About

I never intended to become a U.S. citizen.

I was born and raised in Kamloops, British Columbia. In my twenties, after being sexually assaulted by my boss, I packed up my life and moved to Seattle to start over. When I tried to apply for a green card, I discovered that the United States had considered me a citizen since the day I was born, but nobody had thought to tell me.

I spent much of my adult life in Washington State, and for a long time I loved living there. But the longer I stayed, the more I struggled to reconcile what America claimed to stand for with what I saw happening around me.

Two school shootings affected people close to me, and a friend was shot and killed while sitting in her car at a stoplight. I lived in a country where owning a gun was a constitutional right and healthcare wasn't. In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, people were going bankrupt from medical bills. Healthcare should never be for profit, period. Money shaped what kind of education a child received, too, because the quality of a child's education depended on the wealth of their ZIP code. Every child deserves the same quality of education regardless of where they live. All of this was happening while billionaires accumulated unimaginable fortunes and millions struggled to afford the basics.

While we argued about all of this, we were also destroying the planet we depend on to survive.

How can a society with so much wealth and intelligence be so bad at taking care of people and the planet?

That question became my five-time award-winning novel, They Could Be Saviors. It is an eco-thriller about a group of women who decide the only way to stop climate change is to kidnap the billionaires most responsible for destroying the planet. The women treat the billionaires' pathological need to accumulate wealth with psychedelic therapy.

The questions behind the premise are serious. Why do we admire people for accumulating more wealth than they could ever spend? Why do we accept an economic system that rewards endless accumulation on a planet with finite resources?

Humanity has the knowledge and the means to address its biggest problems. What we find hard is questioning the beliefs and institutions we've been taught to trust.

Over time my frustration with the United States grew, and during the second Trump administration it became more personal. I realized I didn't want to live in a country where I could be shot dead by my own government for trying to protect other people. I'm exactly the sort of person who would pull out my phone and start recording an ICE raid, and I didn't want to find out what might happen next.

So after years in Washington, I moved back to Canada. I am a dual citizen, and I will never give up my Canadian citizenship, unlike Ted Cruz.

Leaving the United States didn't mean I stopped caring about what happens there. People I love still live in the United States, and the problems that concern me, such as inequality and climate change, don't stop at the border.

My goal is to get people to question what they've been told, but more than anything, I want to offer hope, especially to the younger generations.

They are inheriting enormous problems they didn't create. They're being told to work harder and be grateful for the opportunity, and I reject that. We created the systems we live under, and we can change them. We can question what we've been taught to admire and imagine a future that looks nothing like the one we're heading toward.

That's why I write, and it's why I'm running this campaign. I think we need to start asking better questions.

I'm Diana Colleen, a Canadian novelist running for President of the United States.