Good morning. Ahead of this long weekend in most of the country, we’re exploring why Canadians are so reluctant to let themselves rest. We get into that below, along with the latest on tariff fallout, the Liberal leadership race and love songs. But first:
Today’s headlines
- The U.S. ramps up its global trade war, drawing up a list reciprocal tariffs for every country, including Canada
- The Canadian AI company Cohere is being sued by major publishers for copyright violations
- Donald Trump promises that Ukraine will be involved in peace talks with Russia over ending the war
Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
Rest
The upside of downtime
Good morning, I’m Globe feature writer Zosia Bielski. This year, I’m exploring how Canadians think about and spend their time, both at work and beyond. And this long weekend, I’m looking at how we rest. More to the point, how we don’t rest.
I’ll start by telling you about a Cadillac commercial that really grates on Brigid Schulte, who writes about North Americans’ always-on culture.
In the car ad, a boomer-age dad walks through his modern showpiece home. Standing by the pool, he pontificates on the American work ethic.
“Other countries, they work, they stroll home, they stop by the café. They take August off – OFF,” he scoffs. “Why aren’t we like that? Because we’re crazy, driven, hardworking believers, that’s why. Those other countries think we’re nuts. Whatever.”
Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
It’s obnoxious and over-the-top, making you want to tip Cadillac Dad into his pool.
But the message stayed with me after I interviewed Schulte a decade ago: rest is for the weak.
In her two books, Overwhelmed and Over Work, Schulte, a former Washington Post journalist, makes clear that our beliefs about work, rest and leisure differ drastically depending on where we live in the world.
There’s Cadillac Dad and his ilk, but also people, governments and workplace cultures that prioritize living a good life over status, ambition and hours clocked. Places like Iceland and Denmark, which consistently rank high in happiness and life satisfaction, but also productivity.
Cue the groans about Scandinavian utopias. Still, Schulte returned to North America more attuned to our busyness culture, to burned-out people reluctant to stop and rest. “Time sickness,” she called it.
I wanted to survey Canadians’ attitudes toward work and leisure. What signals do we send each other about unambitious resting? Why do we feel compelled to make our off hours productive?
Statistics show a high-strung population. Our daily stress rivals Americans’ stress. We devote meagre time to resting and leisure offline. And we leave hard-earned vacation days on the table each year.
When I interviewed Canadians about this, I was struck by how often the conversations would veer away from rest, to the more familiar terrain of work. And pressure: work inching into evenings and holidays; obligations filling up weekends; a parenting culture that clogs families’ calendars with constant “skills acquisition” for children.
“Concerted cultivation,” is a term I learned from University of Toronto professor Melissa Milkie when we spoke for a story about children’s memories in December.
“It’s not experiencing life with your kids, so much as really purposefully trying to ensure that your kid is going to learn from the experience,” said Milkie, who studies family time and wellbeing.
That resonated. When we’re making sure every minute is useful, maybe we’re not experiencing life together.
Some of this time sickness stems from a Protestant work ethic, so baked-in here. Though it’s not so much the case in Catholic Quebec, I was reminded by Michael Inzlicht, who leads the University of Toronto’s Work and Play Lab, where he studies effort, leisure and rest. Inzlicht, who was born in Montreal, alighted while talking about hordes of Quebecers at all-inclusive resorts. He marveled at the sheer number of backyard pools he once saw while flying over freezing Quebec City.
“It’s a cultural thing,” he told me. “Our cultures tell us what is appropriate and what is not.”
Help might be coming for the restless though, as a large-scale movement builds in defence of rest.
One camp of thinkers promotes rest as a boon to productivity, and as a catalyst for some of our brightest ideas. Then there is the sizable self-care faction on Instagram, encouraging people to guard their personal time. A newer offshoot is reframing rest as a broad revolt against grind culture. Slow tourism, collective nap-ins, fitness classes that let people flop on the mat: the rest warriors are here.
They’re riding a pandemic wave that also ushered in hybrid work, four-day work weeks, right-to-disconnect laws and catty out-of-office replies, as well as families reassessing their clogged calendars. Slowly, norms around the on and off hours are shifting.
I thought back to hard-driving Cadillac Dad after the U.S. election. Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s newly minted “efficiency czar” was installing sofa beds in offices for his staff to work around the clock, doing God knows what.
One thing is clear: when it comes to whether we can change our restless ways, we’re at an inflection point.
The Shot
‘This site operates, in many ways, the same way as a hospital.’
Boxes are moved along a conveyer belt where they are sealed and stamped for shipment, in a UPS Healthcare warehouse, in Burlington.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
While Canadians’ demand for health care soars, UPS is making a big pivot to delivering drugs and devices. To answer the need for specialized health care shipping, a 535,000-square-feet facility in Burlington, Ont., will be entirely devoted to shipping health care products.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At Home: Former central banker Mark Carney says he may call an early election if he replaces Justin Trudeau as party leader.
Abroad: A week before Germany’s election, at least 36 people are left hurt after a motorist drove a car into a crowd in Munich.
Down low: Canadian producers warn that the U.S. should expect toilet paper panic buying and price hikes if Trump follows through on tariffs.
Ocean songs: Research suggest some whales sing low enough to be ‘acoustically invisible’ to predators.
Love songs: Readers voted for their favourite love songs, and the winner is announced today after some heartbreaking decisions.