Canada Is Massively Overrated, Impossibly Unsustainable, and Wildly Corrupt
It's time you heard the truth about the "great" white north
Last week I published an article about a Canadian government cover-up of a water-poisoning scandal, and I started the piece by trying to dispel the myth that Canada is a lovely, good, and moral nation.
I was shocked by how much this surprised my readers — including Canadians. Many people had never even heard of several of the scandals I mentioned.
So, today, I’ve decided to dedicate an entire exposé to forever demolishing the insane notion that Canada is “good.”
But first, I need to say:
I love Canada.
I’m so grateful to be a Canadian citizen.
Canada has universal healthcare.
And low gun crime.
And great poutine.
And the Rockies.
And the good bit of Niagara Falls.
And most of the world’s freshwater.
And no Fox News.
And no Republicans.
And no Democrats.
Elections don’t last for two years.
It has the 34th best-ranked passport for mobility.
It even has a great international reputation, whether it deserves it or not.
Okay, enough with buttering up the Canucks.
Canada is not the kind and friendly place you see depicted in the media.
While undoubtedly more polite (and often more open-minded) than its neighbo(u)r to the south, Canada has a long history of human rights abuses it would rather the world never hear about.
And you know me—I don’t like lies.
So let’s dig into thirteen serious ongoing problems at the moment:
1. Canada has a racism problem
Admittedly, the majority of Canadians know that racism is a problem within the country, and Canada was the first place in the world to ban slavery back in 1830, but its overall track record on race isn’t great as they’d like you to believe:
Toronto was home to the 1918 anti-Greek race riot.
Canada has hosted the KKK since 1925.
The Canadian Indian Act helped inspire South Africa’s apartheid policies.
Jews were once banned from McGill University.
Thousands of Chinese workers slaved and died to build Canada’s Pacific Railway.
Canada threw over 22,000 Japanese-Canadians in concentration camps during World War II.
Today, black Canadians earn less than their lighter-skinned counterparts; are more likely to suffer from unemployment; and are the victims of more hate crimes than any other ethnicity.
2. Canada has a territorial dispute crisis
Ever heard the Canadian national anthem?
The first line goes:
“Oh, Canada, our home and native land.”
That’s a typo.
It should sing:
“Oh, Canada, our home is native land.”
Unlike America, which basically just killed off its indigenous population, Canada made treaties with the original nations and then forced them onto reserves.
All good, end of story, right?
Absolutely not.
First Nations are now the fastest-growing population in Canada — expanding at more than four times the national average — and many of their nearly two million members live in abject poverty.
Why?
Because Canada is currently in violation of dozens if not hundreds of treaties with the 634 First Nations within its borders.
So hundreds of thousands of true Canadian natives languish in a no-man’s land while the Canadian government refuses to make them right, content to let Indigenous members languish in prison at five times the national average, struggle with major Western health crises, live in unliveable housing, freeze to death, and die from mercury poisoning.
3. Canada has an unaddressed child abuse scandal
Canada has yet to pay reparations for its century-long experiment in kidnapping 150,000 children — abusing, torturing, and murdering thousands during the era of residential schools.
4. Canada subjugates a foreign nation
Canada, a 155-year-old English nation, controls a 414-year-old French nation within its borders and has systematically undermined all its attempts at regaining sovereignty.
(Anglophones, please save your comments and complaints. If the situation was flipped, you’d be absolutely losing your minds.)
5. Canada is a climate change nightmare
Despite all its greenwashing in the press, Canada is, per capita, the worst pollution-emitting nation on the planet.
And it’s currently setting off the biggest carbon bomb in human history with its scorched-earth tar sands project.
Here’s a tiny piece of what it looks like from above:
6. Canada is in the middle of an ongoing genocide
The Canadian government is doing nothing to address the long-running Indigenous genocide, with more than 4,000 women and girls missing or found murdered since 1980.
What does that look like on the ground on the individual level?
When my wife and I lived on Vancouver Island, a First Nations high school girl went missing. Her dismembered-and-burned remains were later identified by her teeth alone.
It’s so prevalent along one stretch of Canadian road that it is called The Highway of Tears.
(On a personal note, I interviewed the Grand Chief of the First Nations for a documentary on human trafficking, and the kind-hearted leader literally broke down and wept as he told me about the plight of his people’s daughter.)
7. Canada is a fake democracy
Canada’s Parliamentary “democracy” is actually a constitutional monarchy, meaning that the Queen of England theoretically can veto any bill she doesn’t like.
It’s voting system is the dopily named “First-Past-The-Post,” and it has a huge host of problems, the main one being that it drastically underrepresents the voting populace and encourages dismal voter turnout.
In one election, one party got 7.7% of the vote and received 32 seats, while another party captured 6.5% of the vote and ended up with a tenth as many seats.
In another election, it meant that the ruling party had absolute and total control over the fate of the nation despite receiving just 33% of the total votes.
(The FPTP system is so wildly corrupt that current PM Justin Trudeau promised to get rid of it, but as soon as he came to power, he immediately stopped talking about it.)
Also: Canada doesn’t have term limits, which allows Prime Ministers to consolidate their position and amass far too much power. One PM served for nearly 22 years. (The current PM is on his third term and his father served four.)
8. Canada is nearly devoid of culture
I have driven across Canada once for pleasure and four times for work, and I can tell you unequivocally: It is a corporation-dominated nation. Every single city looks exactly the same: Tim Horton’s, Canadian Tire, McDonald’s, repeat.
Corporate chains absolutely dominate Canadian life. There are:
The big five banks (RBC/BMO/CIBC/Scotia/TD)
The two coffee shops (Timmies and Starbucks)
The three shopping spots (Canadian Tire/Walmart/Dollarama)
The seven fast-food joints (McDonald’s/BK/Wendy’s/Harvey’s/A&W/Subway/KFC)
The one sit-down restaurant monopoly (Swiss Chalet/The Keg/Montanas/East Side Mario’s/Kelsey’s/Milestones)
Every form of culture-making gets pushed to the side and crushed by these massive, lifeless, tasteless corporations.
Canada has zero Michelin-starred restaurants.
All its actors (Reynolds, Gosling, McAdams, Carrey, Keanu, Sutherlandx2, Rogen) head south as soon as they get famous.
They can’t hold onto star athletes even immediately after winning the NBA Championship.
9. Canada’s economy is a giant real estate pyramid scheme
Canadians are obsessed with real estate. The number of home reno, home flip, home trade, and rental property shows is embarrassing. But it makes sense — Canada doesn’t produce anything real anymore and just spins debt for a living. (Canadians are also massive shopaholics, with higher household debt than any other nation in the world.)
Here’s how the Canadian economy works:
Buy a house for near-zero money down and a huge amount of debt.
Watch the price go up.
Refinance to pay for fancy cars, BBQs, decks, cottages, and second homes.
Because of all the extra demand, real estate prices go up further.
This economic insanity has caused one of the biggest real estate bubbles in history, so much so that even income earners in the top 10% — that’s people earning $100,000+ per year with no debt — are now priced out of all property types across the entire country.
Here’s what that looks like on a graph:
In other words: A family earning a whopping $100,000 per year can’t even qualify for a mortgage on a condo.
No wonder Canada has a massive homelessness crisis. (And remember: it’s deathly cold up there for half the year.)
When you add in rampant inflation and chronic joblessness, you can understand why Canada scores so high on the Misery Index.
Instead of permanently fixing housing unaffordability, Canadian politicians have sat back and allowed house prices to rise to the highest in the G7.
Young working Canadians are left with only a few rubbish options:
Wait for a housing crash in which they will likely lose their jobs.
Find a way to load themselves up with lifelong seven-figure debt.
Compete against Airbnb to lease wildly overpriced rental properties.
GTF out of dodge and enrich another nation with their skills instead.
10. Canada is the porn capital of the world
Yup.
The addiction monopoly is called Mindgeek.
It started in Montreal.
It owns Pornhub, Brazzers, RedTube, YouPorn, Xtube, Reality Kings, Tube8, and dozens more.
It’s also been accused of human trafficking, and I made a documentary about how it illegally addicts children to its dehumanizing product.
For all Canada’s talk about women’s rights, it sure knows how to commodify a body for parts and services.
11. Canadians are notoriously cheap
Maybe cheap is the wrong word because they love to shop… selfish.
When it comes to charitable donations compared to their American counterparts, they barely give half as much by GDP.
On the average tax form, it’s even worse: Everyday Canadians give six times less than Americans.
That’s just over half of 1% of their income.
A paltry $300 on a median income of $59,360.
And all this, despite the fact that the average homeowner has watched their house go up in value by more than $300,000 since 2015.
12. Canada is a global leader in destroying the planet
Most Canadians don’t know it, but Toronto is the mining finance capital of the world, bankrolling over a third of all mining projects globally, with interests in nearly 10,000 mines.
That’s because Canada set itself up as a tax haven for mining companies. That’s right — investing in a Canadian mining company has the same perks as donating to charity.
As such, Canada is an international powerhouse at destroying ecosystems.
Additionally, it is at the global center of countless mining atrocities, including straight-up slavery and the murder of mining protestors.
13. Canada has a glaring human rights problem
This one is truly crazy.
I can’t even believe it’s a thing.
It’s probably the most embarrassing scandal in Canadian history:
Canada is one of the only nations on earth that refuses to declare clean water a human right.
In conclusion
Notice what I never said in this article:
I never said that I hated Canada.
I never said that Canada is the worst country in the world.
I said that I love Canada, but also that it has serious problems… problems that no Canadian politician is meaningfully addressing because they’re too obsessed with wedge issue identity politics.
The truth is that Canada is the best place on earth to live — if you’ve managed to stay ahead of joblessness and the housing bubble, haven’t lost a loved one to the massive drug death crisis, and can blatantly turn a blind eye to your nation’s colossal environmental and human rights abuses.
But here’s the really sad thing: Because of its low population and massive natural resources, Canada could be the richest, most sustainable, most generous, most democratic nation on earth. Instead, it is a smug, arrogant, mediocre, holier-than-thou collection of hyper-individualist consumers whose core identity is:
“We’re not Americans.”
Canada, unlike literally every other country in the world, has so much wealth that it has zero excuses for all of this ongoing anti-human behavior.
So let’s dispense with this notion of Canadian superiority and issue a call for humility.
Jesus of Nazareth said that we should remove the plank from our own eye before worrying about the speck of sawdust in someone else’s.
I think he was right.
And speaking of lumber, this is probably a good time to mention that Canada is responsible for the greatest amount of primary deforestation on earth and has been purposefully underreporting it for years…
Oh, Canada.