A process of emerging
Our pathway to an Intentional Canada started with a formative but ultimately unsuccessful effort to mount a World Expo bid for 2030. That bid would have been located in Alberta, spanning the three main cities of Edmonton, Red Deer and Calgary, but was intended to draw connections to all parts of Canada — as did Expo ’67 and Expo ’86 for Montreal and Vancouver respectively.
As part of imagining a World Expo, we naturally were drawn to think about what such a global convening effort on that type of scale (40 million visitors) might accomplish for Canada, beyond the economic and political realms.
Although not always recognized as such, Expo ’67 occurring amidst Centennial celebrations brought the world’s attention to Canada’s shameful policies on things like residential schools, albeit much too slowly. Through the (then) discordant inclusion of the “Indians of Canada” pavilion, which sat apart from the main Canada pavilion, Indigenous Peoples were able to talk to the world and one another about issues that were only starting to enter broader public consciousness at home.
Given the efforts of reconciliation around these policies in our time, we wondered how a central theme for an Intentional Canada within the World Expo bid might catalyze public debate about what we actually wanted Canada to become in the decade leading up to 2030 and beyond, versus simply accepting what it had become or making small, incremental improvements.
With our World Expo bid shut down, we didn’t want to lose that intellectual and emotional energy about designing a better future: Intentional Canada was born.