Juno News - Don’t Be Canada with Tristin Hopper

00:00:00.000 Mark Carney has three passports, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, a globalist with options.

00:00:10.640 He hasn't seen Canada in a decade, calls himself a European, not a Canadian.

00:00:19.520 Told U.S. Congress last year, he's a Brit, he's back to lord over you.

00:00:26.520 Canada's not his home, it's his throne.

00:00:35.020 Hi, I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:37.860 We've got a great episode for you today.

00:00:39.620 I'm very pleased to be joined by the author of a new book.

00:00:42.500 The book is called Don't Be Canada, How One Country Did Everything Wrong All at Once.

00:00:47.980 It is now available and is written by Tristan Hopper of The National Post.

00:00:52.120 So, Tristan, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

00:00:54.560 Thanks for having me.

00:00:55.280 Okay, so first, tell us about the book. What is it about and why did you write it?

00:01:01.060 It's about how on a variety of issues, pretty quickly, Canada went further than almost any,

00:01:09.420 well, actually, empirically went further than anybody else and has thus suffered consequences

00:01:15.240 that no one else has experienced.

00:01:16.800 So, you know, that's everything from housing affordability to gender ID to, you know, medical assistance in dying.

00:01:25.240 It's not that we have a dysfunctional system by global standards.

00:01:29.020 It's that we have the most dysfunctional system, which I think most Canadians are sort of unused to.

00:01:35.040 I mean, my whole life, I've always thought, well, if we've got kind of a nutty system,

00:01:39.200 there's probably a nuttier version somewhere in Europe or South America.

00:01:44.100 But it's all of a sudden, on all of these rankings, right at the bottom is Canada.

00:01:49.480 And that's kind of a new thing.

00:01:51.420 What inspired me to write it was I've been with The National Post since 2011.

00:01:55.420 And one thing I do is I'm always looking at how the foreign press is talking about Canada.

00:02:01.200 And when I started, we were almost never mentioned or it would be citing Canada as an example of what to do.

00:02:08.880 So, you know, if you want to get rid of a sovereign debt crisis, do what Canada did in the 1990s.

00:02:14.940 And particularly in the last five years, I've noticed when Canada is mentioned in the foreign press,

00:02:19.680 and this is everywhere from Jacobin to The Economist to The Spectator, all sides of the political spectrum,

00:02:25.420 Canada is mentioned as an example of what not to do.

00:02:29.420 And again, I mentioned medical assistance in dying.

00:02:32.580 I mentioned housing affordability, health care access.

00:02:38.840 Canada is frequently mentioned, and it's almost surprising to the foreigners.

00:02:41.660 They're saying, you know, I was looking at these charts, and I can't believe that of these, you know,

00:02:45.480 the breakdown nations, that was a Financial Times story.

00:02:49.020 They were talking about breakdown nations.

00:02:50.440 And they said, actually, Canada is the worst, you know, in terms of countries that have lost political and economic power.

00:02:55.780 Pretty quickly over the last few years, it's Canada.

00:02:58.160 When you look at countries that are really losing, their fertility rate is just dropping like a stone.

00:03:03.740 It's Canada.

00:03:04.540 We're, you know, among the lowest of the low fertility rates.

00:03:07.460 So it's all of these indicators, all at once.

00:03:10.920 Canada is the worst. 0.91

00:03:12.760 It's so sad. 0.80

00:03:13.900 And it's interesting, Tristan, because when Justin Trudeau first was elected in 2015,

00:03:18.080 the Liberals had this thing like Canada's back.

00:03:20.420 And part of what he promised to do was restore Canada's reputation on the world stage.

00:03:24.280 I'm not sure to restore it from what, because if you look back to, like you said, the 90s and the 2000s and under Stephen Harper,

00:03:31.540 Canada had this reputation of kind of being boring, but in a good way.

00:03:34.980 Like, you don't notice Canada because it was just kind of like quietly getting the work done.

00:03:38.940 And the examples that we did have were like how to restructure your finances or under Stephen Harper,

00:03:43.960 how Canada had the richest middle class in the world, right?

00:03:47.440 And that was sort of what we were known for.

00:03:49.200 I collected some of the headlines that you wrote about in the intro of your book.

00:03:53.520 So I'm going to read through them for the audience.

00:03:55.140 But again, it's a really grim picture.

00:03:56.620 And this is kind of in the context that Trudeau was supposed to rescue Canada's reputation in the early days.

00:04:02.260 It really was like, I remember the Rolling Stone had a cover of Justin Trudeau, like dreamy.

00:04:06.840 Why can't he be our prime minister or our president?

00:04:10.180 And this idea was that he was like the last best hope for liberalism.

00:04:13.840 And he was like the, you know, the great progressive leader that was left standing.

00:04:17.840 And yet that all kind of like tumbled apart under his tenure.

00:04:20.980 So you started with the example of when the UK was debating euthanasia in that country,

00:04:26.960 the MPs were using Canada as the country that they didn't want to be like,

00:04:30.400 because everyone agreed that Canada's euthanasia laws had gone too far.

00:04:34.520 The Telegraph declared that Vancouver was the fentanyl capital of the world.

00:04:38.480 The Times rebranded Canada as the world capital of assisted dying.

00:04:42.220 The BBC pegged Canada as the car theft capital of the world.

00:04:46.080 You go on to talk about Trudeau's online harms bill.

00:04:49.520 Sky News Australia called, said this,

00:04:51.680 Canada considers life sentences for offending someone based off of sex, age, or race.

00:04:56.640 A Canadian cancer society inspired headlines from as far away as India

00:05:00.780 when it apologized for using the term cervix in its literature about cervical cancer.

00:05:06.500 And then they provided alternative words that you could use.

00:05:08.760 It says you may prefer other words such as front hole.

00:05:11.080 Oh my goodness.

00:05:12.120 Just a few more here.

00:05:13.320 Apparently in the 2023 Women's Canadian Powerlifting Union competition,

00:05:18.860 you write that a bearded competitor showed up, utterly shattered the record for women's bench press,

00:05:25.120 and then went right back to identifying as a man after the results were logged.

00:05:28.860 And the New York Post described it this way,

00:05:31.400 man enters powerlifting competition as woman, breaks record.

00:05:35.040 And you say that the record still stands.

00:05:37.000 A couple with regards to euthanasia here, Wall Street Journal said, 0.97

00:05:41.580 welcome to Canada, the doctor will kill you now.

00:05:44.180 He spiked online said, now Canada is euthanizing autistic people. 0.99

00:05:49.040 Canada moves one step closer to euthanizing children, according to the Daily Mail.

00:05:53.080 The Jacobin says that the Canadian state is euthanizing as poor and disabled.

00:05:57.260 And this one is probably the most shocking to me, just because it shows what Canadian people might believe.

00:06:04.160 It says, more than a quarter of Canadians think that homelessness and poverty are reasons for assisted suicide.

00:06:10.000 That was a Fox News headline.

00:06:12.520 So you really paint kind of an embarrassing picture here of our country,

00:06:16.380 that like Canada has become the global example of woke policies gone way too far, run amok,

00:06:23.700 and there's no one really stopping them.

00:06:26.000 So I guess my question is like, why aren't we course correcting?

00:06:29.180 The world is mocking us.

00:06:30.280 Everybody's noticing that Canada is like the extreme on every one of these woke policies.

00:06:34.600 Like, why isn't this a bigger concern among Canadians?

00:06:38.280 I hear a lot what other people think about us.

00:06:40.240 One thing that came up in the book is this idea that Canadians are not aware of these things.

00:06:46.380 So one thing I keep running into is there would be an issue that would be wildly controversial in another country.

00:06:53.620 A great example would actually be the issue of males in women's prisons. 0.56

00:06:57.500 This was a huge issue, front page for days across the UK, you know,

00:07:02.280 indirectly led to the resignation of a Scottish first minister.

00:07:06.020 And at the time it was happening, I'm saying like this is the number one scandal in the UK right now.

00:07:11.780 Canada has been doing this for years.

00:07:13.460 And, you know, we actually have more male offenders in women's prison as a result of this policy. 1.00

00:07:19.760 And also, at least the UK, it was sort of a piece of legislation.

00:07:23.780 I mean, this was an order in council passed quietly by the prime minister.

00:07:27.520 This was in 2017.

00:07:29.360 Justin Trudeau was just at a town hall and someone said, you know, you got to switch up your,

00:07:34.300 it was a trans activist, said you got to switch up your prison policy.

00:07:37.660 So it's based on self-ID because previously it had been, you actually could be a transgender person,

00:07:42.680 a transgender woman in a women's prison, but you had to show evidence of bottom surgery first. 1.00

00:07:47.440 And then it was just changed to self-ID.

00:07:49.520 So literally you're an offender in prison, doesn't matter what you're in for.

00:07:52.920 If you sign a form saying, oh, I'm a woman now, the law says you have to be transferred to a women's prison. 1.00

00:07:58.880 So we have the exact same policy as this crazy controversial thing in the UK.

00:08:03.200 And not only did most Canadians not know it was happening, but there was certainly no grassroots opposition to it.

00:08:10.440 And that comes up quite a lot.

00:08:13.120 This idea that Canadians are very much invested in the idea that they live in the greatest country on earth.

00:08:19.780 Everything works.

00:08:20.560 They can trust their leaders.

00:08:21.660 There's no corruption.

00:08:22.560 There are no bad actors.

00:08:23.460 We can do things here and not have to worry about them the same as a normal country would because we're Canadians and it's going to work.

00:08:31.440 So many people, until they're sort of blindsided by the truth, keep going with that delusion.

00:08:38.100 And ironically, that approach to a country is what allows bad ideas to take root so quickly.

00:08:46.060 And I mean, you mentioned sort of censorship, you know, the online harms bill or medical assistance in dying.

00:08:53.060 I'm going to keep mentioning medical assistance in dying.

00:08:55.540 But when you look back at the piece of legislation and the Supreme Court decision which initiated that, it's quite surprising at the time how uncontroversial it was and how people deciding it actually scoffed at the idea that it could go wrong.

00:09:09.420 Supreme Court justices in the court decision which legalized medical assistance in dying, there was actually, there was experts coming in and saying, as soon as you sort of break the seal on this, it's very hard to constrain a euthanasia program.

00:09:24.620 And you have to be very careful about what you're doing.

00:09:26.740 And you may not be able to put it back in the box once it started.

00:09:30.920 And you actually had justices scoffing and saying, well, that's Belgium or the Netherlands.

00:09:36.760 We shouldn't assume that it's going to go wrong in Canada.

00:09:39.260 Well, we know what we're doing.

00:09:40.300 So as a result, we put in a euthanasia system with the least safeguards of anyone else.

00:09:46.800 And then unsurprisingly, we have the highest rates of increase, way higher than anybody else who's put in medical assistance in dying program and way higher rates of scandals.

00:09:57.860 So that's kind of true across the board.

00:10:00.420 But just this, you know, delusion, I would say that I think it comes from the fact that Canada has been relatively well managed for quite some time.

00:10:10.020 So we just decide, oh, you know, pluralism, tolerance, prosperity.

00:10:15.540 These are all just our Canadian birthrights.

00:10:17.380 These aren't things that need to be managed so we can just do what we want and not have to worry about the bottom line of all those things.

00:10:24.460 And thus, when they start to be eroded, they get eroded very quickly because we're not even willing to notice that it's happening.

00:10:33.140 Well, it seems I mean, it seems in some ways that Canadians are sort of like sleepwalking through like the fall of our country.

00:10:40.140 And I mean, the euthanasia program is a perfect example of that.

00:10:42.960 Like, I feel like I missed it.

00:10:44.320 Like somehow the laws were passed and we didn't really have a national conversation on it.

00:10:49.320 We never really had a debate to understand fully what it meant.

00:10:52.000 And then by the time the laws were brought in, it was like it was too late.

00:10:55.480 It was it was already there and it was already established.

00:10:57.800 And it wasn't until they really started getting to the excesses of it.

00:11:01.300 Right. Like the idea that you could euthanize a child or someone who is mentally ill, that people it really started making press.

00:11:08.800 And I remember I didn't wasn't inspiring the kind of one of the sources I quote in my book.

00:11:13.640 And he's he sort of studied medical assistance and time programs in other countries.

00:11:17.600 And he said things kept happening in Canada that even if they happened in, you know, one of our sort of wuss peer countries in Europe, you assume we're very much like the Dutch or Belgium.

00:11:28.780 And he said things happened in Canada where if they happened in the Netherlands, it would be a huge scandal and we would have people fired and you would have transparency from the government.

00:11:37.320 And like the example of Canada where a veteran calls Veterans Affairs for help with PTSD and is offered made and takes made.

00:11:45.320 That would be a much more controversial thing in basically any European country.

00:11:51.260 And here it was a Senate hearing.

00:11:53.500 I think the person responsible was fired.

00:11:56.100 We still don't know that person's name.

00:11:57.400 And it basically went away.

00:11:59.120 I've seen this with crime as well.

00:12:00.420 I mean, we always people always criticize the Americans for, you know, how many mass shootings are they going to have and they don't change their gun laws.

00:12:07.620 Canada can endure any number of horrifying crimes that are very easily solvable.

00:12:13.220 I mean, you know, the guy was out on bail and he was already on parole from another thing.

00:12:17.380 Like there was multiple interventions that could have stopped this stabbing massacre from happening.

00:12:22.400 And we just don't notice, you know, the names of the victims of these horrifying crimes.

00:12:28.160 These would be galvanizing events, say, in the United States, say, in the UK, say, in Europe, say, in South America.

00:12:34.120 And they are just everyday occurrences.

00:12:37.420 We know they're solvable.

00:12:39.140 We read to the part of the story where, oh, the guy was on bail.

00:12:42.140 That sounds about right.

00:12:43.060 And we just move on.

00:12:44.180 So I don't know how to diagnose that.

00:12:46.940 But, yes, it is.

00:12:48.480 Canadians do not like to engage with the fact that their country is very broken.

00:12:52.840 And they can't fix it until they've engaged with that.

00:12:56.580 Well, in some ways, Tristan, I almost think it's the failure of the conservatives or maybe a failure of Canadians to accept conservative, like, opposition.

00:13:06.260 Because one of the things you quote in your book is Bill Maher, who said that, like, in politics, the liberals are like the gas pedal and the conservatives are like the brake.

00:13:14.960 And obviously, it's a quote from Bill Maher.

00:13:16.520 Yeah.

00:13:17.200 Yeah.

00:13:17.600 Yeah.

00:13:17.840 Bill Maher.

00:13:18.680 And so this idea is that, like, we're only ever stepping on the gas and we have more left wing Canadians than right wing.

00:13:24.620 And Canadians just seem reluctant to listen to conservatives.

00:13:28.200 And I would add on top of that that conservatives aren't even really talking about this, right?

00:13:31.620 Like, here we are in the middle of a federal election.

00:13:34.360 And I don't think any of these issues are being spoken about.

00:13:37.740 Certainly not euthanasia.

00:13:38.820 I haven't heard any leader mention made at all.

00:13:42.880 So it seems like it's kind of, like, settled.

00:13:44.620 Everybody agrees with this program, which you mentioned is the worst of the worst.

00:13:49.380 You have a chapter on how we outdo the Americans on identity politics.

00:13:53.060 It's funny because we hear a lot from Mark Kearney and the liberals about how the conservatives want to import American-style politics into Canada.

00:14:00.800 And yet we've kind of, like, taken over identity politics and we've become, like, we've out-American the Americans on being woke and the identity politics.

00:14:10.300 Oh, yeah.

00:14:10.800 To the point where, I mean, I put this out in the book, where you actually look at some policies that were passed.

00:14:16.480 You know, it is now law within certain government institutions.

00:14:19.900 We imported sort of American ideas of anti-racism so completely that we didn't even sort of toggle them for a Canadian audience.

00:14:30.600 So you'll often see, like, you know, Canadians have to grapple with the legacy of slavery.

00:14:35.620 And so we don't even sort of...

00:14:37.720 And then if you look at the actual history of slavery within Canada, I mean, we're cold.

00:14:42.180 We just...

00:14:42.840 It's not...

00:14:43.320 It's a cold country.

00:14:45.080 Slavery was abolished earlier.

00:14:46.660 It's just not the same factor as it is in the United States.

00:14:50.000 You know, if you look at, you know, chattel African slaves that were held in Canada before slavery was abolished in the entire British Empire, we're looking at, like, 4,000 total.

00:14:58.600 But you'll still see government anti-racism training, which has the legacy of slavery right at the top.

00:15:04.940 Now, if you were just doing an anti...

00:15:07.180 If you still want to say, you know, it's an oppressor, oppressed dynamic, and, you know, all the institutions are fundamentally racist, even if you adapted that to a Canadian audience, I think those ideas are wrong.

00:15:16.680 But if you were doing it within a Canadian context, you would at least say, well, okay, well, let's start with, you know, indigenous people and then, you know, anti-Asian racism.

00:15:23.420 Like, you know, our legacy of racism is different than the United States.

00:15:27.080 But, you know, frequently they didn't do that at all.

00:15:29.360 They just, you'll see direct lines within government materials saying, oh, Canada's exactly the same as the United States on slavery, which is insane.

00:15:36.840 And then, you know, as such, we sort of dial up our various racial quotas and et cetera on that U.S. model without even considering the Canadian context.

00:15:47.200 So, yes, I think that criticism is valid. 0.59

00:15:49.640 There's been a lot of real dumb ideas out of the States that have been imported wholesale into Canada. 0.77

00:15:55.200 And we didn't have the same kind of checks and skepticism that the Americans had in their context. 0.94

00:16:00.540 So, we got hit with them way harder than they did.

00:16:03.320 Well, I want to ask on a couple of these, because, okay, you go through the chapters in your book.

00:16:09.180 I guess there are some things that the conservatives are talking about, because you talk a lot about, or there's one chapter on harm reduction on crack, talking about, you know, the liberalized drug policies in cities like Vancouver.

00:16:21.240 And then, obviously, the housing bubble, Pierre Polyev has tried to address that.

00:16:26.200 But on the social issues, right, when it comes to trans ideology and this idea that kids can undergo these experimental treatments that most other countries in the world are stopping, like even in the U.K., that used to be the sort of forefront of this.

00:16:40.680 And the Tavisdott Clinic, you know, you mentioned in your book, the CAS review, which basically found that there isn't any evidence that doing all of these procedures on trans-identifying children actually helps in terms of their mental health.

00:16:55.700 Canada seemed completely to just refuse to have this conversation, even on the political level.

00:17:00.920 Like, I haven't heard Pierre Polyev talk about this issue once.

00:17:03.920 And same thing with euthanasia.

00:17:05.720 I haven't heard him talk about that issue.

00:17:07.780 So, I mean, you could pick up on either of them.

00:17:09.560 Like, why do you think that the conservatives are so afraid to talk about these issues?

00:17:13.780 I sympathize with the conservatives not being willing to talk about it because, you know, after writing this book, a lot of what is in this book, that's why the end notes section of this book is very detailed.

00:17:23.720 I made an absolute point.

00:17:24.840 This was going to be obnoxiously detailed.

00:17:26.380 Everything was going to be footnoted.

00:17:28.080 And end notes are annoying.

00:17:29.640 I hated them.

00:17:30.160 But I thought, no one's going to believe me when I tell them that these things are happening.

00:17:33.580 So, I can sympathize with the fact that a conservative doesn't want to bring up these issues because people reflexively, when they hear a politician saying them, are going to say, that's an absolutely insane thing to say.

00:17:45.020 Similar to, if you imagine if you were in 2015 and you were a time traveler and you're explaining to them what Canada is going to look like in 2025.

00:17:53.580 You know, just one example, that it's going to be a routine occurrence in Toronto or Montreal, that you're going to have mass protests of people calling for the destruction of Israel, you know, having, you know, mass Islamic prayers in the middle of blocked streets.

00:18:08.120 I mean, you would lose your job if you said that was somewhere in Canada.

00:18:11.080 Now, it's just a routine occurrence.

00:18:12.320 So, I can think of any number of issues, I mean, you know, males and women's prisons, which we already mentioned, the fact that many government jobs do have explicit racial quotas.

00:18:25.120 So, they have to have a certain number of men, women, people of certain races, people who are disabled.

00:18:31.460 I think most Canadians think that's illegal.

00:18:33.780 They think that's something you can't actually do in Canada.

00:18:36.300 And when you tell them that's the law, they're quite surprised by it.

00:18:39.000 Or the fact that it is now most school boards across Canada, if a child as young as six says that they now identify as, you know, a different gender, the teacher has to immediately affirm that gender.

00:18:54.060 And if they question it for a second, they could be in real trouble.

00:18:57.380 So, if you say, you know, maybe you're saying that for this reason, maybe there are other psychological things happening.

00:19:02.500 You're six years old, maybe you don't understand what gender is.

00:19:05.060 You can't do that.

00:19:06.180 That's considered conversion therapy, and you could lose your job or at least be investigated.

00:19:10.680 So, I think we're in a situation where I think the conservatives could capitalize on this issue, but they're in a situation in which we've gone so crazy that just to point out that the issue is happening, you sound crazy trying to explain it.

00:19:25.620 And just doing interviews for this book, I'll often catch myself, I'm 40 seconds into describing something, and I'm realizing, I sound really nuts.

00:19:34.180 And if someone didn't catch the intro to this, they thought, you know, local conspiracy theorist Tristan Hopper is talking about, you know, some conspiracy to do racial quotas within the government.

00:19:42.820 So, I think that's why, and knowing what I know, and I assume that the conservatives know what I know, they'll sort of find ways to address these issues.

00:19:53.840 I mean, this is my read on it.

00:19:55.380 So, they don't want to go just, you know, straight up anti-immigration, but you'll do think, like, you know, Pierre Polyev will bring up the Century Initiative.

00:20:03.480 So, you'll be like, ah, the Century Initiative, we're going to crack down on them.

00:20:06.960 And you'll find sort of little safe ways to attack the issue, because if he just did like me and just sort of outlined how broken the immigration system has been for the past two years, it's so unbelievably broken, you would sound like a conspiracy theorist just for outlining it.

00:20:27.040 But I think that's one of the things that Pierre Polyev actually does quite well is that he goes deep on things, right?

00:20:31.620 Like, in the middle of the housing crisis when Canadians couldn't afford housing, and Justin Trudeau was kind of giving his typical pablum, like, you know, not really getting to the source of the real reason, Pierre Polyev was putting out these long, detailed explanations about, like, the supply chains and the cost of lumber and the various requirements by local governments.

00:20:51.460 And he was just, like, doing a really good job going deep and explaining that in his videos.

00:20:55.940 I feel like he could do the same thing, because, I mean, you did your homework, and you, you know, you have all of these really, really crazy examples, like the power lifter that we talked about at the beginning.

00:21:07.020 Like, I think most Canadians are tired of this stuff.

00:21:10.240 We're sick of it.

00:21:11.120 I'm talking about gender ideology.

00:21:13.480 True, true.

00:21:13.940 And I will say.

00:21:14.880 You know, the schools can change the gender of your child, and they don't even have to tell you about it. 0.50

00:21:20.400 That's right.

00:21:20.680 Or, I mean, just, just one more, Tristan, I mean, you talked about how you can't even tell a child that's confused about their gender.

00:21:27.780 Maybe, you know, you're young, you're six, let's just, like, have a conversation.

00:21:31.080 You can't even have that discussion because of Bill C-4, which received unanimous approval by the House of Commons.

00:21:38.760 Every single conservative liberal bloc NDP and Green MP was in favor of this bill that basically just says that if your kid, if your child is gender confused, you have to affirm.

00:21:49.920 You have to go along with the delusions.

00:21:51.900 Yeah, the affirmation model.

00:21:53.960 So that, yeah, it's written so broadly, and I think I mentioned this in the book, that particular, it's called the, you know, conversion therapy bill.

00:22:00.860 And it's actually a great example of what I'm talking about.

00:22:03.220 You know, Canadians hear that, and they're like, well, I don't like conversion therapy. 0.62

00:22:05.980 You know, it's 1976, and we're hooking up gays to electrodes or something. 0.99

00:22:09.560 And, yeah, that is not representative of what the bill contained.

00:22:13.080 It was written so broadly, and it included gender ID, that, yes, technically, if a child as young as six says they're a different gender,

00:22:23.360 and you tell them, you know, just wait on that.

00:22:27.720 Maybe there's other issues at play here.

00:22:29.740 Maybe you don't understand what gender is.

00:22:31.200 You obviously don't understand what sex is.

00:22:33.600 You know, maybe this is not the right time to make this decision.

00:22:38.200 Yeah, if you are in an institutional situation, or it hasn't been tested before the courts,

00:22:44.260 but if you're a parent telling this to your child, you know, we don't, it hasn't been tested,

00:22:48.640 whether that's grounds that you could have your children removed from you.

00:22:51.220 Again, this sounds crazy, but that is what the law says.

00:22:55.040 It hasn't been tested in a court situation, so we haven't had a judge saying, you know,

00:22:59.460 the state is taking the children away from you because you're refusing to affirm their new gender identity.

00:23:04.600 But that is the legal course we've been on.

00:23:08.800 It's wild that even conservatives voted in favor.

00:23:11.720 And you say that the law was written broadly as if it was accidental.

00:23:14.840 You know, the liberals did that on purpose because they were trying to trap the conservatives

00:23:17.500 and get them to vote against this bill so that they could point to them and say, look at these bigots. 0.53

00:23:21.740 They want to, like you said, the 1976 idea of hooking a gay kid up to electric therapy or whatever, 0.83

00:23:27.340 like these summer camps had existed apparently, like back in the 80s and 90s.

00:23:32.560 And the conservatives didn't want to get trapped, so they basically just sold out the country.

00:23:37.760 And one of the things in your book that I learned was that I think you write,

00:23:41.600 according to public opinion, 70 percent or 69 percent of Canadians say that they would accept

00:23:47.660 the gender of their child, no questions asked.

00:23:51.240 And like 14 percent would accept it enthusiastically.

00:23:53.820 I'm a mother, I have four kids, and this idea that if one day your child comes to you

00:23:59.840 and is confused about their gender that you would just, without question, accept it.

00:24:04.220 I mean, to me that shows, I don't even know how to describe it,

00:24:08.440 but like the Canadian public has been sold a false bill of goods if they believe that.

00:24:12.580 I don't know if the poll specified whether it was children or sort of adult children,

00:24:16.660 so I'm forgetting that.

00:24:17.560 Okay, well, if it's adult children, then that would make sense.

00:24:19.800 I think the way that it was worded was just children, which I assume that meant little kids.

00:24:24.040 But yeah, I mean, maybe if an adult comes to you and say,

00:24:26.520 I want to be a man or I want to be a woman, it's like, okay, whatever, you do your thing. 0.98

00:24:30.280 But when it comes to children and protecting them, I mean, I think things have flipped on this.

00:24:35.760 The reason I put it in because it sort of highlights that,

00:24:39.500 I mean, this isn't a tremendously controversial book because I keep sort of citing poll data.

00:24:44.080 And I put that in the book because I'm showing that, you know, Canadians quite broadly are like,

00:24:49.760 you know, just what you said.

00:24:51.280 You do you if you want to be transgender. 0.90

00:24:53.300 As long as it doesn't affect me, I really don't want to get into it.

00:24:56.520 You know, you just do whatever you want.

00:24:58.900 And then when it came to these sort of edge cases, puberty blockers for kids,

00:25:03.680 the school issues, once Canadians find out that's what's happening,

00:25:06.980 those numbers completely switch.

00:25:08.360 So the same Canadian who is like, if a co-worker says they're, you know, 0.72

00:25:12.560 I'll use the pronouns, I don't care, whatever, you know, 0.72

00:25:14.800 they're still coming to Thanksgiving or the, you know, the local thing.

00:25:18.440 But as soon as it comes to six-year-olds being told that, you know, gender is fluid,

00:25:24.060 no way, you know, and that includes many transgender people within Canada,

00:25:28.760 you know, do not bring these issues up with children.

00:25:32.000 So that sort of comes up throughout the book where you have, you know,

00:25:36.840 it's still an immensely tolerant populace.

00:25:40.400 But we've pushed these issues so far, often without people knowing,

00:25:44.840 that when they really learn the true state of what's going on,

00:25:48.220 yes, then they're not tremendously happy about it.

00:25:51.540 But I'm in Victoria, the most left-wing city in Canada, I think it's safe to say.

00:25:56.360 And I often bring up this anecdote, but whenever someone within my social circle

00:26:01.820 has some dark right-wing thought in the middle of the night,

00:26:03.940 they usually sort of, you know, reach out to me, their National Post friend, for confession.

00:26:08.640 And it's often never about the things that the conservatives like to talk about in public.

00:26:13.920 It's usually something about gender identity. 0.98

00:26:16.880 It's, you know, I saw a woman wearing a kneecap on the bus. 1.00

00:26:19.680 Why, this is Canada?

00:26:20.800 Why, you know, is her husband making her do this?

00:26:22.700 Why is this happening?

00:26:24.340 It's usually one of those sort of hot-button social issues

00:26:27.060 that Pierre Paulyeva has talked about more than any other conservative I can think of

00:26:32.580 within my lifetime.

00:26:33.940 But traditionally, they didn't want to touch with a 10-foot pole.

00:26:38.420 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:26:40.120 I get that, too.

00:26:41.060 In my kids' classes, like, I think the parents,

00:26:44.120 everyone kind of quietly comes to me

00:26:46.000 and tells me things that they've heard

00:26:48.840 about other things that are happening in school.

00:26:50.900 Anytime there's anything that is, like, remotely woke

00:26:53.740 in my son's classroom,

00:26:55.580 they'll, like, come to me and ask me to go to the teacher

00:26:58.060 because they're, like, too timid, too,

00:26:59.680 but they know that I will.

00:27:01.400 So I become, like, the class mom spokesman

00:27:03.540 if, like, there's a book that the kids are reading

00:27:05.500 that some of the parents feel uncomfortable with

00:27:07.420 or something like that.

00:27:09.080 Okay, I have a foul question,

00:27:10.560 and that is that in the book you talk about

00:27:12.360 Canada's plummeting birth rate.

00:27:14.520 Like, our birth rate is scary low.

00:27:16.700 We are not...

00:27:17.600 It's not even that we're not going to grow as a society.

00:27:19.760 It's that, like, it was given up

00:27:20.760 and that particularly millennials aren't having children

00:27:24.480 or choosing not to.

00:27:25.460 I understand, like, the set of circumstances around us

00:27:28.860 are pretty grim when you think about the economy,

00:27:31.500 the idea that, you know, typically you would go buy a house

00:27:34.160 and then you would start a family,

00:27:35.220 but in Canada that's just, like, not a thing

00:27:36.780 that most people can reasonably do.

00:27:40.080 I think our birth rate is, like, as low as South Korea now.

00:27:43.400 And I think probably part of it has to do with the housing market.

00:27:47.560 Part of it is obviously, like, a deeper spiritual question

00:27:50.420 that people just don't see the reason to do the thing

00:27:54.680 that we've always done as a species to survive.

00:27:57.540 So I'm wondering, like, why do you think the birth rate

00:28:00.780 has just fallen off a cliff since, basically, since COVID?

00:28:03.740 And is there anything that we can do to stop it?

00:28:05.400 I'm inclined more towards saying that it's economic.

00:28:09.240 And I would just point you towards sort of the differences

00:28:12.200 between, you know, Ontario and, say, Quebec.

00:28:16.620 So the easiest places to afford in Canada,

00:28:18.940 it's still very unaffordable, but Alberta and Quebec,

00:28:22.100 it's still marginally possible for a young person

00:28:25.440 with a reasonable salary to afford a home of some kind.

00:28:28.320 And I've just noticed, you know,

00:28:30.220 either traveling to Quebec or living in Alberta,

00:28:32.860 as soon as I get there, the first thing I notice

00:28:34.860 is that people, younger people, seem more mature.

00:28:38.020 They seem more grown-up, and they act like grown-ups

00:28:40.780 as compared to, you know, say, the young people

00:28:42.940 in Toronto or Vancouver.

00:28:44.280 And I think it's just because they're allowed

00:28:46.060 to buy into being grown-ups, and they want to be grown-ups.

00:28:48.760 And that's why we're seeing,

00:28:50.420 we've been seeing this for quite some time,

00:28:52.060 this very weird trend in which the average young person

00:28:55.040 is more conservative than the average old person.

00:28:57.460 I don't think, I couldn't find a single other country

00:29:00.160 where that's the case or has been the case

00:29:02.000 in recent decades.

00:29:03.460 There's been plenty of times where young people

00:29:06.140 have sort of veered towards conservative ideas

00:29:08.240 or conservative parties.

00:29:09.620 Brian Mulroney got a plurality of the youth vote in 1984.

00:29:13.400 But the idea that the average Canadian 25-year-old

00:29:15.960 is more conservative than the average Canadian 75-year-old,

00:29:19.520 that's like cats laying with dogs.

00:29:21.120 Something has obviously gone very wrong

00:29:22.900 for that to be occurring.

00:29:24.600 And I think it's just Canadians, young Canadians, 0.98

00:29:29.380 want the ability to just sort of settle down,

00:29:32.200 raise a family, and do these normal things.

00:29:34.620 So, yeah, you could do what my grandma said,

00:29:38.920 which is, oh, you know, just live in 300 square feet

00:29:41.280 and, you know, just have a baby

00:29:42.500 and, you know, just put it in a basket on top of the dryer.

00:29:45.400 I'm, okay, sure.

00:29:46.740 But I would be inclined to say

00:29:50.520 that if a lot of our economic problems went away

00:29:52.940 and we went back to the housing affordability

00:29:55.720 of the 1990s, the income of the 1990s,

00:29:58.660 the per capita growth of the 1990s,

00:30:00.800 I think people would very happily start having kids.

00:30:04.140 I mean, I've certainly seen it in my social circle.

00:30:07.160 As soon as people, something changes financially

00:30:10.160 that they are able to get a home,

00:30:12.180 they start crapping out kids and they're very happy

00:30:14.460 and they wish they'd been able to do it earlier.

00:30:16.560 Well, absolutely.

00:30:17.540 I know so many people waited till their 30s to have kids.

00:30:20.920 And the thing that you realize

00:30:22.080 when you're in your 30s and you have kids

00:30:23.480 is that you had a lot more energy

00:30:25.160 when you were in your 20s.

00:30:26.800 There's a reason biologically.

00:30:28.920 You know, those all-nighters that you used to pull

00:30:30.720 in university studying or doing other things,

00:30:33.320 that was the time that was probably the best time

00:30:35.880 to have kids because you could just get up the next day

00:30:38.160 and not worry when you have to pull an all-nighter.

00:30:40.540 At my age with a baby, it's like,

00:30:42.540 you know, the next day is hard.

00:30:44.140 So I think that's great.

00:30:45.600 Tristan, I really appreciate your time today.

00:30:47.940 I encourage everyone to go pick up the book,

00:30:49.320 Don't Beat Canada, How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once. 0.66

00:30:53.940 It was released on April 8th,

00:30:55.820 so it should be available, I believe, at bookstores

00:30:57.900 and certainly on Amazon.

00:30:59.660 So thanks so much.

00:31:01.280 Thank you.

00:31:01.880 Thanks for having me.

00:31:03.060 All right, everyone.

00:31:03.820 That's Tristan Hopper of the National Post.

00:31:05.720 Go pick up a copy of his book.

00:31:07.100 That's all the time we have for today.

00:31:08.360 Thanks so much for tuning in.

00:31:09.220 I'm Candice Malcolm.

00:31:10.060 This is the Candice Malcolm Show.

00:31:11.420 We'll be back again tomorrow.

00:31:12.320 Thank you and God bless.

00:31:19.320 Thank you.

Juno News - April 21, 2025

Don’t Be Canada with Tristin Hopper

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