In addition to being a proud Italian-Canadian, Paolo Granata is a Professor of Book & Media Studies at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College and a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. An award-winning educator and internationally recognized media scholar, his work spans media ecology, semiotics, educational technologies, philosophy of technology, and artificial intelligence. He is the founder and director of the Media Ethics Lab and has held academic positions in Canada, Italy, Brazil, and China. His latest book is Generative Knowledge: Think, Learn, Create with AI (Wiley, 2026) published in several languages.
This May, I became Canadian. In truth, I have felt Canadian since the first day I set foot in this country. The greatness of Canada rests in precisely this: you feel at home from day one, never carrying the sense of being a foreigner or an immigrant. No one judges you for the accent in your voice, for the way you look, or for where you come from. You feel yourself part of that warm global village (and I don’t mean meteorologically) called Canada.
I should admit I ended up in Canada because of the very thinker who gave us the idea of the global village: Marshall McLuhan. You can imagine my satisfaction when, studying the official materials on Canadian history required for the citizenship exam, I found McLuhan’s name in the chapter devoted to great Canadians. “Nemo propheta in patria”, as the Latins put it. Yet some enlightened mind at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada must be at work, having chosen to place McLuhan in that chapter as a pioneer thinker.
McLuhan was also among the first to describe Canadian multiculturalism as a mosaic, an arrangement of tiles whose diversity yields beauty, whose differences compose a unified vision while honoring each piece for what it is. I have made this idea of the mosaic something of a signature theme of my own work. As I like to say “diversity is the mother of creativity”, the same creativity guiding the intellectual path that, following in McLuhan’s footsteps, led me to the “dish with one spoon territory”.
Paraphrasing that well-known African proverb, I would say it takes a village to make a citizen. And what better village than this one? No one becomes Canadian alone. We are made Canadian by the neighbours who welcome us, by the colleagues who include us, by the strangers who hold doors open on cold mornings, by the institutions that trust us, and by the families, both born and chosen, who anchor us to this place.
As my family and I take our place among the millions who share this immense, generous, hospitable village called Canada, I find myself returning to McLuhan once more. He imagined the global village as a planetary condition. Canada, in its quiet way, has been rehearsing that vision for a very long time: a country built on the patient daily work of arranging lives from every corner of the earth into a single civic mosaic, while leaving each tile its colour and its name.
To this great country, then, my deepest gratitude, for welcoming us, for trusting us, for granting us the rare privilege of calling ourselves, with pride, Canadians.
Long live Canada, and long live every fellow global villager.
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