Canada - A Country That Forgot How to Think
On the intellectual collapse of a nation that replaced policy with performance, truth with optics, and leadership with curated mediocrity.
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Originally written Sept. 24, 2024 - rewritten July 18, 2025
If your greatest daily hardship is deciding between rosé or chardonnay on the dock, feel free to stop reading. But for those standing in food bank lines, trying to finance a roof over their head, or accepting that home ownership is as remote as a Monaco timeshare, let’s just say your lakeside optimism might be misplaced.
When the OECD ranks our future economic growth as the worst, and our per capita GDP is in free fall, we’re no longer in a bad patch—we’re in a controlled descent into mediocrity.
Still, chin up—we’re not alone in this glorious decline. We share the red-ink runway with Ethiopia (-0.1%), Gabon (-0.5%), Liberia (-0.4%), and Haiti (-0.3%), which, to my knowledge, are not members of the G7. Canada sits at a smug -0.4%. Misery, it seems, does love company.
But Of Course, It’s Not Just the Politicians… It’s the People Who Elect Them
Let’s dispense with the obvious. Yes, Trudeau was a poor choice—about as poor as a hereditary monarch in a republic or a vegan running a steakhouse. And yet, somehow, Canadians lined up to buy what was effectively a walking surname wrapped in a selfie filter.
As for Carney, Trudeau’s economic whisperer? He’s already making Trudeau look like a penny-pinching Protestant. That’s no small feat for a man who handed out pandemic cash like it was Halloween candy, and every time productivity in the public sector declined 10% he hired more workers.
The Liberals, of course, were blessed with a fortune so obscene it should be taxed. The NDP had turned into a ghost ship of platitudes, captained by a man who dressed like a traffic cone and inspired about as much confidence. And then there was Captain Orange down south—Trump—who, having confused a trade war with patriotism, embarked on a mercantilist revival the way a raccoon might “revive” a bag of trash.
And still, Canadians voted on “vibes” and fear.
Vibes! They liked Trudeau’s energy. Well, I like the energy of the teenager who hands me a macchiato and misspells my name as “Chthulhu,” but I wouldn’t trust her with foreign policy or fiscal stabilisation.
Trudeau governed like a man raised in a yoga studio and managed by a PR firm. A political mannequin: photogenic, pliable, and utterly devoid of ideological bone or intellectual cartilage. Substance? Don’t be silly. He’s allergic to it—prefers the vapour of polls, the incense of legacy media praise, and the padded cell of curated applause to the unglamorous act of competent governance. He lost me—utterly, irretrievably—when he began waving at ghosts upon disembarking his private jet.
There he was, descending the stairs like some discount monarch, flapping his hand at an empty tarmac as his taxpayer-funded photographer clicked away like a hostage at a North Korean parade.
And, of course, we Canadians, ever the credulous romantics, saw the photos and thought: Ah, look! People came to greet him. He must be beloved. No, dear reader. There were no people. Just the well-angled illusion of approval—an Instagram presidency propped up by fog machines and flattering lenses. A pageant for the gullible, and God, how we applauded.
We elected a brand. And the brand, unsurprisingly, spoils.
Trudeau was a political mannequin installed for his surname, his smile, and his yoga-teacher aura. Substance? Not so much. He’s governed as a man allergic to accountability, preferring the intoxicating haze of polling optics over the tedium of competent execution.
He’s not the disease—he’s the symptom. Our electorate, lobotomised by Instagram reels and CBC “explainer” threads, now votes as though running a nation were a theatre performance, and Justin plays the lead with well-curated socks and a chorus of land acknowledgements.
The pandemic taught our political class a terrifyingly effective lesson: fear is a powerful motivator. Better to strangle civil liberties than risk a headline about a COVID death. The single mom losing her mind in a 600-square-foot box could wait. Meanwhile, our laptop-class elite sipped mojitos on Muskoka decks, declaring lockdowns from their screened-in porches, so virtuous you could choke on the sanctimony.
WELLBYs, Lymphoma, and What We Forgot
If you’ve never heard of WELLBYs—“wellbeing-adjusted life years”—that’s because our public health elite doesn’t like discussing them. They expose uncomfortable truths, like the fact that the death of a 91-year-old with four chronic conditions is not morally equivalent to that of a 35-year-old father of two. But no matter. Every death was sacred except the silent ones.
Like my father’s, while families met on farms with fifteen feet between them—as though respiratory viruses respected yardsticks—my father was being eaten alive by lymphoma. Preventative care was cancelled. Early detection has been replaced by public health theatre. He died seven months later.
In the name of “safety,” we were told not to touch him. When one felt awful, we were trained to assume it was Covid, and if it was Covid, it was a virus, so unless you were on the verge of death, you might as well stay home,
He died out the back of the hospital, while staff at the front were still enforcing mask policies like Vatican doctrine. Not a handheld. Not a last breath witnessed—just protocol.
The Real Plague: Bureaucratic Narcissism
Modern studies now confirm what intuition has always known: lockdowns have done more long-term harm than good. But Trudeau squeezed one more election out of COVID, handing out pandemic pay like candy at Halloween. One international student I knew made $490 a month before COVID and received $2,000/month in relief. She broke no rules. She just followed them. And that’s the point. Four dollars was doled out for every dollar in lost wages.
We’ve been governed not by conviction but by performance artists. Finance ministers who begin every sentence with “Let me be clear” and then proceed to say nothing intelligible. Slogans have replaced our national conversation. And land acknowledgements? A ritual of colonial cosplay: “Yes, this used to be your land. No, you still can’t drink the water. But thanks for the reminder.”
What Shelf Life? He’s Already Expired
Our per capita GDP now resembles that of Alabama. At this pace, by 2050, we’ll be making half as much as the average American. But sure—let’s rename buildings instead of fixing anything.
Our hospitals are collapsing, our housing is unaffordable, our military is under-resourced and over-proud. We’ve become a nation that can’t manage a passport office but still thinks it has the moral authority to lecture the world.
Chrystia Freeland, floated as the next PM, didn’t quite cross that line, but she’s still in Carney’s cabinet. She speaks with the urgency of someone who just drank an entire Nespresso pod and cuts her toenails in Parliament. She resembles a substitute teacher attempting to connect with the cool kids through “active listening.”
And Carney? He turns up at global summits like a third-rate cruise ship illusionist—minus the charisma, but with all the smoke and mirrors—eager to charm the gullible and bill the rest.
He may master the dark art of spending $8,000 a night on hors d’oeuvres. Still, even he will find it difficult to dethrone Trudeau, who remains the undisputed champion in the Olympic discipline of discovering the most outrageously priced hotel suite at taxpayer expense. If extravagance were policy, the man would be Churchill.
But Let’s Be Honest: It’s Not Just Them, It’s Us
Leadership reflects culture. A population that reads less, thinks less, and votes emotionally will get exactly the leaders it deserves. Trudeau didn’t break us. He mirrored us.
We’re governed by a government that struts about as if it commands a sweeping mandate, when in truth it enjoys the explicit support of roughly 25% of the population.
In Canada, one can clinch a majority government with just 4.25 million votes, which, in a country of nearly 40 million, is less a mandate than a mathematical insult.
It requires not a popular groundswell but a horseshoe lodged so far up the electoral tract it defies anatomical logic. As for the other 75%? They’re likely too busy doom-scrolling between barbecue prep and the first intermission of Hockey Night in Canada, tweeting about issues they barely read past the headline.
We’ve fallen to 19th in the world in per capita income. We used to be 9th. With our natural resources, geographic advantages, and institutional heritage, we should be among the top five.
Instead, we’re the C-student who’s been told on every report card, “If you applied yourself, you could do great things.” We haven’t. We won’t. And no one is holding us back but ourselves.
Meanwhile, in Ireland…
My family left Ireland in 1904 in search of an opportunity. Now, Ireland, thanks to lower taxes, less bureaucracy, and a functioning government, is number one in growth and income.
So maybe it’s time to go back.
Better food. Better beer. Fewer people are saying “Let me be clear.”
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Although the grass is never greener on the opposite side of the fence. Even in Ireland. I left Canada in 2021 at the height of the pandemic when things got too stupid and now live in Tokyo. No grass to compare, but the bonsai trees are quite pretty.
I'm old, so the decline of Canada probably won't affect me much. As for my children, I wish them luck and a clear vision of what is needed to reverse the decline.