The Times’s version of Team Canada is getting a new reporter: Dan Bilefsky.

Dan was born and grew up in Montreal, but he has gotten around, most recently reporting from Paris and London in addition to Prague, Brussels, New York and Turkey. He has covered multiple elections, the rise of Europe’s right and terrorist attacks. But he’s also written stories like one about a gang of aging jewel thieves known as the “Bad Grandpas” or the “Diamond Geezers.” He’s turned those stories into a book, which is coming out next year.

Now he is moving back to Montreal to write for us. And here are some of his thoughts about returning home:

More than a century after my great-grandfather arrived in Montreal as a fruit peddler — and more than 25 years after I left my parents’ house — I am excited to be returning home.

Getting to cover my own country as a foreign correspondent at a time when The Times is ramping up its Canada coverage is a cosmic opportunity. So is reconnecting with my family, who never left. My dad is a Montreal-based nephrologist and, at 81, still sees dozens of patients a day!

I feel very fortunate to be coming home when Canada, ever the bashful self-deprecating starlet, is finally having its global close-up. When I was growing up in Montreal in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a restive time. Culture wars over language dominated the headlines, and businesses were fleeing to Toronto.

Nearly three decades later, a panda-hugging son of Montreal is prime minister and an international darling. Canada’s progressive liberalism in everything from health care to immigration is being closely watched the world over as a counterpoint to Trump’s America. And Montreal, always an uber-cool city, is experiencing a boom and being trumpeted across the Atlantic as “the perfect city,” or Paris meets Brooklyn.

I can’t wait to discover the swaggering, multicultural city that was the backdrop of my childhood and nerdy teenage years, when I was sometimes too focused on studying, and escaping, to properly appreciate it. I am particularly eager to explore and write about Montreal’s mind-blowing food scene — and no longer having to explain why Montreal bagels are so much better than New York’s.

Another son of Montreal, Leonard Cohen, whose poetry I tried to emulate when I was growing up, wrote when he was twentysomething, “I have to keep coming back to Montreal to renew my neurotic affiliations.” I think I know what he meant.

But decades later he also came to embrace the city he had left, telling an interviewer in 2006, “I feel at home when I’m in Montreal — in a way that I don’t feel anywhere else.”

I, too, feel the pull toward home, and am looking forward to my great Canadian adventure.