What happened to 'Canada the Good'?

It’s getting harder and harder for the Great White North to keep up the charade of being so 'nice.'

Canadians, perhaps more than any other nation, are obsessed with what people think of them. This coast-to-coast insecurity rears its head almost every July around Canada Day when the national broadcaster - the CBC - does an inevitable “What does the world think of us?” story.

Naturally, Canadians love to hear how well-regarded they are in the world and bristle at any scorn. The usual kneejerk reaction to any derision is, “Well, at least we’re not America.”

On the heels of our recent chat with Maxime Bernier, we took a closer look at some of the shenanigans taking place north of the border. Frankly, it’s getting harder for the Great White North to keep up the charade of being ‘Canada the Good’.

Recent news coming from the land of maple syrup includes these not-so-nice stories:

• Members of Parliament gave a rousing standing ovation to a Ukrainian who fought with the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, a Nazi outfit also known as the 1st Galician. This led to an apology from the Prime Minister, who called the spectacle “deeply embarrassing.” Later, the House speaker who invited the Nazi veteran to Parliament stepped down from his job.

• Doctors are being punished for ‘wrongthink.’ Dr. Mark Trozzi, a physician in Ontario, was found guilty by the province’s medical board of “professional misconduct, dishonourable conduct, and incompetence in the practice of medicine,” because he dared to question the government’s stance on COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other heavy-handed restrictions. He now faces the potential loss of his medical license. Meanwhile, national treasure Dr. Jordan Peterson — a best-selling author and leading global intellectual — was ordered to take re-education training because of public statements the Canadian College of Psychologists did not agree with.

• Hate crimes are rising against Canada’s Jews, the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world, in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. Anti-semitic violence and hate speech have appeared on campuses, on social media, and in Jewish communities across the country. The Ottawa Jewish Community School received an anonymous bomb threat. Hate-filled messages were spray-painted on a Jewish family’s home in Ontario along with a note reading “You and your Jewish family are going to die!” A playground in New Brunswick was painted with swastikas. Stars of David dripping in red paint have appeared around Toronto, while in Winnipeg a shooting at a home bearing a visible "religious symbol" is being investigated as a hate-motivated crime. Air Canada has grounded a pilot who shared a series of disturbing posts, including messages saying Israel should “burn in hell,” and an image of him at a protest with a sign of the Israeli flag going into a waste basket and the phrase “keeping the world clean.”

• The lives of over 13,000 Canadians ended last year as a result of lethal injections, as part of the country’s Medical Assistance in Dying program. This represents 4.1% of all deaths in the country in 2022. Compared to the number of cases of MAiD in 2021, the 2022 figures represent a growth rate of 31.2%. Over 16,104 Canadians made written requests for MAID in 2022, an increase of 26.5% from 2021. More than 80% of those requests were granted. While there is an argument that MAiD is a program rooted in compassion, it is also a potentially slippery slope. There is discussion now about expanding the law to include requests not just from people with terminal diseases but also with mental illness, PTSD, or serious drug addiction.

While Canada prepares to welcome half a million new immigrants next year, the statistic nobody is talking about is outmigration. More and more Canadians are saying ‘enough is enough’ and fleeing the country for potentially greener pastures. Data from Statistics Canada showed more people leaving Canada permanently in the last quarter of 2021 than in any year since the 1970s. That trend has continued throughout 2022 and 2023.

An Ottawa resident recently told The Telegraph that while she considered leaving the country before, she decided to stay on because she loves the country “warts and all.” However, she now thinks that if Justin Trudeau wins another election she may reconsider, “as there’ll be nothing left of Canada to save.”

How does this happen to a country like Canada? How can a nation of relatively well-intentioned and educated people allow such things to occur?

The parable of the boiling frog comes to mind: a frog, when dropped into a pot of boiling water, would immediately recognize the danger and leap right out of the pot. However, if the frog is immersed in tepid water and the heat is raised incrementally, it will stay in the water until it is cooked to death.

While not literally true when it comes to frog behavior, the parable teaches us how things can change so slowly over time that we hardly recognize our surroundings have transformed into something we no longer recognize and would once have never imagined. When thinking about the collapse of previous societies in history, it is perhaps easy to think this phenomenon was at play — with citizens continually accepting “the new normal” and in fact using social pressures to make others accept it as well.

Author Jared Diamond described this process as “creeping normalcy” in his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Politicians use the term "creeping normalcy" to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion, or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it's difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before, so one's baseline standard for what constitutes "normalcy" shifts gradually and imperceptibly. It may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that conditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.

So Canada may be a warning for the rest of the world. Perhaps it is not too late for the Canadian frogs to wake up and jump out of their pot. Meanwhile, the rest of us can open our eyes and see if the water around us is beginning to boil.