Tristan Hopper of The National Post joins Candice to talk about his new book, Don t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All at Once. It is now available and is written by Tristan Hopper, who has been with the National Post since 2011.
00:01:16.860So, you know, that's everything from housing affordability to gender ID to, you know, medical
00:01:24.000assistance in dying. It's not that we have a dysfunctional system by global standards. It's that
00:01:29.620we have the most dysfunctional system, which I think most Canadians are sort of unused to.
00:01:35.100I 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.
00:01:44.160But it's all of a sudden, on all of these rankings, right at the bottom is Canada.
00:01:49.220And that's kind of a new thing. What inspired me to write it was I've been with the National Post since 2011.
00:01:56.240And one thing I do is I'm always looking at how the foreign press is talking about Canada.
00:02:01.400And when I started, we were almost never mentioned or it would be citing Canada as an example of what to do.
00:02:08.500So, you know, if you want to get rid of a sovereign debt crisis, do what Canada did in the 1990s.
00:02:15.000And particularly in the last five years, I've noticed when Canada is mentioned in the foreign press,
00:02:19.740and this is everywhere from Jacobin to The Economist to The Spectator, all sides of the political spectrum,
00:02:25.940Canada is mentioned as an example of what not to do.
00:02:29.480And again, I mentioned medical assistance in dying.
00:02:31.800I mentioned housing affordability, health care access.
00:02:38.740Canada is frequently mentioned, and it's almost surprising to the foreigners.
00:02:41.980They're saying, you know, I was looking at these charts, and I can't believe that of these, you know,
00:02:45.540the breakdown nations, that was a Financial Times story.
00:02:49.060They were talking about breakdown nations, and they said, actually, Canada is the worst, you know,
00:02:52.640in terms of countries that have lost political and economic power pretty quickly over the last few years.
00:02:57.460It's Canada. When you look at countries that are really losing, their fertility rate is just dropping like a stone.
00:03:03.840It's Canada. We're, you know, among the lowest of the low fertility rates.
00:03:07.540So it's all of these indicators, all at once, Canada is the worst.
00:03:12.840It's so sad. And it's interesting, Tristan, because when Justin Trudeau first was elected in 2015,
00:03:18.460the 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.
00:03:24.240I'm not sure to restore it from what, because if you look back to, like you said, the 90s and the 2000s,
00:03:30.320and under Stephen Harper, Canada had this reputation of kind of being boring, but in a good way.
00:03:35.060Like, you don't notice Canada because it was just kind of like quietly getting the work done.
00:03:39.160And the examples that we did have were like how to restructure your finances,
00:03:42.340or under Stephen Harper, how Canada had the richest middle class in the world, right?
00:03:47.500And that was sort of what we were known for.
00:03:49.040I collected some of the headlines that you wrote about in the intro of your book,
00:03:53.540so I'm going to read through them for the audience.
00:03:55.200But again, it's a really grim picture.
00:03:56.840And this is kind of in the context that Trudeau was supposed to rescue Canada's reputation in the early days.
00:04:02.300It really was like, I remember the Rolling Stone had a cover of Justin Trudeau, like dreamy.
00:04:06.920Why can't he be our prime minister or our president?
00:04:10.280And this idea was that he was like the last best hope for liberalism,
00:04:13.900and he was like the great progressive leader that was left standing.
00:04:17.920And yet that all kind of like tumbled apart under his tenure.
00:04:21.020So you started with the example of when the UK was debating euthanasia in that country,
00:04:27.020the MPs were using Canada as the country that they didn't want to be like,
00:04:30.440because everyone agreed that Canada's euthanasia laws had gone too far.
00:04:34.580The Telegraph declared that Vancouver was the fentanyl capital of the world.
00:04:38.540The Times rebranded Canada as the world capital of assisted dying.
00:04:41.740The BBC pegged Canada as the car theft capital of the world.
00:04:46.600You go on to talk about Trudeau's online harms bill.
00:16:57.760When it comes to trans ideology and this idea that kids can undergo these experimental treatments that most other countries in the world are stopping.
00:17:07.600Like 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.
00:17:25.240Well, Canada seems to completely to just refuse to have this conversation, even on the political level.
00:17:31.160Like I haven't heard Pierre Polyev talk about this issue once.
00:17:35.960I haven't heard him talk about that issue.
00:17:38.060So, I mean, you could pick up on either of them.
00:17:39.760Like, why do you think that the conservatives are so afraid to talk about these issues?
00:17:44.280I 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.
00:17:51.280That's why the end notes section of this book is very detailed.
00:18:00.380But I thought no one's going to believe me when I tell them that these things are happening.
00:18:04.620So 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.
00:18:15.240Anyway, 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.
00:18:42.520So I can think of any number of issues.
00:18:46.200I mean, you know, males and women's prisons, which we already mentioned.
00:18:50.320The fact that many government jobs do have explicit racial quotas.
00:18:55.300So they have to have a certain number of men, women, people of certain races, people who are disabled.
00:19:01.580I think most Canadians think that's illegal.
00:19:03.980They think that's something you can't actually do in Canada.
00:19:06.500And when you tell them that's the law, they're quite surprised by it.
00:19:09.380Or the fact that it is now most Canadian school boards across Canada.
00:19:14.660If 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.
00:19:24.100And if they question it for a second, they could be in real trouble.
00:19:27.280So if you say, you know, maybe you're saying that for this reason, maybe there are other psychological things happening.
00:19:36.460That's considered conversion therapy and you could lose your job or at least be investigated.
00:19:40.600So 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.
00:19:55.820And I'm just doing interviews for this book.
00:19:59.080I'll often catch myself, I'm 40 seconds into describing something and I'm realizing I sound really nuts.
00:20:04.400And 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.
00:20:13.040So 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.
00:20:25.840So 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.
00:20:33.680So you'll be like, ah, the Century Initiative, we're going to crack down on them.
00:20:37.200And 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.
00:20:53.740You would sound like a conspiracy theorist just for outlining it.
00:20:57.260But I think that's one of the things that Pierre Polyev actually does quite well is that he goes deep on things, right?
00:21:01.820Like 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.
00:21:12.900Pierre 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.
00:21:21.680And he was just like doing a really good job going deep and explaining that in his videos.
00:21:26.140I 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.
00:21:37.240Like, I think most Canadians are tired of this stuff.
00:22:01.300You can't even have that discussion because of Bill C-4, which received unanimous approval by the House of Commons.
00:22:08.960Every 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.
00:22:23.840So that, yeah, it's written so broadly.
00:22:27.060And I think I mentioned this in the book, that particularly it's called the, you know, conversion therapy bill.
00:22:31.060And it's actually a great example of what I'm talking about.
00:22:33.460You know, Canadians hear that and they're like, well, I don't like conversion therapy.
00:22:36.000You know, it's 1976 and we're hooking up gays to electrodes or something.
00:22:40.440And, yeah, that is not representative of what the bill contained.
00:22:43.280It 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.
00:22:57.920Maybe there's other issues at play here.
00:22:59.940Maybe you don't understand what gender is.
00:23:01.400You obviously don't understand what sex is.
00:23:03.040You know, maybe this is not the right time to make this decision.
00:23:08.440Yeah, if you are in an institutional situation or it hasn't been tested before the courts.
00:23:14.340But 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.
00:23:21.420Again, this sounds crazy, but that is what the law says.
00:23:25.060It hasn't been tested in a court situation.
00:23:27.380So 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.
00:23:34.640But that is the legal course we've been on.
00:23:37.760It's wild that even conservatives voted in favor.
00:23:41.920And you say that the law was written broadly as if it was accidental.
00:23:45.020You 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.
00:23:51.600They 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.
00:24:02.780And the conservatives didn't want to get trapped.
00:24:05.380So they basically just sold out the country.
00:24:08.000And 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.
00:24:20.240No questions asked. And like 14 percent would accept it enthusiastically.
00:24:26.160And 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.
00:24:34.420I mean, to me, that shows I don't even know how to describe it.
00:24:38.640But like the Canadian public has been sold a false bill of goods.
00:24:43.180I don't know if the poll specified whether it was children or sort of adult children.
00:24:47.560OK, well, if it's adult children, then that would make sense.
00:24:50.240I think the way that it was worded was just children, which I assume that meant little kids.
00:24:54.260But 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.
00:24:59.460You do your thing. But when it comes to children and protecting them, I mean, I think things have flipped on this.
00:25:05.300The 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.
00:25:14.600And I put that in the book because I'm showing that, you know, Canadians quite broadly are like, you know, just what you said.
00:25:21.360You 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.
00:25:26.740You know, you just do whatever you want.
00:25:29.060And 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.
00:25:38.560So the same Canadian who is like, if a co-worker says they're, you know, I'll use their pronouns.
00:25:43.760I don't care. Whatever. You know, they're still coming to Thanksgiving or the, you know, the local thing.
00:25:48.660But as soon as it comes to six year olds being told that, you know, gender is fluid, no way.
00:25:55.340You know, and that includes many transgender people within Canada, you know, do not bring this these issues up with children.
00:26:01.580So that sort of comes up throughout the book where you have, you know, it's still a an immensely tolerant populace.
00:26:10.600But 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.
00:26:21.740But I'm in I'm in Victoria, the most left wing city in Canada.
00:26:24.620I 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,
00:26:34.360they usually sort of reach out to me, their National Post friend for confession.
00:26:38.740And it's often never about the things that the conservatives like to talk about in public.
00:26:44.020It's usually something about gender identity.
00:26:47.100It's, you know, I saw a woman wearing a kneecap on the bus.
00:26:49.900Why? This is Canada. Why? You know, is her husband making her do this?
00:26:52.840Why 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.
00:27:04.120But traditionally, they didn't want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
00:27:08.640Yeah, it's interesting. I get that, too.
00:27:11.260In 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.
00:27:20.820Anytime 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.
00:27:31.640So 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.
00:27:39.280Okay, I have a foul question. And that is that in the book, you talk about Canada's plummeting birth rate.
00:27:44.740Like our birth rate is scary low. We are not, it's not even that we're not going to grow as a society.
00:27:49.960It's that like was given up and that particularly millennials aren't having children or choosing not to.
00:27:55.680I 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.
00:28:05.340But in Canada, that's just like not a thing that most people can reasonably do.
00:28:10.260I think our birth rate is like as low as South Korea now.
00:28:14.200And I think probably part of it has to do with the housing market.
00:28:17.780Part 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.
00:28:27.620So I'm wondering, like, why do you think the birth rate has just fallen off a cliff since basically since COVID?
00:28:33.980And is there anything that we can do to stop it?
00:28:36.440I'm inclined more towards saying that it's economic.
00:28:39.380And I would just point you towards sort of the differences between, you know, Ontario and say Quebec.
00:28:46.840So the easiest places to afford in Canada, it's still very unaffordable.
00:28:50.360But Alberta and Quebec, it's still marginally possible for a young person with a reasonable salary to afford a home of some kind.
00:28:58.620And 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.
00:29:08.240They seem more grown up and they act like grown ups as compared to, you know, say the young people in Toronto or Vancouver.
00:29:14.480And I think it's just because they're allowed to buy into being grown ups and they want to be grown ups.
00:29:18.900And 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.
00:29:27.680I 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.
00:29:33.680There's been plenty of times where young people have sort of veered towards conservative ideas or conservative parties.
00:29:39.820Brian Mulroney got a plurality of the youth vote in 1984.
00:29:43.240But 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.
00:29:51.320Something has obviously gone very wrong for that to be occurring.
00:29:55.360And 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.
00:30:04.660So, 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.
00:30:16.220But 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.
00:30:34.180I mean, I, I, I, I've certainly seen it in my social circle.
00:30:37.400As 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.
00:30:47.720I know so many people waited till their 30s to have kids.
00:30:51.020And 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.
00:30:57.040There's a reason biologically, you know, those all nighters that you used to pull in university studying or doing other things.
00:31:03.200Because 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.
00:31:10.600At my age with a baby, it's like, you know, the next day is hard.