A world asks, ‘What’s happened to Canada?’

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It used to be very difficult for Canadian politics to inspire interest in other countries. Usually, the best we could do was have foreign media dutifully note the results anytime we had a federal election – and even then it would be topped with an unappetizing headline like “No change for Canada.”

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But within just the last few years, multiple foreign outlets have profiled Canada for the singular purpose of asking what happened to it, and worrying if Canada’s ills will soon be their own. What’s more, these articles are not limited to a single topic; so much is going sideways in Canada right now that everything from our assisted-suicide regime to our economy to our internet legislation is attracting overseas notice like never before.

Below, a cursory guide to some of them. If you’re noticing that your non-Canadian friends suddenly have a darker picture of your home country than they used to, here’s a clue as to why.

“Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream”

Ever since the 2019 federal election, The Economist’s coverage of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has usually followed a general theme of noting that the bloom is off the rose of his photogenic ascendancy to power in 2015. But in a trio of articles published last month, the publication laid into the Canadian leader as an icon of what not to do.

Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream, published on Oct. 14. Canada’s Trudeau trap, published on Oct. 17. And then, just for good measure, Justin Trudeau is paying for solar panels in the cold, dark Arctic.

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The second entry in the series chronicled Trudeau’s journey from a “centre-left hero” to “toxic liability,” and concluded that if the world’s mainstream leaders follow Canada’s example of “sanctimonious identity politics,” only doom lies in their future. “Unless leaders come up with practical answers to the problems that the electorate cares about … government by virtue ultimately alienates many more people than it inspires,” it reads.

“Canada Is Disintegrating”

The Telegraph in the U.K. ran an entire series of essays last week on the topic of Canada taking it to the limit on progressive laws covering everything from drugs to national identity.

Frequent National Post contributor Jordan Peterson submitted an essay entitled “The West is sleepwalking into Trudeau’s woke nightmare,” and gender-critical feminist Meghan Murphy wrote “the crazy mirror world of Canadian trans politics.” They even commissioned a special logo of a Canadian flag falling apart.

But the most provocatively titled entry in the series was by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham. In Canada Is Disintegrating, Kaufmann said his home country had undergone a “cultural revolution” for which “even the mainstream liberal left admits things have gone too far.”

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“The three prongs of the attack involved setting fire to its past, promoting LGBTQ and critical race theory in schools and government, and unleashing an unprecedented wave of mass migration,” he wrote.

“Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech”

The June tabling of the Online Harms Act prompted a wave of foreign coverage unlike few pieces of Canadian legislation. Although virtually every non-U.S. country has legislated controls on extreme speech, the Online Harms Act went noticeably farther than its peer countries in two respects: It prescribes a life sentence for the speech crime of “advocating or promoting genocide,” and it authorizes pre-emptive custody for anyone suspected of committing hate speech in future.

The U.S. magazine The Atlantic focused mostly on the latter provision in a June profile entitled Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech. Staff writer Conor Friedersdorf opened by citing two science fiction concepts; the “thoughtcrime” of George Orwell’s 1984 and the “precrime” of Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report. “Now Canada is combining the concepts in a work of dystopian nonfiction: A bill making its way through Parliament would impose draconian criminal penalties on hate speech and curtail people’s liberty in order to stop future crimes they haven’t yet committed,” he wrote.

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The New York Post would also weigh in on the Online Harms Bill, in what is likely the only time that the tabloid’s editorial board took an interest in a bill before the Canadian House of Commons. In May, the paper warned readers to “fear the Maple Curtain.”

“One of the World’s Most Immigrant-Friendly Countries Is Changing Course”

The New York Times notes in this October profile that Canada has traditionally had no mainstream qualms with immigration. In sharp contrast to its more immigrant-skeptical cousins in Europe and the United States, “Conservative and Liberal governments have historically promoted immigration policies meant to bolster the ranks of workers and increase the population.”

“But that is now shifting,” writes Matina Stevis-Gridneff. “Most Canadians, polls show, believe the country has taken in too many newcomers in too short a period.”

And the story includes the unprecedently high migrant numbers that drove this shift: More than two million newcomers in just two years, a doubling of the country’s rate of temporary residents (from 3.5 per cent in 2022 to 6.8 per cent in 2024), and worsening rates of unemployment, housing affordability and health care access.

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Stevis-Gridneff even notes rising numbers of temporary residents illegally overstaying their visas or even filing bogus asylum claims “because it buys them time.”

“It’s social murder”

The Canadian MAID regime has horrified the world’s left-wing publications at virtually the same rate that it’s horrified the right-wing ones. In May, the progressive magazine Jacobin published The Canadian State Is Euthanizing Its Poor and Disabled, and last month the conservative National Review published Canada’s Euthanasia Horrors Are Accelerating.

And somewhere in the middle is The Times, which in October published its analysis of whether MAID was a model or a warning to the rest of the world. Given that the title is “It’s social murder” – and the story includes interviews with disabled Canadians who have been offered death in lieu of care – it’s safe to say they veer to the “warning” side of the ledger.

IN OTHER NEWS

The Canadian political establishment has reacted with notable sobriety to Donald Trump’s Tuesday election victory (with the exception of a Nova Scotia MLA who released a lengthy statement urging constituents to hold each other close). “I want to congratulate Donald on a decisive victory last night,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Wednesday, while his deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland said “Canada will be absolutely fine.” If the Trudeau government is suddenly trying to get on Trump’s good side, it’s because there are two immediate costs that a Trump presidency could impose on Canada if we can’t negotiate some wiggle room. One, Trump is promising across-the-board tariffs that could slash billions from cross-border trade, severely impacting Canadian GDP. And two, he might force Canada to stop phoning it in on continental defence.

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The Dutch city of Amsterdam witnessed a wave of coordinated anti-Jewish violence on Thursday night, with crowds captured on video chasing down and beating visiting Israeli soccer fans, going door-to-door to search for additional Jewish victims and, in one case, attempting a lynching.

There’s a few reasons this is relevant to Canada:

• Monday is Remembrance Day, and Canada’s contribution to the Second World War was disproportionately spent towards liberating the Netherlands from Nazi rule. More than 7,600 Canadians were killed in the Dutch campaign and remain buried there. Thursday’s pogrom (and it is widely being called a pogrom) represents the most overt outpouring of antisemitic violence in The Netherlands since their liberation. This was referenced quite explicitly by Willem-Alexander, King of The Netherlands. “We failed the Jewish community during World War II, and last night we failed again,” he said.
• The prelude to the Amsterdam attack doesn’t look all that different from what’s been happening to Canada for the last 13 months: Extremist anti-Israel groups staging blockades, illegal rallies and explicitly calling for violence with little to no pushback from authorities. Early evidence shows that known Dutch anti-Israel groups helped to coordinate the attacks on social media.
• There are Canadian federal politicians who don’t appear to be tremendously upset that it happened. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s statement about the incident didn’t detail what had happened beyond some “violence” in Amsterdam. His only specific condemnation, in fact, was that some of the targeted Israelis had reportedly yelled “anti-Arab chants.”

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