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Looking Back: Moments That Made Us Proud, July 2025 to October 2026

We spend a lot of time on what governments get wrong. This post is about what Canadians got right. Looking back over the past fifteen months, here are the moments that should make all of us proud.

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The Artemis II rocket lifting off from its launch pad in a cloud of exhaust
Artemis II lifts off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on April 1, 2026, carrying Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Photo: NASA / Brandon Hancock (public domain)

Our blog has been quiet since July 2025. Most of what we write is about money, accountability and where governments fall short. That work matters. But it is also worth stopping, now and then, to notice what Canadians have done well.

Looking back over the past fifteen months, there is a lot to notice. Here are the moments that stood out to us, in roughly the order they happened.

A summer of young champions

The run started in the pool. At the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, Summer McIntosh, then 18, won four gold medals and a bronze. Her golds came in the 400 m individual medley, 400 m freestyle, 200 m individual medley and 200 m butterfly. In the 400 m individual medley she won by 7.48 seconds.

A few days later, on August 7, 2025, it was tennis. Victoria Mboko, also 18, won the National Bank Open in Montreal, beating Naomi Osaka 2-6, 6-4, 6-1 in the final. On the way, she beat four Grand Slam champions in one event. She became the first Canadian to win the tournament since Bianca Andreescu in 2019, and the first Canadian woman to lift the trophy in Montreal.

What made both stories special was not just the results. It was watching two Canadian teenagers perform under enormous pressure, one abroad and one at home, and deliver.

Autumn 2025: a Nobel and a World Series run

On October 13, 2025, the Nobel Prize in economic sciences went to three economists, one of them Peter Howitt. He grew up in Guelph, Ontario, studied at McGill, and taught at Western for more than two decades before moving to Brown University.

The prize recognised work on how innovation drives economic growth. Howitt and his co-laureate Philippe Aghion built a mathematical model of “creative destruction,” the way new ideas and firms replace old ones. The Nobel committee’s chair put the lesson simply: “The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted.”

That is a useful idea for any country, and especially for one trying to raise its productivity. It is a quiet kind of pride, but a real one: a Canadian-trained mind helped explain how economies move forward.

The Toronto Blue Jays reached the World Series in 2025 for the first time since 1993. On November 1, in front of a sellout crowd of 44,713 at Rogers Centre, they lost Game 7 to the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-4 in 11 innings.

It hurt. But the run gave Canadians from coast to coast something to share for weeks. After the game, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. said: “I’m sorry we couldn’t give them that title that we know the entire city wants.” Manager John Schneider said: “It will hurt for a few days, a few weeks, when you’re that close.”

There is something very Canadian about being proud of a team that came within one run of a title and handled it with grace.

Milano Cortina 2026

At the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics in February 2026, Team Canada won 21 medals: 5 gold, 7 silver and 9 bronze, eighth overall by total medals.

Some of the highlights:

  • Brad Jacobs’ rink won gold in men’s curling, beating Great Britain 9-6.
  • Valérie Maltais, Ivanie Blondin and Isabelle Weidemann defended their Olympic title in the women’s long track team pursuit.
  • Mikaël Kingsbury became the first-ever Olympic champion in men’s dual moguls, and the first freestyle skier with five Olympic medals.
  • Megan Oldham won gold in women’s ski big air, Canada’s first Olympic medal in that event.
  • Marie-Philip Poulin scored her 19th and 20th Olympic goals, breaking the women’s record previously held by Hayley Wickenheiser.

Both hockey teams came home with silver. That stings in a hockey country. But the Canadian Olympic Committee noted that the men’s medal was Canada’s 17th in Olympic men’s hockey, the most of any nation. That is a record built over generations of volunteers, coaches and parents in cold rinks.

A Canadian goes to the Moon

On April 1, 2026, Artemis II lifted off from Kennedy Space Center with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen aboard, alongside NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch. It was the first crewed mission to the Moon since the Apollo program ended more than 50 years ago.

On April 10, the crew splashed down safely in the Pacific. According to the Canadian Space Agency, Hansen became the first Canadian, and the first non-American, to take part in a lunar mission.

For a country that has long worked alongside its partners in space, it was a moment every child in Canada could understand.

A World Cup on home soil

In June 2026, the FIFA World Cup came to Canada, with matches in Toronto and Vancouver. The men’s team opened on June 12 in Toronto with a 1-1 draw against Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a late goal from Cyle Larin. Canada had lost all six of its previous men’s World Cup matches, in 1986 and 2022.

Then, at BC Place in Vancouver, in front of nearly 53,000 people, Canada beat Qatar 6-0 for its first-ever win at a men’s World Cup. Jonathan David scored a hat trick. “Today was a very special day,” said Stephen Eustáquio.

Canada went on to finish second in its group, beat South Africa in the round of 32 and bowed out to Morocco in the round of 16. For a country that had never won a men’s World Cup match before, that is a long way travelled in one summer.

What these moments say about us

None of these achievements happened by accident. Behind each one are coaches, clubs, schools, universities, research labs and public agencies, many of them supported by Canadians’ own money, through taxes, donations and volunteer hours.

That is worth remembering. When public money is spent well, on pools and rinks, on research, on space science, it can produce moments that bring a whole country together. Rednwhite is being built to help Canadians see where public money goes, so that more of it ends up in places that make us proud.

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