronto in 2016 knowing almost nobody, and no actual Canadians. What happened next was not a vague warmth. It was a method. People introduced me to people, deliberately. Then, and this is the part that does not reliably happen in London or Dublin, they followed up. Someone, often a generation older, would remember a conversation and pick it up a month later, with real interest, on purpose. The welcome was proactive and it was intergenerational, and I have come to think of it less as a national personality trait than as what a society looks like when its first question is about trajectory.

A country asks itself the same question

Here is the turn. The question a country asks strangers is the question it asks itself. And for a century anglophone Canada has asked itself where it is from. Quebec is the exception, and knows it.

The symptoms are familiar to anyone who has lived there. There is a muted smugness in the people who left for New York or San Francisco and come back to visit, and there is nothing muted about their parents. A child doing well in Manhattan is spoken about in a particular register, one that manages to talk up another country and talk down their own in a single breath. Leaving is a graduation. The conversations I had in Toronto ran to Washington far more readily than to Ottawa. People I liked and rated could tell you what was happening in the Senate that week and had not thought about Queen’s Park in a year. The culture people consumed was American, from concentrate. And through all of it, Canadian talent grew tall anyway: Carrey, Reynolds, Bieber, the Weeknd, and a small sitcom about a family bankrupted into a motel that swept the comedy Emmys in 2020. Schitt’s Creek was evidence, largely ignored at home, that the trajectory was always there.

That is small-brother syndrome, and it has a mechanism. Canadians admire ambition at the dinner table. Their institutions do not reward it at home. In March 2024 the Bank of Canada’s senior deputy governor called the productivity problem a national emergency, and by June the governor was calling it the country’s Achilles heel. The economy is a set of protected oligopolies with provincial borders running through the middle of it, and it took a national crisis to start taking those borders down. So a country whose people ask where you are going is also a country whose most ambitious people go somewhere else, and congratulate each other for it. The dinner table and the institutions are asking different questions. The people hear both.

Britain is the contrast case, twice over. Since 2016 it has been a country reading itself by its past, a decade of politics conducted in the grammar of what it used to be. And yet the thing Canada would give anything for, Britain does without thinking. It makes its own culture and believes in it. British drama, British comedy, British music are not treated at home as a brave local alternative to the real thing from somewhere else. They are the thing. That confidence is exportable, and it is the most useful cargo Canada could take from this side of the Atlantic.

A society is defined by which question it asks first, where are you from or where are you going, and it asks that question of newcomers and of itself in the same voice.

What Canada is buying

On 16 September in Strasbourg, with Mark Carney in the chamber, Ursula von der Leyen offered Canada the title of first “associate member” of the European Union. The title does not exist. There is no such category in the treaties. It would have to be invented, defined and then ratified by every member state.

The dinner table and the institutions are asking different questions.

Watch what Carney did with it. The next day, addressing the same parliament, he welcomed the ambition and then spent the rest of the speech on everything except the label. Canada, he said, was neither seeking nor in a position to become a member. What mattered was substance. A senior Canadian official later told the CBC that Ottawa had not proposed “associate member” at all. It had studied the four existing models for a close relationship without membership, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Georgia, and rejected all four, because Canada would not give up independence in exchange for access.

That is the correct instinct, and it is the one I wrote about in July. Authority is claimed, not conferred. A leader who is offered a title and takes the substance instead has understood something about power that most people offered titles never do. Carney’s line to the parliament was that Canada is pursuing “resilience so that no one can control our open markets”. For a country that sends three-quarters of its exports to a neighbour that has spent more than a year calling for it to become the fifty-first state, that line is an answer to the question of where the country is going, said out loud with a number attached: double the trade that does not go south, within a decade. Canada last tried to answer that question in 1972. I will come back to how that went.

Then, on Monday 21 September, Canada’s finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, told the BBC that Britain should join in, that two sovereign countries lose nothing by standing together, in the week the Prime Minister is due in New York to meet Donald Trump.

Now the part that does not appear in a summit communiqué.

The institution offering Canada the closest association it has ever imagined has been provisionally applying its last agreement with Canada since 21 September 2017, nine years ago to the day as I write. Ten member states have still not ratified it. In Brussels, ambition has always run ahead of ratification, and any Canadian official who has done the analysis knows it. The offer is real. The machinery for delivering it has not been built, and the last time it was tried it took a decade and did not finish.

And what Canada would actually be buying is not what the summit language says. Trade is largely done, because CETA already removed nearly every tariff. Defence is done, because that partnership was signed in June 2025. What is left is the thing Europe has and does not know it has, because it is so ordinary here that nobody would think to write it into a treaty: the normality of a twenty-two-year-old spending a year in Lisbon, in a country they have no claim on, for no reason except that they can. Clapham South to Saint-Germain is three and a half hours door to door, and nobody in London would think that worth mentioning. Canadians travel. But when a Canadian moves, it is often to the United States, and it is a step up, not a step sideways. Britain and Canada already run a youth mobility scheme, expanded in 2024, and Canada cut its own immigration and temporary-resident targets in October 2024 when the public consensus cracked. The argument, then, is not for more people moving but for a specific kind of moving, the European kind, in which you go somewhere because you can and the country you arrive in asks you where you are going.

What the question cannot tell you

Diversification can be a substitute for a decision, and Canada knows this better than anyone, because it has tried it before. In 1972 Mitchell Sharp’s Third Option proposed exactly this: a deliberate turn away from dependence on the United States. By the end of the decade the American share of Canadian trade had gone up. Canada now has an agreement with Europe, one with the Pacific, one with the Americans it is trying to rely on less, and is negotiating an association whose terms nobody can state. Pursuing everything at once can look like strategy and be avoidance. A target is what you announce when the choice is still ahead of you.

Ireland is the precedent, and Ireland is the warning. In 1973 it sent 55% of its exports to the United Kingdom and joined the European project partly to stop being defined by its neighbour. By 2023 the United Kingdom took 11%, according to the CSO. On the numbers, it worked. But 28% now goes to the United States, and Irish prosperity rests on American capital in a way that would have astonished the people who signed the accession treaty. Ireland did not escape dependence. It changed landlord. Nobody in Ottawa should hear the Irish story without that second half, and it is not the half Irish people tell.

The trajectory question has a shallow edge. A society that never asks where you are from can become one in which nobody knows, and roots matter. The best of what I saw in Toronto was people asking about heritage precisely because it was not a verdict. The point is not to stop asking. It is to stop sorting.

And I left. I moved from Toronto to London in 2023, for reasons that would sound very familiar at a Toronto dinner table, and three years on I am not sure it was the right call. The dinner table never mentions that part. I am not standing outside the pattern. I am in it.

Ireland did not escape dependence. It changed landlord.

There is of course a limit to what any treaty can do. An association with Europe cannot make Canada believe in itself. No external arrangement can. That has to come from inside, from the dinner table and the institutions finally asking the same question, and the honest reading of everything since the start of 2025 is that they have begun to. The belief arrived before the paperwork. That is the right order, and the only one that has ever worked, for a country or for a leader.

Somewhere in downtown Toronto tonight, someone Irish is asking someone Canadian which school they went to, and being met with the same polite incomprehension. Good. For the first time, Canada is being asked, from outside and from within, the question it has always asked everyone else. Where are you going? Its answer, so far, is the right one.