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

Posted by Geoffrey Clarfield

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.

“We didn’t have to explain who comes in. We didn’t have to bring the hammer down on violent criminals. We just thought we had reached this sort of utopian state that was self-sustaining.”

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.

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.

He cited the dramatic rise in MAID deaths, which was originally forecast to account for roughly 2.05 percent of Canada’s deaths (around 6,000) per year but reached 7,611 by 2020 and 10,064 by 2021. As of last year, numbers hit 16,499, or 5.1 percent of all deaths in the country.

On Canada’s struggling health-care system, Hopper writes that long waits at the emergency room have led to an increasing number of deaths and are symptoms of “free healthcare” that’s anything but free.

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.

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.