Anyone who has read the National Post in the past decade is likely to be familiar with journalist Tristin Hopper’s distinctive voice. Hopper, who is both a reporter and columnist at the conservative outlet, may be best known for poking fun at Canada’s sacred cows.
Now, in his first book, Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once (Sutherland House), Hopper takes aim at various Canadian policies implemented during the Trudeau years.
“The examples are legion: the real estate bubble that never bursts, Orwellian internet regulations, harm reduction policies that escalate harm, official health guidelines that recommend the use of glory holes in a pandemic, and a runaway euthanasia system that inspired the Wall Street Journal to declare, ‘Welcome to Canada, the doctor will kill you now’. As sobering as it is comic, Don’t Be Canada examines the cascading consequences of extreme policies and tells the tragic story of a country that took its wealth, tolerance and functionality for granted,” reads the dust jacket for the eight-chapter book.
Hopper spoke with Canadian Affairs reporter Samuel Forster about some of the issues he chose to highlight in the book, and why he remains optimistic about Canada’s ability to solve its myriad problems.
SF: The book examines a wide range of problems and policy areas that may seem to outside observers as unrelated. How did you arrive at this list of issues?
TH: It only got a chapter if it was something that Canada was doing uniquely bad, or on which we were an outlier — [if] we were doing something that no one else in the world was doing. So there’s no chapter on federal debt accumulation. There’s no chapter on poor military readiness. We’re not doing great in either of those categories, but the rest of the Western world is also not doing particularly well. So it only qualified as a chapter if I was able to show that there was something we were doing that was beyond the pale for any of our peer countries.
SF: Of the various social and political trends you focus on in the book, does one stand out as especially harmful to the fabric of Canadian society, or especially irreversible?
TH: We’ve gone way harder on a lot of gender identity issues than even the United States. We’ve gone way harder on a lot of so-called anti-racism [policies], the sort of oppressed-versus-oppressor dynamic. We’ve gone harder on that than the United States.
In terms of any particular issue, I think I would just point out that a unifying problem across all of these eight chapters is the fact that Canadians don’t understand what’s going on. I think why these problems were able to get so bad so quickly is because of this generalized Canadian sense that there are certain things that do not happen in Canada, that we are a well-run country — [that] we do not have corruption, we do not have bad actors … we’re different from any other country.
SF: Early on in the book you say, ‘There is a lot of human tragedy in the coming pages, whole generations robbed of potential, scores of preventable deaths, and untold numbers of innocent people caught within the wheels of a terrifying Kafkaesque bureaucracy. But I’m not going to pretend that Canada’s descent into madness isn’t simultaneously one of the most darkly comic things a country has ever done to itself. Nobody will fault you if you laugh.’
In your mind, what is the most tragicomic part of the book?
TH: The shop teacher showing up with the giant, oversized fetish breasts, and then the school board sort of defending him. And then after a year, he says, ‘Actually, I’m a man again.’
SF: Are there attributes of the Canadian state that make you optimistic about the future?
TH: Yeah … The moment that you realize that every bad thing that ever happened to you, you’re the architect of that, that’s great because that means you can fix them.
You don’t have to deal with an external force… You can get to this at the end of this book and realize high crime is a choice. Housing unaffordability is a choice. Low economic growth is a choice. These are all things we didn’t have to do…
Just look at any of the other countries that show up when we go to these big G20 gatherings, the problems they have to deal with demographically, culturally, socially, environmentally. Canada is still a giant pile of resources filled with people. We’re generally insulated from disruptive demographic waves. We have more control over our immigration system than almost any other country on earth…
So [for] anybody just looking at the raw fundamentals, we are still a country that can run on easy mode. All we have to do is stop punching ourselves directly in the nuts, or ovaries, whichever is your preference.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity
Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once can be purchased here.
