Canada’s pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan, depicts landscapes and waterways that have been sculpted by ice for thousands of years.Canada Pavilion/Supplied
Inside the southeast edge of the two-kilometre-round wooden structure that encircles much of Expo 2025 in Osaka sits a jagged, 15-metre-high recreation of an ice jam. It’s Canada’s pavilion. The story the country hopes to tell with the crush of ice is not one of impediment, but of rejuvenation and regeneration: a thawing springtime river, ready to flow anew.
Enough people flow to the pavilion daily that, as afternoon encroaches, it can be a 90-minute wait to get in. Only then do visitors experience Canada’s full Expo vision: a trip through a northern river with icebergs emerging from the ground, each with hidden displays visible only through augmented reality.
By hovering handout tablets over the icebergs, visitors can catch glimpses of 3-D scenes and stories. As they scour the river, they might find an Inuk carver seated atop a narwhal, Quebec City’s Chateau Frontenac, Niagara Falls and a composite of city skylines anchored by the CN Tower.
The exercise is wordless and self-directed. This is who we are, the exhibit tries to convey to the 28 million people expected to cycle through the Expo this year. Find your favourite version of the Canadian experience.
World Expos and Fairs have, for nearly 175 years, helped countries and companies position themselves as beacons of the future, featuring the public debuts of new technologies ranging from the television to the zipper. But against the backdrop of an increasingly isolationist United States and wars in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, what stands out on this artificial island on the edge of Osaka are the ways, however unintentionally, that national pavilions have become sly beacons of cultural diplomacy.
This kind of soft statecraft is “priceless” right now, said Laurie Peters, Canada’s commissioner-general for Expo 2025, in an interview in a private dining room tucked behind Canada’s public pavilion. She’s spending six months here, through mid-October, entertaining executives and government officials.
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Extending the hand of Canadian culture, she said, is “going to be the muscle that we all need to flex in terms of breaking down some of the barriers that are building up around us, whether we have anything to do with them or not.”
Though Expo pavilions take years to conceive, design and build, the ways that countries are choosing to convey themselves in Osaka feel loaded with immediacy.
The Irish pavilion includes a handful of natural and cultural objects, and a performing-arts piece, that draw attention to the country’s links with Japan and the broader world. France’s love-themed pavilion is laden with extravagances: Rodin sculptures, Alsatian wine, a spinning globe constructed of Louis Vuitton trunks. Yet it still finds ways to connect with the broader world, including an exhibit linking the 2019 fires and rehabilitations of the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris and Japan’s Shuri Castle.
And then, of course, there’s the U.S. Its pavilion homes in so much on American innovation that it effectively serves up ads for Microsoft and Tesla, then takes visitors into the belly of a (highly Instagrammable) launching rocket. Linking each room is an animated star that flies across video boards while singing a song about the world’s countries working together. Just about everything else in the pavilion, however, suggests that any teamwork would happen on America’s terms.
The U.S. pavilion also advertises higher-education programs, despite its government’s increasing restrictions on immigration. It even highlighted the prestigious Fulbright program, which President Donald Trump has proposed ending.
Canada’s iceberg adventure is at once more consistent and more inviting. Subtler, too. “Sometimes very simple, more discreet pavilions are more symbolically charged,” says Robert Lepage, the Quebec playwright, director and actor who served as the public presentation’s co-designer. (He was joined by co-designer Steve Blanchet, as well as artistic consultant Soleil Launière of Pekuakamiulnuatsh First Nation; the pavilion’s overall creative direction was overseen by the Montreal studio mirari.)
Canada’s exhibit features a trip through a river with icebergs emerging from the ground and augmented reality displays.Canada Pavilion/Supplied
Lepage has long been a fan of World Expos, happily recalling not just the infectious spirit of Montreal’s Expo 67, but the “big statement” of Quebec getting its own pavilion at 1970’s Expo. That edition – in which Ontario and British Columbia also had their own pavilions – also happened to take place in Osaka, and it looms large in the Japanese memory to this day.
As he and the team worked on Canada’s pavilion presentation, they considered following a salmon’s journey through Canada, navigating different waterways and ecosystems. But then they found another way to capture their ideas: fire (figuratively) and ice (literally). The landscapes and waterways of Canada have been sculpted by ice for thousands of years. Augmented-reality technology could capture the country’s fiery energy by animating the pavilion’s ice features with augmented-reality sketches of the diversity and vibrancy of Canadian life.
Ottawa’s National Arts Centre hopes to emphasize that, too, and has plotted out a full six months of Canadian programming at the pavilion and across the Expo, including a performance of Oscar Peterson’s Canada-themed Trail of Dreams Suite by its namesake orchestra.
Like everything else at the Expo, the NAC’s programming strategy can be taken both at face value and as a symbol for Canada’s intentions in Osaka.
Heather Gibson, the NAC’s executive producer for popular music who led its Expo curation, said much of programming was organized in the first few months after Donald Trump’s election – and that she received signals from Ottawa that it would be wise to use the opportunity to strengthen ties with Asian and European governments.
Conveying Canada’s cultural and demographic breadth and openness was one clear tactic to achieve this. You can see it in the breadth of the performers the NAC is bringing to the Expo, including Jeremy Dutcher, the Polaris Music Prize-winning tenor from Tobique First Nation; the Montreal-based Haitian-Canadian singer-songwriter Dominique Fils-Aimé; and PEI’s poet laureate Tanya Davis.
“Every country has the opportunity to tell you what they think they are,” Gibson says. “When push comes to shove, we act like our countries. The ones that you think are more competitive? They are. The ones who are more collaborative? They are.”
Davis, who performed her poetry set to music alongside her bassist partner Carlie Howell at the Expo in April, usually considers herself a critic of nationalism. But after six performances in six days in Osaka, she came away surprised. “We’re not perfect, but we can speak about what we want,” Davis says. “Canada conveyed some of the best parts of itself.”
