‘Don’t Be Canada’: Journalist’s Book Examines How the Great White North ‘Did Everything Wrong All at Once’

Once a thriving nation, Canada has seen a steep erosion in prosperity and security in just 10 years, a slide journalist Tristin Hopper blames on a string of self-inflicted policy failures detailed in his new book.

“Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once” was released in April. In it, the National Post columnist says Canada has mismanaged several critical issues compared to other developed nations, including drug and crime reform, euthanasia, health care, transgender policy, the judiciary, and housing.

“We just sort of became wildly complacent and got into a headspace that we were special, we were Canadian, we had a functioning society, and ... we didn’t have to defend it,” Hopper said in an interview with the Epoch Times.

Housing and Dangerous Streets

Hopper’s eight-chapter book says Canada has fallen in prosperity over the past decade and has become a country where home ownership is increasingly out of reach for many people, crime and drug addiction runs increasingly rampant, and the health-care system has become dysfunctional, sometimes even fatal, for Canadians in need of care.

“Each one is something that Canada is uniquely extreme with,” Hopper said.

On drug addiction and crime, Hopper writes that “harm reduction” policies of safe injection sites and B.C.’s aborted decriminalization of public drug use and possession are signs of serious decline. An attempt by progressive policymakers to de-stigmatize drug addiction has endangered the public, made drug addiction worse, and helped create tent cities in a rising number of communities, according to Hopper.

His book also argues that Canadians need to better understand the link between soft-on-crime policy and rampant crime, noting that the term “super chronic offender” is now being used by some Western Canadian police forces to refer to a person who commits more than one crime per month.

Hopper cites a 2022 B.C. Urban Mayors’ Caucus report showing how a small group of individuals accounted for an outsized number of interactions with law enforcement that year, during which they were regarded as suspects or charged.

Death and Health Care

Hopper also tackled Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in his book. He said Canada serves as a cautionary example even among countries that are implementing euthanasia programs. 

Censorship and Identity Politics

Hopper’s book argues that Canada is flirting with censorship and dystopia, including in expansions of hate speech law, mandated takedowns of content, and the proposed Online Harms Act which was introduced last February and is currently before the lawmakers for debate.

Hopper noted that even progressive author Margaret Atwood warned last spring that the Justin Trudeau government’s Online Harms Act, the predecessor of the current proposed bill, was “Orwellian” in nature.

“It wasn’t until Ottawa started threatening life sentences for speech crimes that its democratic peers began noticing that their Canadian cousin had developed a bit of a censorship problem,” Hopper writes.

On identity politics, Hopper writes that Canada went too far by embracing policies that are overly permissive, including allowing biological men into female spaces, mandating pronoun usage, and putting tampons in men’s bathrooms on military bases.

He said that while this has produced some pithy cultural commentary by people like Jordan Peterson, it’s a bad situation for Canada and for young people to grow up in.

Economy

Hopper writes that Canada’s economy is in bad shape, linking this partly to real estate, which he said began a “feverish ascent” in 2003 and is still far too expensive for most Canadians to afford. Although much of the Western world has seen home prices balloon, Canada is an example of where the situation has become dire, according to Hopper.

“It is Canada that pioneered the idea of seeing whole cities transform into over-leveraged financial products. It is Canada where the problem of unaffordability first began to veer into the cartoonish,” he writes.

‘Activist Judges’

Hopper writes that many of the problems discussed in his book involve activist judges who he says are “unhinged from reality” and are leading the country down the wrong path.

“At the heart of virtually every chapter in this book is an activist judge. A jurist who looked at the Charter of Rights and Freedoms [and] decided that a vague phrase such as ’security of the person' denoted an unquestioned constitutional right to do drugs in a playground or obtain suicide on demand,” Hopper writes.

He said that while “an increasing number of Canadians” are realizing the courts have “lost their minds,” change will be slow as “activist judges” continue to play a role.

What’s the Solution?

The light at the end of the tunnel for Canada, according to Hopper, is that the majority of its problems are self-inflicted, rather than at least partly due to external threats and pressures facing some nations, such as in Taiwan or the European Union.

Hopper said the first step to a solution is realizing how broken Canada  so it can be rebuilt, pointing to nations like Poland which went from economic stagnation and rampant dysfunction to becoming one of the world’s fastest-growing, safest societies.

“Poland really sucked for most of the 20th century. And as such, you have an entire country of people saying, we really have to be careful about what we do, or we can go back into the abyss. Canada is the reverse of that,” Hopper said, adding that Canada could become like a “giant Switzerland,” if concerted and consistent policy changes and public pressure are applied.

Hopper cautions Canadians not to expect any political party or leader to come along and fix things, saying it is up to Canadians themselves to get the country out of its current situation.

“[I don’t agree with] the idea that we can just sort of sit on our hands as all these problems happen and just wait for some philosopher king to become prime minister and fix everything,” Hopper said.

“You have to ready the ground for a lot of the sort of necessary fights to fix Canada that would need to take place.”