Canada Is Speedrunning America's Future | Werry & Metter

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I've been saying for a while that Canada is the live case study Americans need to be watching. Not as a foreign curiosity, but as a timeline. The same ingredients, mass immigration without infrastructure, a healthcare system drowning in its own bureaucracy, anarcho-tyranny on the streets, and a governing class that has fully inverted its relationship with the people it's supposed to serve, are on American ballot boxes right now.

Mamdani in New York, Al-Sayed in Michigan, Talarico in Texas, the LA mayor race. These aren't hypotheticals.

Mike Werry and Mira Metter spent years making Broken Country, a documentary that tries to shake Canadians awake to what has actually happened to their country over the last decade. They interviewed thousands of people, ran everything through researchers, journalists, and a legal team, and came out with something that lands harder than most policy journalism because it doesn't start with a conclusion, it starts with the data and lets the wreckage speak.

Mira told me she went into it with no predetermined conclusions. She just wanted to know what happened. What she found confirmed the worst of it.

We recorded this right after Toronto voted Olivia Chow in for another four years. Mike and Mira were visibly frustrated. I wasn't surprised. Canada is speedrunning what we may be preparing ourselves for here in the United States, and the fact that voters keep re-electing the people accelerating the decline is the part that makes me lean toward malice over suicidal empathy, though I'll admit I'm still grappling with that.

Key takeaways

• "Free" healthcare costs Canadian families over $20,000 a year in taxes and is killing people on waitlists. Recorded waitlist deaths have climbed from 15,700 to over 22,000, and most provinces don't even track the data, so the real number is likely two to four times higher.
• Canada went from the Harvard of immigration standards to an open door, and broke everything in the process. GDP per capita was identical to the US in 2014 at roughly $53,000 USD each. Americans now average around $77,000. Canada is still at $53,000, while youth unemployment sits at a record 14%.
• The bureaucracy functions exactly as bureaucracies do: it expands to meet the needs of its own expansion. Up to 40% of Canadians are employed by government at some level when you include consultants. The ArriveCAN app, the 17-year Toronto LRT disaster, and the MAiD program's expansion all follow the same logic: an expanding bureaucracy needs to expand to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.
• Mark Carney is a WEF-class operator sitting on top of one of the most resource-rich nations on earth and running it into the ground. Canada has lumber, oil, gas, steel, and rare earth minerals, and it's one of the least prosperous-per-capita wealthy nations on paper. That's not an accident.
• The money is the root cause. Debased currency funds the whole machine. Carney sold Canada's gold when he was governor of the Bank of Canada. He's now cutting the cash transaction reporting threshold in half and overseeing six major banks developing government-regulable digital coins.
• Bitcoin is the exit that doesn't require waiting for a ballot box to un-corrupt itself. Broken Country was funded primarily through Bitcoin. That's not a coincidence. When the fiat system is the mechanism of control, opting into sound money is the one accountability move that doesn't depend on a system that can be manipulated.

Healthcare That Isn't Free, And Isn't Working

The first thing Mira pushed back on in our conversation was the word "free." There is no free lunch. Canadian healthcare is paid through taxation, and the bill has been going up. By her figures, the average Canadian family of four was paying around $18,000 a year for government health coverage recently; that number has since crossed $20,000. At the same time, the count of recorded waitlist deaths has risen from 15,700 to over 22,000, and Mira was quick to note that most provinces don't even collect that data, so you can at minimum double that figure, probably quadruple it.

Mike put the access crisis in plain terms: one in five Canadians doesn't have a primary care physician. They flood emergency rooms for everything from strep throat to serious trauma. Wait times of 18 to 20 hours aren't anomalies. They're the norm.

The system ground down to this point through deliberate choices made in the 1990s, doctor graduation caps and hospital bed reductions, all to balance federal budgets. The bill got passed to the future, and the future is now.

The MAiD program sits on top of all of this. What started as a tightly scoped end-of-life option has expanded into something that functions like a bureaucracy finding new markets. Mira's frame for it was pointed: once a bureaucracy is created around something, its job becomes growing.

MAiD is no different. I found that harder to dismiss than any single data point in the documentary.

My family and I have been on CrowdHealth for five years now. As a family of five, we pay around $700 a month. It's crowdfunded healthcare, you pay a monthly fee, help with other members' bills, and they negotiate costs down, often 50-80%.

No insurance company telling you what care you're allowed. Watching what's happened in Canada, I'm even more convinced this is the right call. (joincrowdhealth.com/tftc, code TFTC, $99/month for the first three months.)

Obamacare started the deterioration of American health coverage. Canada is just a decade further down the same road.

The Immigration Math Nobody Did

The international student figure alone is staggering. Canada went from roughly 300,000 international student permits in 2023 to over a million by 2025. Total annual inflow has been running around 2 million people into a country of 40 million. Nobody ran the math on what that does to housing, healthcare, infrastructure, or wages before opening the door.

The GDP per capita gap tells the story. In 2014, Canada and the US were essentially tied, both averaging around $53,000 USD per person. Americans are now at roughly $77,000. Canada is still at $53,000, in USD.

Mike acknowledged the specific numbers may be slightly off, but the direction is unambiguous. You don't get a gap that wide without a structural failure somewhere.

Youth unemployment is at 14%, which Mira described as the highest on record. The mechanism isn't complicated. Tim Hortons, once the entry-level job for Canadian teenagers, got bought by a Brazilian private equity firm whose first major lobbying push was for temporary foreign workers.

The jobs that used to give Canadian kids their first work experience now go to people willing to take a fraction of the wage. That gap compounds across a generation.

The old Canadian immigration system was legitimately world-class. Mira quoted one of their documentary subjects saying it was harder to get into Canada as an economic immigrant than to get into Harvard. Points-based, skills-weighted, heavily filtered. Express Entry in 2015 loosened the standards. The 2022 adjustments loosened them further.

What followed was a flood the system wasn't built to absorb.

The economic spreadsheet argument for mass immigration, the version pushed by think tanks like the Cato Institute here in the States, is complete insanity to me. It's steeped in disdain for the native-born population. It looks at a birth rate problem and concludes the native population isn't adequate, rather than asking why people who already live there can't afford to form families.

The answer keeps coming back to regulatory and monetary failure, not a shortage of human bodies.

The Century Initiative, which Mike cited, has as its stated goal a Canadian population of 100 million by 2100. Carney is a believer. The math of getting there requires importing the difference, which is exactly what the last decade has been.

The Bureaucracy That Only Knows How to Grow

Oscar Wilde said it, and Mike quoted it: an expanding bureaucracy needs to expand to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy. I don't know a better description of what's happened in Canada.

Mike's figures on public sector employment are striking. By his research, somewhere around 80% of net new jobs created since roughly 2014 have come from the public sector. About 20% of Canadians are directly government-employed. Add consultants and other functionaries and that number climbs to 40%.

Put that in American terms: imagine 160 million Americans employed by the federal government. The only output of a bureaucracy is more bureaucracy.

The Toronto LRT project is the case study. Seventeen years from start to finish. Tens of billions over budget. And somewhere along the way, according to Mike and Mira, the cars that were ordered didn't match the width of the tracks that were built.

Nobody lost their job. They moved to a different role. That's the accountability structure. No consequences, so no correction.

The ArriveCAN app was supposed to cost $30,000. The Auditor General of Canada's review put the actual bill at roughly $54 million. For a COVID travel form app. The money went somewhere inside the party apparatus and nobody has recovered it.

Mira's figure on executive bonuses: around 92% of Canadian government executives receive taxpayer-funded bonuses. The government decides how much it wants to spend, then decides how to tax Canadians to cover it. That quote came from a former senior Conservative Party figure featured in the documentary. The direction is always the same: spending up, services declining, bonuses paid.

Anarcho-Tyranny, Canadian Edition

I named it directly in the conversation because that's what it is. Anarcho-tyranny. The state selectively enforces laws against productive citizens while leaving actual criminals and public disorder functionally untouched.

The Toronto police chief's advice to residents: leave your car keys near the front door so thieves can take the car without needing to break in and potentially harm you. That was real guidance from law enforcement. You can be charged for defending your property in Canada. The car is safer to sacrifice.

Toronto's main intersection gets shut down every Sunday by pro-Hamas protests. The police can do nothing. Mike described terrorist flags being waved openly. No arrests, no dispersal.

Meanwhile, Trudeau's approach to the justice system introduced sentencing guidelines weighted by how "marginalized" a defendant is considered. Mike described a category called "super offenders," people charged more than 50 times in a year, released the same day, arrested again the next. That system works as designed for certain people and not others.

Mike also raised something that's now showing up in the UK and here in the US: judges reportedly giving lighter sentences to rapists and murderers specifically to prevent deportation. Mira added that some of the protesters from the truckers' rally during COVID faced harsher treatment than violent offenders.

I had my own version of this in New York this summer. I came up from the A train in midtown, crossing 7th Avenue to catch the Amtrak back to Philly, and got crack smoke blown directly in my face. Two cops standing right there. I asked them if they were going to do anything. They said no.

New York, Canada, and most of Western Europe are on the same trajectory. France is further along: the riots there aren't just frustration, they're what happens when you defund policing long enough that the state loses its monopoly on force.

Mike mentioned that at the time of recording, three Canadian provinces were actively looking at secession, with one having recently finished some form of sovereignty referendum process. The Alberta independence movement has been building for years. That pressure cooker is reading high.

The Housing Trap and the Birth Rate Collapse

Mira's housing numbers are the ones that stick with me. In 1990, the average Canadian home cost about 2.5 times the average income. Today, in rural areas, it's 9 times. In Toronto and Vancouver, it's somewhere between 19 and 30 times income.

A 500-square-foot condo in a Toronto high-rise, a shoebox, as Mike put it, goes for $700,000 to $1.5 million. Developers are essentially forced to build these because municipal governments depend on property taxes and development charges, and the only way to maximize those is to pack floors. The regulatory cost before a developer breaks ground is already millions of dollars and potentially years of process.

The foreclosure rate on new housing starts is going up. Canada needs, by Mira and Mike's figures from a couple of years ago, something like 7 million new homes by 2030 to match the population as it stood then. Mike's stat: there hasn't been a single year since 1970 where Canada built more than 250,000 new housing starts. The gap between need and capacity is not closeable at current trajectory.

The birth rate collapse connects directly to this. Mira interviewed people across Canada and heard the same thing repeatedly: where do you put a child? A 500-square-foot apartment at $4,000, $6,000 a month, with a mortgage that's doubled on renewal, food costs up 35%, and one income gone because the company moved operations to the US where it's cheaper to operate.

The affordability crisis is the predictable output of regulatory chokepoints stacked on top of monetary debasement.

The Broken Money Underneath All of It

I think a lot of the problems we described in this conversation are rooted in the money problem. Money's broken. The expansion of the monetary supply is what funds the bureaucracy, what makes the debt-financed giveaways possible, what erodes purchasing power for everyone holding the currency.

Carney, as governor of the Bank of Canada, made the call to sell Canada's gold. All of it. Right before gold made its sustained run higher. Now he's running the country and he's cut the cash transaction reporting threshold from $10,000 to $5,000 CAD.

Mike told me about going to withdraw $5,000 in cash, a straightforward transaction, and having to fill out two long-form compliance filings. What $10,000 in CAD bought in 1990 requires roughly $21,000 today in purchasing power. Cutting the cash threshold in half on top of that debasement means you're effectively regulating people out of transacting in cash in amounts that were normal a generation ago.

The six major Canadian banks are now developing their own digital coins designed to be regulable by the government. The direction of travel is obvious. A programmable currency that can be frozen, limited, or redirected based on political decisions is a control mechanism, not money.

Canadian consumer debt to GDP is over 100%. Wages have stagnated at around $53,000 USD for a decade. Mike estimates that when you include income taxes, carbon taxes, gasoline taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, and property taxes, somewhere between 60 and 70% of a Canadian family's income goes to taxes of some kind. The average family of four is paying over $20,000 a year just for healthcare that has 18-hour ER waits and 22,000+ recorded waitlist deaths.

Bitcoin is the exit that doesn't require asking anyone for permission. You don't need a politician to fix the money. You just use the better money.

Mike disclosed on tape that Broken Country was funded primarily through Bitcoin, unprompted. That was the actual payment rail the people making the documentary needed, one not subject to the same system they were documenting.

What Canada's Decline Means for Americans Right Now

The government of Canada's own social mobility report, cited by Mira, projected that if current trajectories hold, by 2040 the middle class will be largely eroded, crime will run rampant, and generational wealth will be the only path to housing and education. Mira said the report included language about people hunting and fishing in city parks. That was an official government projection. And since it was published, none of the data points that would indicate improvement have moved in the right direction.

Food banks in Canada recorded 2.3 million visits in a single month, June, which was a record. In a country of 40 million people. Mira's figure: 59% of food bank users are employed and have post-secondary education.

These are working, educated people who cannot cover their basic costs.

This is the picture I'm watching when I see Mamdani running in New York, Al-Sayed in Michigan, Talarico in Texas, the LA mayor race, Andrew Nixon in Florida running as a card-carrying DSA member. The policies are on the ballot right now. They sound appealing: free healthcare, free childcare, free dental, government intervention in housing. They are the same policies that Canada has been running for a decade. The outcome is documented.

I'm not naive about the ballot box either. I watched what happened in Brazil with the Supreme Court's election interference. I'm watching a debate in the 9th Circuit right now about California's legislature and illegal immigrant voting.

The ballot box is not a clean accountability mechanism when the bureaucracy has gotten large enough to protect itself. That's why Bitcoin matters beyond the price. When the fiat system is the mechanism of control, opting out is the one move that doesn't depend on anyone else's permission or integrity. You can just opt out. Use the better money. Stack sats.

Canada built something real. I grew up playing lacrosse and crossed paths with a lot of Canadians. Tough, funny, polite, salt of the earth. That culture is worth fixing.

Mike and Mira made Broken Country because they think it can be. The documentary doesn't start from doom, it starts from the premise that you can't fix what you won't honestly look at.

Watch it before you go to the ballot box. That was Mike's closing ask. I second it.

About Mike Werry and Mira Metter

Mike Werry and Mira Metter are the directors and producers of Broken Country, a documentary examining Canada's decade of managed decline across healthcare, housing, immigration, the economy, and government waste. The film involved thousands of street interviews conducted by Mira, an extensive research and journalism team, and a legal fact-checking process before release. Mike has a background in investment banking. The project was funded primarily through Bitcoin.

Sources mentioned

• Auditor General of Canada, ArriveCAN Review: the audited cost of the ArriveCAN app, widely reported at approximately $54 million against a projected $30,000 baseline
• Fraser Institute, Cost of Government Health Care: annual report tracking what Canadian families actually pay for the "free" healthcare system
• Food Banks Canada, HungerCount: annual report tracking food bank usage; source for monthly visit records and user demographic data
• Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey: source for Canadian youth unemployment figures
• CMHC, Housing Market Reports: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation data on housing starts and affordability
• Century Initiative: the organization Mike Werry cited as the policy vehicle behind the 100-million-population target for Canada by 2100

Watch the conversation

Timestamps

• 0:00 - Intro
• 0:36 - Toronto votes Olivia Chow back in
• 6:03 - DSA candidates and the American parallel
• 11:40 - Healthcare isn't free and it's killing people
• 16:33 - GDP per capita: Canada vs. the US since 2014
• 19:43 - Canada's immigration standards collapse
• 23:28 - Mark Carney and the WEF ploy on Canada
• 32:00 - The Century Initiative and the 100 million target
• 35:48 - The great inversion: government vs. the governed
• 48:37 - The housing trap and the birth rate collapse
• 1:02:13 - The Toronto LRT: 17 years, billions over budget
• 1:07:55 - Bread, circuses, and why bad policy keeps winning
• 1:11:45 - Carney sold Canada's gold
• 1:16:23 - 60-70% of income to taxes; purchasing power gone
• 1:20:21 - The government's own 2040 social mobility warning
• 1:31:09 - Anarcho-tyranny, super offenders, and the justice system

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