From assisted suicide to housing affordability, Canada now cited as the very model of a worst-case scenario
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In just the last week, there have been two separate columns in British newspapers framing Canada as a model of what not to do.
Both were inspired by the tabling of Bill 63, the Liberals’ Online Harms Bill. The Spectator said that it effectively engendered the founding of a Canadian “thought police.” The Telegraph cited it as evidence that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete.”
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This didn’t used to happen. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian politics were famously inaccessible to the wider world. For Canada’s 2008 federal election, The Spectator covered it with a blog post that mostly mused on how nobody cared. “It’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections,” it read.
But now – on topics ranging from assisted suicide to housing affordability to internet regulation – it’s not infrequent that Canada will be cited in foreign parliaments and in foreign media as the very model of a worst-case scenario.
It was just six months ago that The Telegraph scored a viral hit with a mini-documentary framing the political situation in Canada as a “warning to the West.”
“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has sought to position itself as the global bastion of progressive politics,” reads a synopsis for the film Canada’s Woke Nightmare, which has garnered more than five million views.
The documentary notes that Canada is now at the absolute global vanguard of progressive issues including harm reduction, assisted suicide and gender ideology.
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Canada now has the world’s most liberalized assisted suicide regime, and the world’s highest rate of deaths attributable to euthanasia.
Canada was the first country to go all-in on supervised consumption as a response to rising overdose rates, and B.C. is the first jurisdiction to distribute free recreational opioids under the rubric of “safer supply.”
And in just the last few years, Canada’s rules governing transgender identity have been pushed even further than equivalent policies across much of Europe.
As one example, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was forced to resign last year in part due to controversy that her government had allowed convicted rapists to secure transfer to women’s prisons simply by self-identifying as female.
Trudeau enacted the exact same policy in 2018 – and with the same effect that it allowed sex offenders to transfer to women’s prison. Nevertheless, the issue has gone almost unremarked in Canadian discourse.
The thrust of Canada’s Woke Nightmare is that this “social revolution” has mostly been to the country’s detriment, and should be heeded by Western nations looking to follow the same path.
The U.K. is currently studying a proposal to legalize doctor-assisted suicide. And during Parliamentary hearings, it was Canada that was presented as the example of what to avoid.
“I would say that Canada is a warning sign for countries that legalize medical assistance in dying,” Trudo Lemmens, a University of Toronto bioethicist, told a U.K. committee last June.
The phrase “warning to the world” was also used in a recent profile on Canadian euthanasia published in the magazine Spiked. “Rather than tackle the health and economic challenges Canadian society is facing, the government is effectively offering an early death as a solution to life’s ills,” it read.
Former National Post columnist Jamil Jivani – who just won election as a Conservative MP – was last year featured in Newsweek with his argument that Trudeau government attempts to regulate the internet should be studied by U.S. policymakers as a test case on how internet controls can erode free speech.
“Canadians made the mistake of taking free speech for granted,” wrote Jivani of the Online Streaming Act, which enforced Canadian content quotas on sites ranging from Netflix to social media.
Even beyond the political realm, aspects of the Canadian economy have gone so beyond the pale that they are now the international benchmark for what can go wrong.
That’s most true of housing, with Canada often topping charts for the most “unaffordable” shelter or the most “bubbly” real estate market.
Last November, Business Insider profiled the Canadian housing crisis for the singular purpose of warning Americans not to let their own housing market get as bad. U.S. readers were told that Canadians faced “decades” until they had any chance of getting fair market value for a house.
If the Online Harms Act is suddenly garnering headlines across the rest of the Anglosphere, it’s not because Canadian politics are inherently interesting to the wider world. Rather, it’s because Bill C-63 – just like any number of Trudeau policies before it – is proposing to do things that no other Western democracy has yet proposed.
While plenty of Canada’s peer countries have hate speech controls, Bill C-63 was able to raise even European eyebrows with life sentences for “advocating genocide,” and a provision for police to mandate house arrest merely on suspicion that a Canadian was likely to commit a hate crime.
The Wall Street Journal, for one, profiled the bill as a real-life example of the 2002 film Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian future in which citizens are jailed for “pre-crime.”
Or in the critical words of The Spectator, “this legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime … if that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is.”
Nobody’s ever accused Quebec of trying to live within its means, but the province has recently tabled a deficit that is record-breaking even by their standards. Premier François Legault, who has typically been considered centre-right on these matters, is planning to run an $11 billion deficit in the next fiscal year. For context, that’s equivalent to $1,300 per Quebecer.
As is tradition, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau has marked her separation from the prime minister with an interview and photo spread in Elle Magazine. She was also at the Forbes and Know Your Value’s annual 30/50 Summit in Abu Dhabi, where she said that women “shouldn’t expect the minimum” from their men. “You should expect a maximum of nourishment, presence and help in your life with the people around you,” she said.
The Toronto Star has just confirmed an earlier report by the National Post that Canada has suspended military exports to Israel. Israel was never a major buyer of Canadian military equipment, and few if any of them could be characterized as arms (it’s mostly airplane parts). Nevertheless, the exports were reportedly paused for “human rights concerns” – even as the likes of Qatar and Saudi Arabia remain allowed to buy Canadian military kit, and at higher levels.
This marks at least the third time that the Trudeau government has pursued a policy that is directly in line with a political demand of the anti-Israel movement that is routinely blockading streets, picketing Jewish sites and even getting Trudeau’s own political events cancelled. The prior two were the Trudeau government calling for a ceasefire that would leave Hamas in control of Gaza, and the reopening of funding to UNRWA despite a ream of evidence that the agency allegedly employs terrorists, including several who directly participated in the Oct. 7 attacks.
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