Canada fans hold up the Maple Leaf flag during Team Canada women's 2-1 win over Switzerland on Monday in Milan.Mike Segar/Reuters
During each Olympics, Réjean Tremblay, the since-retired titan of Quebec sportswriting, had a trick he’d work. He would at some point compare Quebec’s medal tally to all the other provinces and territories put together. Typically, it didn’t show the rest of us in the best light, which was his cheeky point.
It’s become such a commonplace, especially at a Winter Games, that it has become jejune to point out. Still, it’s happening again.
As of this writing, Canada has 11 medals. Five have been won by Quebeckers. Another was won by a team that is 5/6ths Quebeckers.
If you want get all sabermetrical about it, Quebec has 53 per cent of Canada’s medals, against 23 per cent of the total population. That’s good ROI.
But because it is winning, does it feel like the rest of us are not? Not to me. That’s an old, tired story about division. The way the global order is shifting is encouraging a new, more interesting story about solidarity.
The Olympics are different things to different countries. America has its own Olympics. Everyone else in it is either a villain or a bit player. China works it in the opposite direction. The Scandinavians have a friendly fight with each other, nearly all of it on skis. At our Olympics, Canada talks to itself.
Most days, I suspect most of us do not feel connected in any real way to the people on the opposite coast or in the middle of the country. The Canadian story is one of dislocation – from the place your parents or grandparents were born, from the part of Canada you grew up in and left, from the rest of the country’s priorities and cultural peculiarities, or by virtue of geography. It can be a pleasant alienation, but an alienation nonetheless.
The Olympics is where we all act like we live on the same block. Someone from Alberta won a silver medal in ski-skating or snow-jumping or whatever. You don’t have any idea what that is, and you’ve never heard of the small town they’re from, but you’re very stoked about their win. For reasons you might have trouble articulating, you share in it.
I felt a twinge of this watching Megan Oldham take gold in big air on Monday. I’ve covered it live. I’ve watched it on TV a few times. Other than proving Newton’s law of universal gravitation, I still have no idea what’s going on.
Canada's Megan Oldham hugs a teammate after winning the women's freestyle skiing big air finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, on Monday.Lindsey Wasson/The Associated Press
How does one decide that they’d like to make a living skiing backward off a cliff? And why doesn’t everyone who risks their life in this way get a medal? It should be one gold, one silver and 18 bronzes.
Still, you’re watching the final few competitors come down the hill, with Oldham in the lead, feeling like the tenor of your whole week will be decided on this outcome. It does not occur to you in the midst of this to wonder where Oldham is from (Ontario) because she is Canadian. She’s risking her literal neck for all of us.
Her win is your win is our win. That’s a Canadian Olympics.
When Laurent Dubreuil comes out after winning a bronze that surprised everyone, including him, you are right to feel a proprietary pleasure.
Dubreuil is about as Quebec as it gets. He swears like a trucker in French, and talks like a banker in English. Dubreuil displays none of the theatrical emotionalism of some others we could speak of.
That’s why when he drops a post-race line about how he hopes to teach his children “that sometimes dreams come true,” it lands. That’s a Canadian line delivery, in either official language.
The best thing I could say about our athletes here is that you’d love to have every one of them as an upstairs neighbour. They’d borrow the stand mixer and actually bring it back the next day, along with some of whatever they’d baked. They’d show up if you were in trouble, even if they didn’t know you that well.
The definition of a Canadian Olympics is that occasion on which the citizens of this vast nation are encouraged to recognize that all of these sporting representatives are our neighbours. They aren’t just in your corner, they’re fighting it. This realization causes you to meditate on your other 40-million-odd neighbours.
When else do we do that? Trade wars, actual wars … mostly wars. I prefer it the Olympic way instead. Less expensive, in every sense.
I am from Toronto, feel very Toronto, and connected to Torontonians (unless you live in the east end, which isn’t Toronto. It’s a suburb of Ottawa.)
Laurent Dubreuil of Canada celebrates winning the bronze medal on the podium of the men's 500 metres speedskating race at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, on Saturday.Luca Bruno/The Associated Press
Am I wrong to feel this way? Well, if you think so, you’re obviously not from the right part of Toronto, so why would I care?
I am Toronto first in all things, except at the Olympics and whenever anyone mistakes me for an American. Then I am Canada first.
By a metrical standard, it’s not been the greatest Canadian Olympics so far. Again, as of this writing, the country stands 13th in the medal table.
Medals do matter. They prove to the rest of the world that we are robust, well financed and capable of making a good presentation. We win medals for the same reason the Milanese don’t go out in public in jogging pants.
However, that is the external messaging of an Olympics.
The internal messaging is more fundamental, and largely unaffected by performance. It is that feeling you get when you turn on the TV because you want to see how Canada is doing.
Often, that means no particular individual. You could start out watching something having no idea who the Canadians in it are, and by the end feel that regardless of where they’re from that their outcomes are your outcomes, good or bad.
That’s more than sport. That is the dream of this country.