I woke this morning to the sort of silence one usually associates with miracles or the CBC losing funding. It was not the usual Canadian silence of people muttering “well, that’s concerning” while being mugged by ideology in a Lululemon hoodie. No. It was the silence that comes after a fever breaks.

By breakfast, the first signs were impossible to miss. Gender ideology had finally been moved to its proper shelf: comparative religion. It now sat comfortably beside crystal healing, Gnostic sects, and the more enthusiastic forms of astrology. Canadians, with characteristic politeness, agreed that adults were free to believe in innate gender spirits if they wished. They were simply no longer allowed to drag those beliefs into schools, prisons, women’s shelters, human rights tribunals, or sports governing bodies and demand that everybody else call it science.

Female spaces reverted, almost overnight, to the radical old principle that women are female. Women’s prisons once again housed women. Women’s shelters once again served women. Women’s hospital wards, changing rooms, crisis centres, rape relief services, and athletic categories all quietly recovered their original function. The country did not collapse. No one burst into flames. The sun rose, the buses ran late, and Canadian women experienced the deeply unfamiliar sensation of not having to explain why privacy, fairness, and physical safety were not hate crimes.

“They were replaced by the revolutionary practice of getting on with things.”

Even the sports pages improved. Men were removed from women’s competitions with so little fuss one wondered why the insanity had been allowed to continue so long. Records began to mean something again. Girls stopped being told that getting flattened by male bodies was a teachable moment in inclusion.

Meanwhile, Canada seemed to have recovered from a long and embarrassing binge. DEI offices vanished like travelling carnivals after a municipal scandal. Land acknowledgements were quietly retired from every meeting and kindergarten graduation after the public noticed they had not, in fact, altered land title or improved anyone’s life. They were replaced by the revolutionary practice of getting on with things.

Freedom of speech also made an unexpected return. Not the decorative kind. The real kind. The kind where one could say true or unpopular things without being marched through a moral struggle session by people whose entire personality is a lanyard.

For several glorious hours, the country seemed almost curable.

Then I remembered the date.

Happy April Fool’s Day.