Tristin Hopper urges conservatives to fight back and ‘Don’t Be Canada’
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Summary
Tristan Hopper talks about his new book, Don t Be Canada, and why he thinks Canada is not strong and free, at least not in the way that you might expect from a country that prides itself on being a bastion of free speech.
Transcript
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Please join me in welcoming my good friend, Tristan Hopper, to the stage to talk about his book, Don't Be Canada.
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And if you don't have a copy, please go out and buy one.
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Thanks for inviting me to Canada's Strong and Free Network.
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Except for the media table, particularly the Western Standard.
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This is the part of the speech where it says, suck up to Alberta.
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Daniel Smith kept talking about the hardworking pioneers and such like.
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Half my family is Albertan and the pioneers on that side, she's definitely not talking about them.
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I'm descended from people who didn't learn the language, immigrated, immediately went on welfare,
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you know, got into a bunch of vexatious lawsuits.
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But anyway, the B.C. side was quite hardworking.
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But I want to start with a quick review of the other speakers at this year's Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference.
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Danielle Smith was once cast so deep into the political wilderness that when I visited Calgary on assignment 10 years ago,
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some of the people in this room were heard to joke,
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Danielle who, whenever her name was mentioned, well, now she's premier and you're not.
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Jamil Javani started at the absolute rock bottom of the Canadian social hierarchy.
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And yet, somehow he managed to shake off the stench of this regrettable and ignominious career path
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Preston Manning did something I still think is impossible.
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He took Canada's various warring factions of pissed off right wingers
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and synthesized them into a moderately coherent political entity.
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The British writer John Ronson wrote of Conrad Black that should he die,
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his tombstone would read just his name and the dates of his existence.
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Otto von Bismarck's tomb carried just the word Bismarck.
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But Lord Black would at least favor us with a forename on his grave marker,
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I'm a 38-year-old divorced newspaper reporter who drives a 2006 Volkswagen Jetta with headliner issues,
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and I literally work out of that Jetta because I don't want to pay the rent for a co-working space.
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I charge my laptop by plugging it into a repurposed car battery that I keep on the passenger seat.
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But you invited me because I wrote a book that very specifically details all the ways
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in which Canada is not strong and free, at least right now.
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The rough synopsis of the book, Don't Be Canada, available at all good booksellers
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through Southern Linn House Publishing on Amazon.com and our audiobook drops next week,
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is that in a contemporary political era defined by bad ideas,
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Canada fell for these bad ideas harder than anyone else.
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Gender ideology, harm reduction, assisted suicide, permanent real estate bubbles,
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unsustainable immigration, justice systems that utterly refuse to appropriately punish violent crime.
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Everywhere, at least in the West, fell for these a little bit,
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but we Canadians took them, crushed them into a powder,
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and snorted them off the diaper change table in a gas station change room.
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We have an assisted suicide regime that is now the world's model of what not to do,
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and that sentiment is shared on both the left and the right.
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Here's a headline from the right-leaning Wall Street Journal.
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Welcome to Canada, the doctor will kill you now.
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And here's a headline from the very left-wing Jacobin.
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The Canadian state is euthanizing its poor and disabled.
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The principle of harm reduction as a response to drug addiction was invented in Europe,
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But we took it to such extremes that we're now doing things that would draw stairs
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even in the most liberal hippie corners of Denmark or the Netherlands.
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Nobody else handed free daily rations of recreational opioids to drug addicts
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and then acted surprised when it resulted in a tidal wave of those same opioids hitting the black market.
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Nobody else had public health officials calling for free government distribution of smokable fentanyl.
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Nobody else had a court decision finding a constitutional right to shoot heroin on a playground
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since asking a drug user to move to a different section of the park could cause them irreparable harm,
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thus violating their Section 7 rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
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The idea for Don't Be Canada came about because in my role at the National Post,
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I make a point of reading what the world's media is writing about Canada.
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When I started at the Post in 2011, international outlets either wrote nothing about us
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or it would be some niche story about how if you wanted to run an effective points-based immigration system
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or climb out of a sovereign debt crisis or organize efficient general elections
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or if you wanted to shoot terrorists from really far away with a sniper rifle,
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The international headlines we're making these days are not nearly as quaint.
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We're now the world's nightmare scenario for real estate unaffordability.
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With Vancouver emerging as the world's centre for illicit fentanyl consumption,
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the BBC called Canada the world capital for auto theft.
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We're history's only country that declared itself guilty of an ongoing genocide.
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And we're definitely the only country whose Prime Minister did so at a women's conference
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We have the only military on Earth that mandates tampons in every men's washroom
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and disciplines any service member who jokes about it.
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A year ago, U.S. talk show host Bill Maher, a lifelong progressive,
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recorded an entire segment about how the United States should actively do the opposite
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There's only one problem with thinking everything's better in Canada.
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How did we go from one of the most boring, uneventful, peaceful, well-managed,
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and socially cohesive countries on Earth into a petri dish of dumb ideas?
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My grand unified theory is that an entire country decided to run absolutely everything
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on the honour system and was surprised when this immediately sent everything to hell all
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We'll run a criminal justice system that gives bail to everyone, and if you violate your
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bail conditions, we'll just give you bail again.
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We'll run an immigration system with little to no screening and with massive loopholes
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We'll establish an entire legal framework based around the notion that your gender is
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whatever you say it is and not give any thought whatsoever to how such a system could
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We'll greenlight an assisted suicide regime with the fewest guardrails on Earth and even
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In Carter v. Canada, the Supreme Court decision that set the guidelines for legal medical assistance
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in dying, justices casually dismissed the notion that such a system would ever yield
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We should not lightly assume that the regulatory regime will function defectively.
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We got the idea that this was the enlightened way to run a country.
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We had it so good for so long that we forgot this wasn't the natural state of things.
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This is my usual explanation for how housing became a disaster.
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For 20 years, whenever a government at any level faced a decision with impacts on real
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estate, they always took the route which made it a little harder to build and afford a home.
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Maybe you want to put in a new building code mandating that bathrooms all need to have
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reinforced walls just in case a handicapped resident wants to install a grab bar in future.
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That's fine, but that's going to add a few hundred dollars to each unit and price out
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Maybe you want a greenbelt of undeveloped land surrounding the greater Toronto area.
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Sure, but those tens of thousands of families who otherwise would have lived in a greenbelt
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You do this kinds of stuff thousands of times and you ever so slowly take a country that
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as recently as the 1980s had the world's best house population and you turn it into the
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one place on earth where home prices are most divorced from income.
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I hear these sentiments often, often from Americans or Alberta separatists, looking at you, Alberta
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separatists, or from older Canadians who can indulge in such catastrophizing because they
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don't have to live here much longer, or at least they don't intend to.
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But I and many other Canadians have nowhere else to go.
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I checked, I'm not allowed to make Aaliyah to the part of Northern England where the hoppers
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I've ideally got five more decades to be a Canadian.
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I've got three children who have about nine more decades of being a Canadian.
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I've got two parents I'm going to have to bury here.
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This giant ship we call Canada holds everyone I love, everything I've built, and everything
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I treasure, and it's why I take great offense when I see people drilling holes in its hull.
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In just the past few years, I have seen levels of dysfunction that I thought existed only in
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I have seen government overreach that seems pulled from the Soviet bloc.
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I have seen hatreds unlike anything in our history.
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I'm from Victoria, and I can say that if you go all the way back to its days as an HBC
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fort, you're not going to find any outpouring of public hate quite as unhinged as the weekly
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peons to Hamas that now monopolize the tourist district each Saturday with the help of a free
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And yet, after months of meticulously documenting all of Canada's problems, which are contained
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in the eight-volume, Don't Be Canada, I can confidently say I would rather fix our problems
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than the problems of any other country on Earth.
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There are eight chapters in Don't Be Canada, and every single one details a massive, nation-ruining
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problem that is fully within our power to stop, sometimes to a cartoonish degree.
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We're not Taiwan or Ukraine, in which our worst problem is a heavily armed autocracy next
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We're not Mexico or Lebanon, in which you have criminal and terrorist organizations deeply
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Canada's problems are, we've been brought to our knees by a crime problem because we refuse
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to jail the few hundred or so guys committing all the crimes.
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We have the world's most unaffordable housing despite having more of the raw materials to
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It makes sense that Hong Kong has a housing shortage, but Canada, all we are is land and
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We've got unsustainable immigration, despite the fact that we have tighter control of our
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immigration than almost any other country on Earth.
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There are no rubber boats of asylum seekers hitting our shores, no convoys streaming across
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And in acquainting myself with all the ways in which Canada is broken, it's highlighted
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You've all seen things these days that you thought would never happen in Canada.
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Jewish sites regularly targeted by gunfire and firebombs.
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Patients regularly dropping dead in hospital waiting rooms.
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A miniature downtown east side in every single city large enough to support a junior hockey
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A crime horrifying enough that it once shocked the country for months now happens every few
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We now have governments and institutions ascribing different treatment for different people based
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Many of the people in this room have faced a government forum in just the last few years
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However, these flamboyant betrayals of the Canadian promise have illustrated what the
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I used to roll my eyes at the idea that peace, order, and good government could ever be an
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inspirational rallying cry for the Canadian project.
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But with all three now in peril, I realize now that I was just an ungrateful bastard the
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After reading my book, people have often approached me expressing a feeling of helplessness.
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They didn't know how deep the rot was and how many of the disturbing things they were
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seeing on the news were expected symptoms of a broken system rather than wacky anomalies.
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They picked up Don't Be Canada thinking that a shop teacher showing up to work in Oakville,
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Ontario with cartoonishly large prosthetic breasts was the result of some bizarre regulatory
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oversight rather than something that was welcomed and defended by authorities.
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So why bother swimming against the tide, Tristan?
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I'm just going to get investigated by my union if I object to DEI hiring policies at my university.
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I'm just going to get banned from the local rec center if I suggest that they rent a bouncy
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castle instead of hire a drag queen to read to children.
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I'm just going to get arrested if I meet the home invader with a baseball bat instead of
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I see people expressing hopelessness even if the next election goes exactly the way they
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want, as any attempt at reform is just going to get struck down by our increasingly politicized
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They'll find some charter right to steal cars or they'll establish a free trade zone with
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Defeatism is always unattractive, but particularly when you have so much on your side.
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If there was ever a moment for so-called conservative ideas, it's right now.
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On all the core ideas, the majority of Canadians are on your side, sometimes to a dramatic degree.
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This is where a progressive institution or political party holds on with both hands to an
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idea despite the fact that only about 20% of the population supports it, thus ceding the
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The idea that teachers should be required to secretly transition gender dysphoric children
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The notion that light sentences and easy bail is the most effective way to address violent crime.
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The notion that newcomers to Canada shouldn't be expected to adhere to a common set of shared values.
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Meanwhile, there is now a whole latticework of heterodox institutions and voices that didn't
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In the mid-2010s, if you were writing a news story about, say, safe injection sites, it
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was virtually impossible to find a voice willing to speak critically against them.
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Any health organization you called, any medical professor, would just back the party line that
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the science supports this, safe injection saves lives and makes neighborhoods safer.
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It was the same deal with many of the most radical components of gender identity as they
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Nine years ago, Bill C-16 enshrined gender expression as a protected category under the
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This came with a whole pile of unintended consequences, since you were extending federal
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protections to the notion that a person is whatever gender they say they are.
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But aside from a few gender-critical feminists, basically nobody at the time was willing to say
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You've got the Macdonald-Laurier Institute doing human's work.
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On the extremes of gender ideology, including on the issue of women's sports, Alberta has
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now pursued a path of treatment-based drug policy as a direct challenge to the policy of
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harm reduction, uber alice, that is now present everywhere else.
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When a Canadian is hammered for wrongthink by one of Canada's various kangaroo courts, be
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it a human rights tribunal or an ideologically captured professional licensing body, they have
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places to turn that didn't used to be available to them.
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Like the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.
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That's the group defending Amy Ham, the BC nurse, dragged through a legal odyssey for saying publicly
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You've got allies for a strong Canada, the group that brought me here.
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You've now got a whole archipelago of independent media that is shining light into places where
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Yes, you should read all this independent media after you've subscribed to the National Post
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Remember when the entire country woke up to news that a Samadun demonstration in Vancouver
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had concluded with a ritual burning of the Canadian flag and chants of death to Canada?
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You didn't hear about that because of CTV or even the great and mighty and benevolent post-media.
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You only heard it because Jared Yeiger, lately of the Western Standard, was there with a camera.
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Demographically, Canada is increasingly aligned towards reform.
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Canada, by my read, is now the only Western country on earth in which the average 20-year-old
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is now more likely to vote for a conservative option than the average 70-year-old.
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You get moments in time in which you have a plurality of under 30 voters favoring a conservative option.
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That's what happened in the electoral landslides won by Brian Mulroney or Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan.
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But young people never vote conservative at higher rates than older people.
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To me, the most startling example of this phenomenon were the results of the 2025 civics high school election poll.
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The Canadian electorate picked a liberal government.
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Usually it's just people quietly looking at me.
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Which means if you'd only had teenagers voting in the most recent federal election,
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Pierre Pellievre, that's how you pronounce his name, would be prime minister right now.
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The normal pattern among young voters is that lacking life experience, they pine for some abstract utopia.
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That's why you normally get disproportionate numbers of 20-something voters backing socialist or far-right options.
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But in Canada, the abstract utopia is the world of 20 years ago.
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I live in my hometown, and I know the windows that didn't used to have bars on them.
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The alleyways that didn't used to be blockaded with barbed wire.
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The parks that didn't have tent encampments in them.
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Even for Gen Z-ers, who can't remember the 1990s, they keep finding artifacts and clues as to what once was.
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They get their first real job and notice that every co-worker over 40 was able to buy a house on a normal salary.
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While anybody younger is crammed into a $3,000 a month apartment with roommates.
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In the forgotten corners of their school library, they can find outdated literature that instructs teenagers not to do drugs,
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rather than simply ensure that their meth pipe is properly sanitized.
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They can watch old newsreels about Expo 86 and wonder why it shows children being entertained by clowns and puppets instead of drag queens.
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And you're finding a similar conservative tilt among recent immigrants.
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We saw this in BC, where the most recent election featured the most populist conservative option since the Socreds.
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And polls showed it doing way better among brown people than it did among white people.
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People come to Canada for prosperity, freedom, and a life removed from the internecine BS of the old country.
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Lately, we've failed our newcomers on all three.
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Across Canada, in communities and minds who have never once thought of themselves as being conservative or right-wing or even particularly traditional,
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there is a yearning for Canada to just smarten up and return to the way it used to be.
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And it's in this climate that, possibly without realizing it, the Canadian right has suddenly become the standard-bearer for a whole swath of Canadian principles that have traditionally been the domain of progressives.
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Conservatives are now the most conspicuous defenders of tolerance and pluralism.
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The only side in Canada right now which believes that someone's immutable characteristics should be irrelevant to how they are treated by their neighbours and by their government.
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Canada remains one of the only countries on Earth where it is a regular occurrence that two neighbours meet and exchange small talk,
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without either one ever considering the fact that the two of them are different colours.
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It's one of the only corners of planet Earth in which you can get cut off by someone a different race than you,
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and you call him an a-hole without ever thinking of using a racial slur instead.
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And precisely one side of the political spectrum wants this tolerant utopia to continue,
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while the other side has made it very clear of their plan to regress into a Canada where different races access different public spaces,
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different educational systems, and even different justice systems.
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If you are a 13-year-old who feels confused about her sexuality and uncomfortable in her body,
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there is one side pushing the idea that you need immediate clinical interventions.
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And then there's another side, your side, who says,
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don't worry about it, these are awkward years, and you're fine just the way you are, whatever happens.
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If Canada had more Conservative mayors, I can also guarantee you that you'd be able to hold a Pride parade in this country
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without it immediately being shut down by masked men screaming for Intifada.
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So why should you defend and rebuild Canada rather than giving it up for dead?
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Because a bunch of unhinged maniacs gave you a monopoly on the truth.
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And if you don't defend and restore that truth, then someone else will.
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Someone whose motives may not be as straightforward and pure as your own.
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You're going to let this country be consumed by dumb ideas
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because you're afraid some activist lower court judge or politicized human rights tribunal
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Just beyond the walls of this building, it wasn't too long ago,
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you had Galician immigrants arriving by train and then bursting into tears
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at the sight of their isolated, undeveloped homesteads.
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They'd been promised the last best west, and they got cold prairie.
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But they stayed, and their great-great-great-grandchildren are probably in this room right now.
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It was right in this region when you had Indigenous nations witnessing the overnight disappearance of the buffalo,
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an event that plunged them into the worst famine in our recorded history,
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forcing whole communities to suddenly grapple with how any of them were going to survive into the future.
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110 years ago, Calgary had only just begun to take its current form
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when seemingly all its young men were summed away to a great war from which many would never return.
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And then those that came back saw the same thing happen to their sons 20 years later.
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100 years ago, you had five women, all Albertans,
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pushing against a seemingly unmovable Canadian political reality,
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If the ghosts of all these people could be in the room with us right now,
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are you seriously going to tell them that you had to abandon a better future for your children
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because you were depressed that the last federal election didn't go your way?
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It's a common rule among Alberta oilfield contractors that even in boom times,
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you should plan your business as if oil is $50 or $60 a barrel.
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You set an arbitrarily low benchmark and plan your finances to still be sustainable
00:25:22.620
Similarly, let's imagine that there will always be a liberal government for the rest of time.
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The next prime minister is going to be Xavier Trudeau.
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Stephen Gilbeau will eventually be appointed governor general.
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Even in this nightmare scenario, the $40 a barrel scenario,
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there's still plenty you can do to reverse the decline and restore the Canadian promise.
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My conclusion from writing Don't Be Canada was that while the current liberal government
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they didn't invent any of the bad ideas they embraced.
00:26:00.760
Our hyper-liberalized assisted suicide regime can basically be pinned
00:26:04.760
on the relentless lobbying of one non-profit, dying with dignity.
00:26:08.960
The runaway train that is Canadian harm reduction was set in motion
00:26:12.180
by a dozen or so activist academics in the early 2000s.
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A slow crawl of regulatory changes made at the local level
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entrenched the principle of gender self-ID across Canada
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before anybody had realized what was happening.
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Start asking your rec center and local library politely
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why there's more progress pride flags in their lobby than Canadian flags.
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If you go to a Lamaze class that starts by asking all the extremely pregnant women
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Pack up, leave, and give your money to a Lamaze class that doesn't do that.
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When someone on your local neighborhood forum goes off
00:27:00.240
or how safe injection makes neighborhoods safer,
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Explain as patiently and sympathetically as you can
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If you're angered by all the violent crimes committed by offenders
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start tracking and publicizing who's responsible.
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Which judges, which prosecutors, which parole board members
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participated in the early release of an offender
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and setting up a website takes $40 in an afternoon.
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I can tell you that since writing Don't Be Canada,
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They just don't consider themselves conservatives
00:28:30.620
is to thrust a Pierre Polyev pamphlet in their face.
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that every safety regulation is written in blood.
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When you're on your Air Canada or WestJet flight
00:28:45.580
you may notice a smoke detector in the bathroom.
00:29:01.000
And just as that tragedy yielded safer aircraft,