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The Telegraph’s ‘Canada’s Woke Nightmare’ doc is like Jordan Peterson and a Fuck Trudeau flag had a baby

Sep 1, 2023

As with most pieces of propaganda, the motive is the message.

Last night I watched a documentary from The Telegraph, Britain’s conservative newspaper of record that used to be owned by Conrad Black, and I have to say it was exactly as expected.

If this gives you an idea of the feel of the film, an angry Jordan Peterson opened with the following statement…

“Canada was a very stable, middle-class country with reliable institutions. To say that’s gone is to say almost nothing.”

Oh boy.

Before I get into the weeds, I want to remind everyone of a political trend that was invented by Karl Rove, the former brain trust of President George W. Bush. He wanted to help deflect the constant criticism levied at his boss and coined the phrase Bush Derangement Syndrome. Ever since Bush’s presidency, every political party has paraphrased Rove’s idea. There was Obama Derangement Syndrome, and then Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The label has been passed around like a sex worker at Matt Gaetz’s house.

So I might as well use it to describe the current swath of conservatives who see prime minister Justin Trudeau as an authoritarian dictator. They used that actual term in the movie, by the way. This is peak Trudeau Derangement Syndrome.

The documentary begins with rabble rouser Aaron Gunn walking around East Vancouver with the British host of the documentary, Steven Edginton. Gunn, best known for protesting with white supremacist group Sons of Odin as part of his work with Canada Proud, was apparently filming a documentary of his own about the strategy to provide clean needles and fentanyl-free drugs to addicts.

Edginton claimed that British Columbia had legalized drug possession, but the move was actually decriminalization. While this may seem like semantics to some, the difference between legalizing and decriminalizing is significant. Legalization has a specific definition, such as being sold in stores, and drug trafficking is still illegal in BC.

Gunn misleads Edginton by attempting to draw causation between decriminalization of hard drugs and homelessness/violent crime. The film attempts to take a correlation and attribute crime and homelessness statistics without mentioning that the time period they are referring to includes the 2.5 years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when all addictions and mental health issues spiked. Homelessness was also an issue for many who could no longer afford rent amid unemployment records.

Edginton then went on to interview Chris Elston, more commonly known as Billboard Chris, a man who fights against gender theory by wearing signage on his body. Like many grifters, Elston sometimes has a point, and sometimes he is brazenly insensitive towards trans youth. His stance on puberty blockers is understandable, but then he goes off the deep end by protesting in front of kids who are already confused and depressed without having to experience someone who is perceived to be denying their very existence.

Edginton then interview Amy Hamm, one of two featured interviewees in the film who can be considered measured and reasonable. Hamm is the BC nurse who put up the billboard that said “I (heart) JK Rowling, which triggered many activists in the province. Her stance on gender theory is tame compared to others in that space, and she was probably chosen to make the film seem more moderate.

Edginton then went on to visit an Indian family in Toronto who immigrated in the 1970s. This portion of the film was also pretty tame, with most of the complaints centered around them feeling stereotyped by the education system. They also had issues with the way school boards teach sexuality and gender theory.

Then the film got a little nutty…again.

Edginton visited Christine Gauthier, a Canadian veteran and former para-Olympian. She described how long it takes to replace her wheelchair and that the government ignored veterans with disabilities. This is a legit complaint, but it is also bipartisan. Edginton doesn’t mention the conservative government, led by Stephen Harper, who first started making drastic cuts to military benefits, and who took veterans to court to block a class action lawsuit against his government.

Gauthier then claimed that a government worker told her on the telephone that she might want to consider euthanasia as an option after she told the worker she wasn’t sure she could still go on. The film never mentions that one caser worker had been suspended for offering the assisted dying option to at least 5 veterans. The film also neglected to inform its audience that Trudeau himself called the advice “absolutely unacceptable” before reviewing and revamping the protocols.

In other words, a lone case worker’s incompetence was blown up in this documentary to make our country look like we were actively trying to kill our veterans.

You have to wonder what outlets like The Telegraph are really trying to accomplish by cherry picking the worst stories out of Canada and pasting it onto our flag, as if we are at the mercy of neo-progressives at every turn.

Sure, there are some ultra-woke policies that could probably be dismantled, ratified, or reformed, but that is true every time a new government is formed. How many crazy conservative ideas have there been over the years? And how many times did rational people tell reactionaries to calm the fuck down, or that Harper did not, in fact, eat babies in his spare time?

Far right conservatives are using an already ignorant swath of their base to help them win the culture wars, and what they are accomplishing is a perversion of ideas meant to inflame, not inform.

As a centrist, I am often rolling my eyes at the left and some of their policies in Canada, but as a rationalist I think I can tell if, in the words of another interviewee in the film, David Leis from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, “Canada has become a totalitarian state.”

He literally said that. It’s worth noting that the FCPP also denies the existence of climate change, and fought against most of the Truth and Reconciliation recommendations.

You know, the best of the best.

I watched this film so you didn’t have to, by the way. It’s the usual broad-brushing we see from ideologues in today’s political climate, where nobody on camera points out the irony that the people they are describing as immovable radicals are being described that way by immovable radicals.

The film ends with this doozy from Jordan Peterson.

“I think what’s happened is that the predatory psychopaths have figured out hot to cloak themselves in the guise of compassion.”

Yes yes, now off you go.

Contributing Writers

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