The Candice Malcolm Show - Don’t Be Canada with Tristin Hopper

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

00:00:10.700 He hasn't seen Canada in a decade, calls himself a European, not a Canadian.

00:00:20.300 Told U.S. Congress last year, he's a Brit, he's back to lord over you.

00:00:26.560 No, Canada's not his home. It's his throne.

00:00:35.120 Hi, I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:37.920 We've got a great episode for you today.

00:00:39.680 I'm very pleased to be joined by the author of a new book.

00:00:42.560 The book is called Don't Be Canada, How One Country Did Everything Wrong All at Once.

00:00:48.040 It is now available and is written by Tristan Hopper of The National Post.

00:00:52.180 So, Tristan, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

00:00:54.640 Thanks for having me.

00:00:55.340 Okay, so first, tell us about the book. What is it about and why did you write it?

00:01:01.140 It's about how on a variety of issues, pretty quickly, Canada went further than almost any,

00:01:09.480 well, actually, empirically went further than anybody else and has thus suffered consequences

00:01:15.300 that no one else has experienced.

00:01:16.860 So, you know, that's everything from housing affordability to gender ID to, you know, medical

00:01:24.000 assistance in dying. It's not that we have a dysfunctional system by global standards. It's that

00:01:29.620 we have the most dysfunctional system, which I think most Canadians are sort of unused to.

00:01:35.100 I mean, my whole life I've always thought, well, if we've got kind of a nutty system, there's probably a nuttier version somewhere in Europe or South America.

00:01:44.160 But it's all of a sudden, on all of these rankings, right at the bottom is Canada.

00:01:49.220 And that's kind of a new thing. What inspired me to write it was I've been with the National Post since 2011.

00:01:56.240 And one thing I do is I'm always looking at how the foreign press is talking about Canada.

00:02:01.400 And when I started, we were almost never mentioned or it would be citing Canada as an example of what to do.

00:02:08.500 So, you know, if you want to get rid of a sovereign debt crisis, do what Canada did in the 1990s.

00:02:15.000 And particularly in the last five years, I've noticed when Canada is mentioned in the foreign press,

00:02:19.740 and this is everywhere from Jacobin to The Economist to The Spectator, all sides of the political spectrum,

00:02:25.940 Canada is mentioned as an example of what not to do.

00:02:29.480 And again, I mentioned medical assistance in dying.

00:02:31.800 I mentioned housing affordability, health care access.

00:02:38.740 Canada is frequently mentioned, and it's almost surprising to the foreigners.

00:02:41.980 They're saying, you know, I was looking at these charts, and I can't believe that of these, you know,

00:02:45.540 the breakdown nations, that was a Financial Times story.

00:02:49.060 They were talking about breakdown nations, and they said, actually, Canada is the worst, you know,

00:02:52.640 in terms of countries that have lost political and economic power pretty quickly over the last few years.

00:02:57.460 It's Canada. When you look at countries that are really losing, their fertility rate is just dropping like a stone.

00:03:03.840 It's Canada. We're, you know, among the lowest of the low fertility rates.

00:03:07.540 So it's all of these indicators, all at once, Canada is the worst.

00:03:12.840 It's so sad. And it's interesting, Tristan, because when Justin Trudeau first was elected in 2015,

00:03:18.460 the Liberals had this thing like Canada's back, and part of what he promised to do was restore Canada's reputation on the world stage.

00:03:24.240 I'm not sure to restore it from what, because if you look back to, like you said, the 90s and the 2000s,

00:03:30.320 and under Stephen Harper, Canada had this reputation of kind of being boring, but in a good way.

00:03:35.060 Like, you don't notice Canada because it was just kind of like quietly getting the work done.

00:03:39.160 And the examples that we did have were like how to restructure your finances,

00:03:42.340 or under Stephen Harper, how Canada had the richest middle class in the world, right?

00:03:47.500 And that was sort of what we were known for.

00:03:49.040 I collected some of the headlines that you wrote about in the intro of your book,

00:03:53.540 so I'm going to read through them for the audience.

00:03:55.200 But again, it's a really grim picture.

00:03:56.840 And this is kind of in the context that Trudeau was supposed to rescue Canada's reputation in the early days.

00:04:02.300 It really was like, I remember the Rolling Stone had a cover of Justin Trudeau, like dreamy.

00:04:06.920 Why can't he be our prime minister or our president?

00:04:10.280 And this idea was that he was like the last best hope for liberalism,

00:04:13.900 and he was like the great progressive leader that was left standing.

00:04:17.920 And yet that all kind of like tumbled apart under his tenure.

00:04:21.020 So you started with the example of when the UK was debating euthanasia in that country,

00:04:27.020 the MPs were using Canada as the country that they didn't want to be like,

00:04:30.440 because everyone agreed that Canada's euthanasia laws had gone too far.

00:04:34.580 The Telegraph declared that Vancouver was the fentanyl capital of the world.

00:04:38.540 The Times rebranded Canada as the world capital of assisted dying.

00:04:41.740 The BBC pegged Canada as the car theft capital of the world.

00:04:46.600 You go on to talk about Trudeau's online harms bill.

00:04:49.580 Sky News Australia called, said this,

00:04:51.740 Canada considers life sentences for offending someone based off of sex, age, or race.

00:04:56.700 A Canadian cancer society inspired headlines from as far away as India

00:05:00.840 when it apologized for using the term cervix in its literature about cervical cancer.

00:05:06.380 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.

00:05:11.040 Oh, my goodness.

00:05:12.160 Just a few more here.

00:05:13.980 Apparently, in the 2023 Women's Canadian Powerlifting Union competition,

00:05:18.940 you write that a bearded competitor showed up,

00:05:21.600 utterly shattered the record for women's bench press,

00:05:25.200 and then went right back to identifying as a man after the results were logged.

00:05:28.940 And the New York Post described it this way,

00:05:31.460 man enters powerlifting competition as woman, breaks record.

00:05:35.060 And you say that the record still stands.

00:05:37.060 A couple with regards to euthanasia here,

00:05:39.840 Wall Street Journal said, 0.99

00:05:41.620 welcome to Canada, the doctor will kill you now. 0.94

00:05:44.260 He spiked online, said, 1.00

00:05:45.980 now Canada is euthanizing autistic people.

00:05:49.120 Canada moves one step closer to euthanizing children,

00:05:51.720 according to the Daily Mail.

00:05:53.140 The Jacobin says that the Canadian state is euthanizing,

00:05:56.440 it's poor and disabled. 0.96

00:05:57.640 And this one is probably the most shocking to me,

00:06:00.980 just because it shows what Canadian people might believe.

00:06:04.120 It says, more than a quarter of Canadians think that homelessness and poverty

00:06:07.800 are reasons for assisted suicide.

00:06:10.080 That was a Fox News headline.

00:06:12.580 So you really paint kind of an embarrassing picture here of our country,

00:06:16.440 that like Canada has become the global example of woke policies gone way too far,

00:06:23.000 run amok, and there's no one really stopping them.

00:06:26.040 So I guess my question is like, why aren't we course correcting?

00:06:29.220 The world is mocking us.

00:06:30.240 Everybody's noticing that Canada is like the extreme on every one of these woke policies.

00:06:34.700 Like, why isn't this a bigger concern among Canadians?

00:06:38.340 We care a lot what other people think about us.

00:06:40.480 One thing that came up in the book is this idea that Canadians are not aware of these things.

00:06:46.440 So one thing I keep running into is there would be an issue that would be

00:06:50.040 wildly controversial in another country.

00:06:53.660 A great example would actually be the issue of males in women's prisons. 0.56

00:06:57.020 This was a huge issue, front page for days across the UK, you know,

00:07:02.340 indirectly led to the resignation of a Scottish first minister.

00:07:06.280 And at the time it was happening, I'm saying like this is the number one scandal in the UK right now.

00:07:11.840 Canada has been doing this for years.

00:07:13.820 And, you know, we actually have more male offenders in women's prison as a result of this policy. 1.00

00:07:19.620 And also, at least the UK, it was sort of a piece of legislation.

00:07:23.840 I mean, this was an order in council passed quietly by the prime minister.

00:07:27.580 This was in 2017.

00:07:29.420 Justin Trudeau was just at a town hall and someone said, you know, you got to switch up your,

00:07:34.280 it was a trans activist, said you got to switch up your prison policy.

00:07:37.820 So it's based on self-ID because previously it had been, you actually could be a transgender person,

00:07:42.740 a transgender woman in a women's prison, but you had to show evidence of bottom surgery first. 1.00

00:07:47.200 And then it was just changed to self-ID.

00:07:49.580 So literally, you're an offender in prison, doesn't matter what you're in for.

00:07:53.180 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

00:07:59.060 So we have the exact same policy as this crazy controversial thing in the UK.

00:08:03.240 And not only did most Canadians not know it was happening,

00:08:07.540 but there was certainly no grassroots opposition to it.

00:08:10.460 And that comes up quite a lot.

00:08:12.220 This idea that Canadians are very much invested in the idea that they live in the greatest country on earth.

00:08:19.640 Everything works.

00:08:20.620 They can trust their leaders.

00:08:21.720 There's no corruption.

00:08:22.620 There are no bad actors.

00:08:24.380 We can do things here and not have to worry about them the same as a normal country would

00:08:29.060 because we're Canadians and it's going to work.

00:08:31.480 So many people, until they're sort of blindsided by the truth, keep going with that delusion.

00:08:38.140 And ironically, that approach to a country is what allows bad ideas to take root so quickly.

00:08:46.120 And I mean, you mentioned sort of censorship, you know, the online harms bill or medical assistance

00:08:52.620 in dying.

00:08:53.420 I'm going to keep mentioning medical assistance in dying.

00:08:55.600 But when you look back at the piece of legislation and the Supreme Court decision, which initiated

00:09:00.160 that, it's quite surprising at the time how uncontroversial it was and how people deciding

00:09:07.140 it, we actually scoffed at the idea that it could go wrong.

00:09:09.620 Supreme Court justices in the Carter decision, which legalized medical assistance in dying.

00:09:15.520 There was actually, there was experts coming in and saying, as soon as you sort of break

00:09:19.920 the seal on this, it's very hard to constrain a euthanasia program and you have to be very

00:09:25.820 careful about what you're doing.

00:09:26.980 And you may not be able to put it back in the box once it started.

00:09:30.640 And you actually had justices scoffing and saying, well, that's Belgium or the Netherlands.

00:09:36.860 We shouldn't assume that it's going to go wrong in Canada.

00:09:39.340 Well, we know what we're doing.

00:09:40.820 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

00:09:53.280 else who's put in medical assistance in dying program and way higher rates of scandals.

00:09:57.640 So that's kind of true across the board.

00:10:01.440 Just this, you know, delusion, I would say that I think it comes from the fact that Canada

00:10:06.820 has been relatively well managed for quite some time.

00:10:10.060 So we just decide, oh, you know, pluralism, tolerance, prosperity.

00:10:15.620 These are all just our Canadian birthrights.

00:10:17.460 These aren't things that need to be managed so we can just do what we want and not have

00:10:22.260 to worry about the bottom line of all those things.

00:10:24.540 And thus, when they start to be eroded, they get eroded very quickly because we're not

00:10:30.660 even willing to notice that it's happening.

00:10:33.220 Well, it seems I mean, it seems in some ways that Canadians are sort of like sleepwalking 1.00

00:10:37.640 through like the fall of our country.

00:10:40.240 And I mean, the euthanasia program is a perfect example of that.

00:10:43.020 Like, I feel like I missed it.

00:10:44.400 Like somehow the laws were passed and we didn't really have a national conversation on it.

00:10:49.360 We never really had a debate to understand fully what it meant.

00:10:52.080 And then by the time the laws were brought in, it was like it was too late.

00:10:55.540 It was it was already there and it was already established.

00:10:58.000 And it wasn't until they really started getting to the excesses of it.

00:11:01.380 Right. Like the idea that you could euthanize a child or someone who is mentally ill, that

00:11:06.100 people it really started making press.

00:11:09.280 And I remember I didn't wasn't inspiring the kind of one of the sources I quote in my book.

00:11:13.700 And he's he sort of studied medical assistance and time programs in other countries.

00:11:17.800 And he said things kept happening in Canada that even if they happened in, you know, one

00:11:22.160 of our sort of wuss peer countries in Europe, you assume we're very much like the Dutch or

00:11:28.040 Belgium.

00:11:28.800 And he said things happened in Canada where if they happened in the Netherlands, it would

00:11:32.640 be a huge scandal and we would have people fired and you would have transparency from

00:11:36.980 the government.

00:11:37.380 And like the example of Canada where a veteran calls veterans affairs for PTSD and is offered

00:11:44.080 made and takes made.

00:11:45.400 That would be a much more controversial thing in basically any European country.

00:11:51.340 And here it was a Senate hearing.

00:11:53.560 I think the person responsible was fired.

00:11:56.180 We still don't know that person's name.

00:11:57.500 And it basically went away.

00:11:59.180 I've seen this with crime as well.

00:12:00.540 I mean, we always people always criticize the Americans for, you know, how many mass shootings

00:12:05.340 are they going to have and they don't change their gun laws.

00:12:07.680 Canada can endure any number of horrifying crimes that are very easily solvable.

00:12:13.280 I mean, you know, the guy was out on bail and he was already on parole from another thing.

00:12:17.440 Like there was multiple interventions that could have stopped this stabbing massacre from

00:12:21.360 happening.

00:12:22.480 And we just don't notice, you know, the names of the victims of these horrifying crimes.

00:12:28.340 These would be galvanizing events, say, in the United States, say, in the UK, say, in

00:12:33.160 Europe, say, in South America.

00:12:34.180 And they are just everyday occurrences.

00:12:37.480 We know they're solvable.

00:12:39.200 We read to the part of the story where, oh, the guy was on bail.

00:12:42.200 That sounds about right.

00:12:43.100 And we just move on.

00:12:44.220 So I don't know how to diagnose that.

00:12:47.000 But yes, it is.

00:12:48.540 Canadians do not like to engage with the fact that their country is very broken and they

00:12:54.040 can't fix it until they've engaged with that.

00:12:55.780 Well, in some ways, Tristan, I almost think it's the failure of the conservatives or maybe

00:13:01.000 a failure of Canadians to accept conservative like opposition, because one of the things

00:13:07.480 you quote in your book is Bill Maher, who said that like in politics, the liberals are

00:13:12.660 like the gas pedal and the conservatives are like the brake.

00:13:15.020 And obviously it's a quote from Bill Maher.

00:13:16.560 Yeah.

00:13:17.260 Yeah.

00:13:17.660 Yeah.

00:13:17.900 Bill Maher.

00:13:18.300 And so this idea is that like we're only ever stepping on the gas and we have more left

00:13:23.480 wing Canadians than right wing and Canadians just seem reluctant to listen to conservatives.

00:13:28.260 And I would add on top of that, that conservatives aren't even really talking about this, right?

00:13:31.680 Like here we are in the middle of a federal election.

00:13:34.420 And I don't think any of these issues are being spoken about.

00:13:37.800 Certainly not euthanasia.

00:13:38.880 I haven't heard any leader mention made at all.

00:13:42.900 So it seems like it's kind of like settled.

00:13:44.520 Everybody agrees with this program, which you mentioned is the worst of the worst.

00:13:49.640 You have a chapter on how we outdo the Americans on identity politics.

00:13:53.240 It's funny because we hear a lot from Mark Kearney and the liberals about how the conservatives

00:13:57.360 want to import American style politics into Canada.

00:14:00.860 And yet we've kind of like taken over identity politics and we've become like we've out American

00:14:06.400 the Americans on being woke and the identity politics.

00:14:10.380 Oh, yeah.

00:14:10.820 To the point where, I mean, I point this out in the book where you actually look at some

00:14:15.060 policies that were passed.

00:14:16.540 You know, it is now law within certain government institutions.

00:14:19.940 We imported sort of American ideas of anti-racism so completely that we didn't even sort of toggle

00:14:28.860 them for a Canadian audience.

00:14:30.100 So you'll often see, like, you know, Canadians have to grapple with the legacy of slavery.

00:14:35.500 And so we don't even sort of and then if you look at the actual history of slavery within

00:14:40.240 Canada, I mean, we're cold.

00:14:42.180 We just it's not it's a cold country.

00:14:45.160 Slavery was abolished earlier.

00:14:46.700 It's just not the same factor as it is in the United States.

00:14:49.840 You know, if you look at chattel African slaves that were held in Canada before slavery was

00:14:55.300 abolished in the entire British Empire, we're looking at like 4000 total.

00:14:58.480 But you'll still see government anti-racism training, which has the legacy of slavery

00:15:04.180 right at the top.

00:15:05.420 Now, if if you were just doing an anti if you still want to say, you know, it's an oppressor

00:15:09.300 oppressed dynamic and, you know, all the institutions are fundamentally racist.

00:15:13.300 Even if you adapted that to a Canadian audience, I think those ideas are wrong.

00:15:16.700 But if you were doing it within a Canadian context, you would at least say, well, OK,

00:15:19.780 well, let's start with the, you know, indigenous people and then, you know, anti-Asian racism

00:15:23.220 like, you know, our legacy of racism is different than the United States.

00:15:27.000 But, you know, frequently they didn't do that at all.

00:15:29.600 They just you'll see direct lines within government materials saying, oh, Canada is exactly the

00:15:33.980 same as the United States on slavery, which is insane.

00:15:36.920 And then, you know, as such, we sort of dial up our various racial quotas and et cetera on

00:15:44.660 that U.S. model without even considering the Canadian context.

00:15:47.140 So, yes, I think that criticism is valid. 0.93

00:15:49.700 There's been a lot of real dumb ideas out of the States that have been imported wholesale 0.98

00:15:54.540 into Canada. 0.96

00:15:55.460 And we didn't have the same kind of checks and skepticism that the Americans had in

00:16:00.020 their context.

00:16:00.500 So we got hit with them way harder than they did.

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00:16:34.040 Well, I want to ask on a couple of these because, OK, you go through the chapters in your book.

00:16:39.400 I guess there are some things that the conservatives are talking about because you talk a lot about

00:16:43.340 or there's one chapter on harm reduction on crack, talking about the liberalized drug policies in cities like Vancouver.

00:16:51.440 And then obviously the housing bubble, Pierre Polyev has tried to address that.

00:16:56.360 But on the social issues, right?

00:16:57.760 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.

00:17:07.600 Like even in the UK that used to be the forefront of this and the Tavistock Clinic, you know, you mentioned in your book, the cast 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.

00:17:25.240 Well, Canada seems to completely to just refuse to have this conversation, even on the political level.

00:17:31.160 Like I haven't heard Pierre Polyev talk about this issue once.

00:17:34.160 And same thing with euthanasia.

00:17:35.960 I haven't heard him talk about that issue.

00:17:38.060 So, I mean, you could pick up on either of them.

00:17:39.760 Like, why do you think that the conservatives are so afraid to talk about these issues?

00:17:44.280 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.

00:17:51.280 That's why the end notes section of this book is very detailed.

00:17:53.920 I made an absolute point.

00:17:55.060 This was going to be obnoxiously detailed.

00:17:56.600 Everything was going to be footnoted.

00:17:58.000 And end notes are annoying.

00:17:59.860 I hated them.

00:18:00.380 But I thought no one's going to believe me when I tell them that these things are happening.

00:18:04.620 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.

00:18:15.240 Anyway, 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.

00:18:24.800 You know, just one example.

00:18:26.860 That it's going to be a routine occurrence in Toronto or Montreal.

00:18:30.060 That you're going to have mass protests of people calling for the destruction of Israel.

00:18:34.140 You know, having, you know, mass Islamic prayers in the middle of blocked streets.

00:18:38.320 I mean, you would lose your job if you said that was somewhere in Canada.

00:18:41.280 Now it's just a routine occurrence.

00:18:42.520 So I can think of any number of issues.

00:18:46.200 I mean, you know, males and women's prisons, which we already mentioned. 0.96

00:18:50.320 The fact that many government jobs do have explicit racial quotas.

00:18:55.300 So they have to have a certain number of men, women, people of certain races, people who are disabled.

00:19:01.580 I think most Canadians think that's illegal.

00:19:03.980 They think that's something you can't actually do in Canada.

00:19:06.500 And when you tell them that's the law, they're quite surprised by it.

00:19:09.380 Or the fact that it is now most Canadian school boards across Canada.

00:19:14.660 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.

00:19:24.100 And if they question it for a second, they could be in real trouble.

00:19:27.280 So if you say, you know, maybe you're saying that for this reason, maybe there are other psychological things happening.

00:19:32.680 You're six years old.

00:19:33.760 Maybe you don't understand what gender is.

00:19:35.500 You can't do that.

00:19:36.460 That's considered conversion therapy and you could lose your job or at least be investigated.

00:19:40.600 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.

00:19:55.820 And I'm just doing interviews for this book.

00:19:59.080 I'll often catch myself, I'm 40 seconds into describing something and I'm realizing I sound really nuts.

00:20:04.400 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.

00:20:13.040 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.

00:20:24.060 I mean, this is my read on it.

00:20:25.840 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.

00:20:33.680 So you'll be like, ah, the Century Initiative, we're going to crack down on them.

00:20:37.200 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.

00:20:53.740 You would sound like a conspiracy theorist just for outlining it.

00:20:57.260 But I think that's one of the things that Pierre Polyev actually does quite well is that he goes deep on things, right?

00:21:01.820 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.

00:21:12.900 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.

00:21:21.680 And he was just like doing a really good job going deep and explaining that in his videos.

00:21:26.140 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.

00:21:37.240 Like, I think most Canadians are tired of this stuff.

00:21:40.460 We're sick of it.

00:21:41.340 I'm talking about gender ideology.

00:21:43.680 True, true.

00:21:44.140 And I will say that you can, you know, the schools can can change the gender of your child and they don't even have to tell you about it.

00:21:50.300 Or, I mean, just just one more, I mean, you talked about how you can't even tell a child that's confused about their gender.

00:21:58.120 Maybe, you know, you're young, you're six.

00:21:59.900 Let's just like have a conversation.

00:22:01.300 You can't even have that discussion because of Bill C-4, which received unanimous approval by the House of Commons.

00:22:08.960 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, you have to go along with the delusion.

00:22:22.100 Yeah, the affirmation model.

00:22:23.840 So that, yeah, it's written so broadly.

00:22:27.060 And I think I mentioned this in the book, that particularly it's called the, you know, conversion therapy bill.

00:22:31.060 And it's actually a great example of what I'm talking about.

00:22:33.460 You know, Canadians hear that and they're like, well, I don't like conversion therapy. 0.51

00:22:36.000 You know, it's 1976 and we're hooking up gays to electrodes or something. 1.00

00:22:40.440 And, yeah, that is not representative of what the bill contained.

00:22:43.280 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 and you tell them, you know, just wait on that.

00:22:57.920 Maybe there's other issues at play here.

00:22:59.940 Maybe you don't understand what gender is.

00:23:01.400 You obviously don't understand what sex is.

00:23:03.040 You know, maybe this is not the right time to make this decision.

00:23:08.440 Yeah, if you are in an institutional situation or it hasn't been tested before the courts.

00:23:14.340 But if you're a parent telling this to your child, you know, we don't, it hasn't been tested whether that's grounds that you could have your children removed from it.

00:23:21.420 Again, this sounds crazy, but that is what the law says.

00:23:25.060 It hasn't been tested in a court situation.

00:23:27.380 So we haven't had a judge saying, you know, the state is taking the children away from you because you're refusing to affirm their new gender identity.

00:23:34.640 But that is the legal course we've been on.

00:23:37.760 It's wild that even conservatives voted in favor.

00:23:41.920 And you say that the law was written broadly as if it was accidental.

00:23:45.020 You know, the liberals did that on purpose because they were trying to trap the conservatives and get them to vote against this bill so that they could point to them and say, look at these bigots.

00:23:51.600 They want to, like you said, the 1976 idea of hooking a gay kid up to electric therapy or whatever, like these summer camps that existed apparently, like back in the 80s and 90s.

00:24:02.780 And the conservatives didn't want to get trapped.

00:24:05.380 So they basically just sold out the country.

00:24:08.000 And one of the things in your book that I learned was that I think you write, according to public opinion, 70 percent or 69 percent of Canadians say that they would accept the gender of their child.

00:24:20.240 No questions asked. And like 14 percent would accept it enthusiastically.

00:24:24.480 I'm a mother. I have four kids.

00:24:26.160 And this idea that if one day your child comes to you and is confused about their gender, that you would just, without question, accept it.

00:24:34.420 I mean, to me, that shows I don't even know how to describe it.

00:24:38.640 But like the Canadian public has been sold a false bill of goods.

00:24:43.180 I don't know if the poll specified whether it was children or sort of adult children.

00:24:46.880 So I'm forgetting.

00:24:47.560 OK, well, if it's adult children, then that would make sense.

00:24:50.240 I think the way that it was worded was just children, which I assume that meant little kids.

00:24:54.260 But yeah, I mean, maybe maybe if an adult comes to you and say, I want to be a man or I want to be a woman, it's like, OK, whatever.

00:24:59.460 You do your thing. But when it comes to children and protecting them, I mean, I think things have flipped on this.

00:25:05.300 The reason I put it in because it sort of highlights that, I mean, this isn't a tremendously controversial book because I keep sort of citing poll data.

00:25:14.600 And I put that in the book because I'm showing that, you know, Canadians quite broadly are like, you know, just what you said.

00:25:21.360 You do you if you want to be transgender. As long as it doesn't affect me, I really don't want to get into it. 1.00

00:25:26.740 You know, you just do whatever you want.

00:25:29.060 And then when it came to these sort of edge cases, puberty blockers for kids, the school issues, once Canadians find out that's what's happening, those numbers completely switch.

00:25:38.560 So the same Canadian who is like, if a co-worker says they're, you know, I'll use their pronouns. 0.59

00:25:43.760 I don't care. Whatever. You know, they're still coming to Thanksgiving or the, you know, the local thing.

00:25:48.660 But as soon as it comes to six year olds being told that, you know, gender is fluid, no way.

00:25:55.340 You know, and that includes many transgender people within Canada, you know, do not bring this these issues up with children.

00:26:01.580 So that sort of comes up throughout the book where you have, you know, it's still a an immensely tolerant populace.

00:26:10.600 But we push these issues so far, often without people knowing that when they really learn the true state of what's going on, yes, then they're they're not tremendously happy about it.

00:26:21.740 But I'm in I'm in Victoria, the most left wing city in Canada.

00:26:24.620 I think it's safe to say. And I often bring up this anecdote, but whenever someone within my social circle has some dark right wing thought in the middle of the night,

00:26:34.360 they usually sort of reach out to me, their National Post friend for confession.

00:26:38.740 And it's often never about the things that the conservatives like to talk about in public.

00:26:44.020 It's usually something about gender identity. 0.98

00:26:47.100 It's, you know, I saw a woman wearing a kneecap on the bus. 1.00

00:26:49.900 Why? This is Canada. Why? You know, is her husband making her do this?

00:26:52.840 Why is this happening? It's usually one of those sort of hot button social issues that Pierre Paulieva has talked about more than any other conservative I can think of within my lifetime.

00:27:04.120 But traditionally, they didn't want to touch with a 10 foot pole.

00:27:08.640 Yeah, it's interesting. I get that, too.

00:27:11.260 In my kids classes, like I think the parents, everyone kind of quietly comes to me and tells me things that they've heard about other things that are happening in school.

00:27:20.820 Anytime there's anything that is like remotely woke in my son's classroom, they'll like come to me and ask me to go to the teacher because they're like too timid to, but they know that I will.

00:27:31.640 So I become like the class mom spokesman if like there's a book that the kids are reading that some of the parents feel uncomfortable with or something like that.

00:27:39.280 Okay, I have a foul question. And that is that in the book, you talk about Canada's plummeting birth rate.

00:27:44.740 Like our birth rate is scary low. We are not, it's not even that we're not going to grow as a society.

00:27:49.960 It's that like was given up and that particularly millennials aren't having children or choosing not to.

00:27:55.680 I understand like the set of circumstances around us are pretty grim when you think about the economy, the idea that, you know, typically you would go buy a house and then you would start a family.

00:28:05.340 But in Canada, that's just like not a thing that most people can reasonably do.

00:28:10.260 I think our birth rate is like as low as South Korea now.

00:28:14.200 And I think probably part of it has to do with the housing market.

00:28:17.780 Part of it is obviously like a deeper spiritual question that people just don't see the reason to do the thing that we've always done as a species to survive.

00:28:27.620 So I'm wondering, like, why do you think the birth rate has just fallen off a cliff since basically since COVID?

00:28:33.980 And is there anything that we can do to stop it?

00:28:36.440 I'm inclined more towards saying that it's economic.

00:28:39.380 And I would just point you towards sort of the differences between, you know, Ontario and say Quebec.

00:28:46.840 So the easiest places to afford in Canada, it's still very unaffordable.

00:28:50.360 But Alberta and Quebec, it's still marginally possible for a young person with a reasonable salary to afford a home of some kind.

00:28:58.620 And I've just noticed, you know, either traveling to Quebec or living in Alberta, as soon as I get there, the first thing I notice is that people, younger people seem more mature.

00:29:08.240 They seem more grown up and they act like grown ups as compared to, you know, say the young people in Toronto or Vancouver.

00:29:14.480 And I think it's just because they're allowed to buy into being grown ups and they want to be grown ups.

00:29:18.900 And that's why we're seeing, we've been seeing this for quite some time, this very weird trend in which the average young person is more conservative than the average old person.

00:29:27.680 I don't think, I can't, I couldn't find a single other country where that's the case or has been the case in recent decades.

00:29:33.680 There's been plenty of times where young people have sort of veered towards conservative ideas or conservative parties.

00:29:39.820 Brian Mulroney got a plurality of the youth vote in 1984.

00:29:43.240 But the idea that the average Canadian 25 year old is more conservative than the average Canadian 75 year old, that's like cats laying with dogs.

00:29:51.320 Something has obviously gone very wrong for that to be occurring.

00:29:55.360 And I think it's just Canadians, young Canadians want the ability to just sort of settle down, raise a family and do these normal things.

00:30:04.660 So, yeah, you could, you could, you could do what my, my grandma said, which is, oh, you know, just live in 300 square feet and, you know, just have a baby and, you know, just put it in a basket on top of the dryer.

00:30:15.620 Okay, sure.

00:30:16.220 But I would be inclined to say that if a lot of our economic problems went away and we went back to the housing affordability of the 1990s, the income of the 1990s, the per capita growth of the 1990s, I think people would very happily start having kids.

00:30:34.180 I mean, I, I, I, I've certainly seen it in my social circle.

00:30:37.400 As soon as people, something changes financially that they are able to get a home, they start crapping out kids and they're very happy and they wish they'd been able to do it earlier.

00:30:46.780 Well, absolutely.

00:30:47.720 I know so many people waited till their 30s to have kids.

00:30:51.020 And the thing that you realize when you're in your 30s and you have kids is that you had a lot more energy when you were in your 20s.

00:30:57.040 There's a reason biologically, you know, those all nighters that you used to pull in university studying or doing other things.

00:31:03.200 Because that, that was the time that was probably the best time to have kids because you could just get up the next day and not worry when you have to pull an all nighter.

00:31:10.600 At my age with a baby, it's like, you know, the next day is hard.

00:31:14.360 So I, I think that's great.

00:31:15.780 Tristan, I really appreciate your time today.

00:31:18.160 I encourage everyone to go pick up the book, Don't Be Canada, How One Country Did Everything Wrong All at Once. 0.81

00:31:24.180 It was released on April 8th, so it should be available, I believe, at bookstores and certainly on Amazon.

00:31:29.820 So thanks so much.

00:31:31.460 Thank you.

00:31:31.980 Thanks for having me.

00:31:33.200 All right, everyone.

00:31:34.040 That's Tristan Hopper of the National Post.

00:31:35.920 Go pick up a copy of his book.

00:31:37.340 That's all the time we have for today.

00:31:38.580 Thanks so much for tuning in.

00:31:39.420 I'm Candice Malcolm.

00:31:40.240 This is the Candice Malcolm Show.

00:31:41.620 We'll be back again tomorrow.

00:31:42.540 Thank you and God bless.

The Candice Malcolm Show - April 21, 2025

Don’t Be Canada with Tristin Hopper

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