Transcript: Canada Is Speedrunning America's Future | Werry & Metter

Marty Bent [0:36] Mirror Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Werry [0:39] Thank you, Marty. Welcome. Thank you for having us.

Mira Metter [0:41] Yes, thank you for having us.

Marty Bent [0:42] Well, it looks like I caught you at a frustrating moment in Toronto. Why don't we? Why don't we start there? What happened this week in Toronto?

Mike Werry [0:49] Yesterday we had our mayoral election, and Toronto voted in for four more years of.

Mira Metter [0:56] Decline.

Mike Werry [0:57] Decline. You know, fentanyl addicts in the streets, safe supply, crumbling infrastructure.

Mira Metter [1:02] Expensive renaming of public spaces that didn't really need naming changes.

Mike Werry [1:10] Yeah, just bike lanes and, you know, gridlock.

Mira Metter [1:15] Gridlock

Mike Werry [1:16] and

Mira Metter [1:16] prioritizing drug use over, you know, children's safety.

Marty Bent [1:20] So this is Olivia Chow, correct?

Mike Werry [1:23] Yes.

Marty Bent [1:24] And what was her platform going into the previous election and then into this one? And what has she done over the last 4 years structurally?

Mike Werry [1:34] I think the biggest thing that you can sort of say that she's done is she's been a massive proponent for safe supply and safe injection. So one of the things we have here in Canada, which you see in bits and pieces in the States, is government-supplied opioids and places for people to use them. That has unleashed upon our streets. And, you know, we also have like government vending machines where you can get crack pipes and, you know, injection kits and meth pipes and all that sort of stuff. In our film, we actually covered it in Barrie— sorry, in the Barrie School Board, which is outside of Toronto. They were providing safer snorting kits, but—

Mira Metter [2:22] To high school?

Mike Werry [2:24] To high school students. But it has led to a dramatic decline in safety, both in terms of property crime, in terms of antisemitism, in terms of opioid use on the streets. And, you know, we seem to have voted it in yet again.

Marty Bent [2:51] Yeah, it's confounding me, an American. I've been to Canada a few times, and it's been a long time. It's been like 8 years, and it seems like a lot's happened in a relatively short period of time for the, for the worse. And you two directed and produced, uh, Broken Country, a documentary trying to highlight all this and really shake people awake to what has happened to Canada covering healthcare, housing, immigration, the economy writ large. And then at the end, I think the end was the most potent part to me, just highlighting the corruption and the waste in the government. But before we get into sort of dissecting everything that's happened in Canada, particularly this decade, Why did you guys feel compelled to make this documentary?

Mira Metter [3:46] Do you want to take it or should I?

Mike Werry [3:49] I'll start, right? I will give all credit to Mira on this one. She was the one who really drove it and drove it from the get-go, but it really started from conversations that we were having around the dinner table and in backyard playdates and with friends. And it was a sense that things were not right in this country. Things were in continual managed or designed decline, and it was harder and harder and harder to live. And you just looked around and you looked around and you look at our street and every other house had had a car stolen. The Toronto police chief was telling citizens of Toronto to leave your keys on your front door so that they were easier to steal, so that you were at less risk of a home invasion and injury, because you could be charged here if you try to defend your property.

Mike Werry ⋮ Many different reasons. The safety of our kids was a huge piece of it. Them going to school in a downtown area and seeing fentanyl addicts and addicts and being accosted on a daily basis.

Marty Bent [5:06] Yeah. And it's insane to think about because, I mean, in the email thread that we had going back and forth, I think one of the lines that really stuck out to me, and it's a big topic here in the United States, but it seems like Canada is speedrunning what we may be preparing ourselves for here in the United States. It's a case study in in what not to do and a warning shot to the audience that's outside of Canada to not let these policies infect your country. And we've seen it here. We were talking about before we hit record, we have the rise of democratic socialism here in the United States. You have Mamdani in New York, you have Al-Sayed in—

Mike Werry [5:52] Talarico.

Marty Bent [5:54] Michigan. We have Talarico running in Texas. We'll see how that goes next week. We had the LA mayor race. this year was pretty contested.

Mike Werry [6:03] Andrew Nixon in Florida is a card-carrying member of the DSA. Um, yeah, yeah.

Marty Bent [6:11] I,

Mike Werry [6:12] I, you know, I, I think that this is a— that this is— we made this film out of a patriotic effort to, you know, illustrate for Canadians en masse what had truly happened to this country. And understanding, you know, the why behind it and the what had happened.

Mira Metter [6:33] I mean, truly, like, I think the most interesting thing is, is that I went into this without any type of predetermined conclusions. I just genuinely wanted to know, like, what happened. Because no matter what side of the fence you stand on, you know, whether you're more conservative or more liberal or In your case, it's a Republican or Democrat, or now it's more socialist Democrat. Every person is impacted by the results of these bad policies, everyone. And I don't think that anyone can really point to anything that's truly gotten better in the past 12 years. It's all declined. Yeah.

Mike Werry [7:20] And funnily enough, Mira finished filming this movie really June, July of 2025. And with the exception of a few pickup shoots here or there, we've been editing the film, or she's been editing the film for the better part of a year. And through that, through the filming, we had Trump being elected. Tariffs, 51st state, Justin Trudeau resigning, Mark Carney coming in and being installed as a new prime minister, promising to get a deal done with Donald Trump, which still hasn't happened. All these different things. And we look at the film and not one aspect that we cover, from healthcare to taxes and everything in between, the economy has gotten better. It's only gotten worse. And for Americans, a lot of the same policies are on the ballot box right now. And this is a vision into the future of what happens when you try to go too far down a road. And this is the outcome that you're ultimately left with.

Marty Bent [8:39] Well, let's break it down because the beginning of the movie, the— I think like the first third, if I recall correctly, focused on the healthcare system because that seems to be one of the pride and joys of Canadian citizens when talking to Americans about, oh, we have good, relatively free healthcare. Healthcare. But you document throughout the movie that like this is not any, any, in any sense, is it not functional because of the amount of time you have to wait? Who gets preference over others? And then in recent years, the introduction of the MAiD program, which is essentially just sending people out the pasture for any reason that, that, that can be taken as, okay, it's time for you to, to, to move on to the, to the afterlife.

Marty Bent ⋮ And I think that Again, drawing parallels to the United States, I think that's one of the big discussions and arguments that we've been having in this country since Obamacare and the American Care Act passed under Obama. And we've watched a deterioration of our healthcare system and health insurance system here in the United States. And I think Canada seems to be at least a decade ahead of this here. How would you describe the tragedy of Canadian healthcare as it stands today?

Mira Metter [10:01] I mean, I think first off, it's important to distinguish that it's not free healthcare. Like, there is no free lunch, right? Like, healthcare is paid for through taxation. So we have not only increased in the past, like, 3 years the cost of healthcare from, I think, The stats that I had in the film were 18,000 a year for your average family of 4. Today, it's over 20,000 for your average family of 4, and that's like a 2-year data gap. And at the same time, the number of people who have died on waitlists that was recorded, because not all provinces— the majority of provinces actually don't record that data. has gone up from 15,700 to over 22,000.

Mike Werry [10:55] So you can at least double that and probably, in fairness, quadruple that number because it's not just waiting lists, it's people who are boarded in hospitals. And so first things first, one thing that is very different for Americans is 1/5 of Canadians don't have access to primary care physicians. Right. So they flood the ER room. The ER rooms then become your triage center for everything from strep throat to a bullet wound and everything in between. And so your waiting times are 18 hours, and there's lots of people who are waiting 18, 20 hours to receive care.

Mira Metter [11:40] But that situation happened and the situation that we're in where we have very expensive healthcare and we're no longer— we used to be. One of the reasons why we pride ourselves on our healthcare is because we are the grandfather, the founder of universal care, right? It's not original to us anymore, but it started in Canada and then it's been adapted other places. So that's where it became a point of pride. But The way that we have taxed it and reduced the number of doctors and put policies in place in the '90s, really, in order to balance the federal budgets, it's really passed the buck down the line and the impacts are seen throughout the entire medical system.

Mira Metter ⋮ We've reduced the number of doctors that were allowed to graduate and practice. We've reduced hospital bed capacity. So there's not enough capacity for all of the influx of senior citizens, as well as new Canadians that have come in or temporary immigrants that have come in, or foreign workers or temporary students or the temporary populace. And What it means is, is that people are not just paying out of their tax dollars, but they're paying with their health, their health outcomes, and their lives.

Marty Bent [13:13] Yeah, well, and focusing on the temporary immigrants, I mean, that was one of the other shocking stats. I forget it was for the temporary immigrants or the students. I think it might have been the students, but they're supposed to be temporary as well. But it went from 300,000 students in 2023 to over a million in 2025. So you have this influx, and that's one of— that's been one of the— like, if you look at, like, I think there's accounts on X that say, like, crazy chart of the day, and they post crazy charts. One is Canadian immigration chart over the last 10 years. It's literally up and to the right. I think the inflow is like 4 million, something like 10% of the population. It's just not sustainable from an economic perspective.

Mike Werry [13:57] Well, if you think about it, so It is not sustainable when you're adding in roughly 2 million new people to the population. Remember, we have a population of 40 million people right now. So when you're adding in that much, that many people to the, to the populace every single year and they're coming into Toronto, it's a strain on housing, the strain on infrastructure, it's a strain on public services. They all get access to the same thing. It is a strain on healthcare. And we did not do the math or think about any of that leading into it. And so it's created a huge problem, and it's created huge problems both for perception of immigrants, some of whom were scammed to get in here.

Mike Werry ⋮ And that's a lot of the temporary foreign students, but it has also created a security issue around being able to exit them, and they're not exiting. And so it has created a huge drain and strain on our resources that is a very hard thing to correct. And now we're talking about adding on 50,000 15 million more immigrants. Um, you know, yeah, in an interview with the New York Times, you know, 15 million more, um, and dramatically ramping that up. The government called it a whoopsie, and then, you know, all of a sudden they're—

Mira Metter [15:36] They dialed it back, and now they're pumping it up again. Yeah, planning to.

Marty Bent [15:40] Do you think this is— before we hit record, you mentioned God's sad suicidal empathy. Do you think it's suicidal empathy, or do you think there's a tinge of malice to this as well?

Mike Werry [15:52] I think, okay, so if you look at— Good question. It's a really great question. I think a lot of what has happened is actually economic. The idea was our numbers were so bad economically in terms of GDP per capita. One of the ways to inflate GDP is to add on new people.

Mira Metter [16:16] But when you realize it, when it's actualized, it's actually significantly dropped. And so,

Marty Bent [16:23] yeah, that's what the stat in the movie was. What was it? The turn of the 2020s, the GDP per capita of the US and Canada was equivalent to $52,000.

Mike Werry [16:33] That was in 2014. In 2014, yeah, $53,000 USD each Canadian. Canadians on average made that much money, and Americans on average made that much money. Now Americans make $77,000 or so on average. Canadians still make $53,000 on average

Mira Metter [16:52] in USD.

Mike Werry [16:53] But, you know, the immigration has created a huge strain across the board in terms of affordability. Just think about, you know, when you're adding that many people into Toronto or Vancouver or Montreal, the rise in housing prices, the rise in apartment rental prices, those have gone through the roof. And if you look at the graph, there's a graph that's out there that shows net new immigration versus the actual decline in birth rates for Canadians. And we're now at the lowest level on record, well below replacement level. And a lot of that is due to affordability issues created directly from the immigration that we've allowed in. I mean, there's other reasons too.

Mira Metter [17:42] It's not directly, directly, but it doesn't, it doesn't help the situation. I think the affordability, the cost of housing, the stagnation of wages, the loss of job opportunities, that has really impacted the birth rate. And so now what they're saying is, what the government is saying is the rationale behind adding approximately 15 million more people to the country through immigration is for jobs. Well, we have the highest youth unemployment in history. 14%. Yeah, it's, it's astronomical. And those are people who are actively looking for jobs, and they just, they can't get them because they're in competition with someone who's willing to accept half their wage under the table. And so from an employer standpoint, it's— you're going to go for the cheapest labor possible. And so you have a whole generation that's locked out of working in the country that they've studied in, that they've grown up in, and they now can't get experience in.

Mike Werry [18:51] Yeah.

Mira Metter [18:51] So it's— and it's devastating a lot of futures and it's devastating the current reality, I think, for most people, including a lot of the new immigrants that have come in. And especially the people who have entered, you know, previously, previous to these policy adjustments, because this is really a new phenomenon. Like, this is something that started, um, with 2015, and then it was accelerated in 2022 with adjustments to our immigration policy to allow for a broader opening of category of people.

Marty Bent [19:28] Well, that's another thing you highlight in the documentary is the Gold standard of immigration policy was Canada in the in the twenty twentieth century. Was it 1974?

Mike Werry [19:39] Before twenty before 2014.

Mira Metter [19:43] Well, really it started in the sixties. Yeah, right.

Marty Bent [19:46] But there was there were standards, right? Like you had to take you had to meet something.

Mira Metter [19:50] We had an economic point system. So one of our experts that we interviewed like said, and it's true, I've read it a number of times, that it's harder it was harder to get into Canada. as an economic immigrant than it was to get into Harvard. And so that made it that we got excellent immigrants that came to the country that wanted to be here, that could adapt, that could survive, that could sustain, that wanted to be part of the culture. And then what happened in 2015 is that we opened up an Express Entry So you didn't have to be as accredited or educated. You just had to fill like a certain level of employment. And then again, in 2022, those parameters were opened up even further, dropping further the education standard, decreasing like, you know, regulations around temporary workers, temporary student, foreign students. And that's where we got incredible numbers that entered the country. Yeah.

Mike Werry [20:55] So if you think about it, one of the easiest ways to think about the youth unemployment, which is a huge problem, 14%, is in your country as well as ours, one of the first jobs that you get is making fries at McDonald's.

Marty Bent [21:11] Mine was, I was a hot dog stand guy. There you go.

Mike Werry [21:15] There you go. It's the exact same sort of thing, right? For us, it's McDonald's too, don't get me wrong, but Tim Hortons. Tim Hortons, our pride and joy, was always employing Canadian students and Canadian young kids. And they were one of— actually, when they got bought by a Brazilian private equity firm, one of their biggest lobbying efforts was for temporary foreign workers. And so now if you look at it, all the jobs that used to be going to youth are going to temporary foreign workers because they're taking pennies on the dollar. They're much cheaper to hire, and it's left a huge gap. And those issues with jobs have carried forward in different ways through Canadians 20, 30, and 40 years old.

Marty Bent [22:17] Yeah. And it's complete insanity because you're trying to— it's complete because you're throwing more bodies at a problem that isn't really a problem of bodies. It's a problem, I would argue, of regulatory frameworks and free market dynamics that aren't allowed to persist. And you're just exacerbating the problem by disenfranchising the native-born population, bringing in low-wage, low-quality workers, for lack of a better term. And then driving up the price of everything for everybody else because you have scarce resources and housing and healthcare, whatever it may be, with more demand now because there's materially more people in the country. And again, it goes back to the question of malice. And you think of, you brought up Mark Carney. He's somebody I've covered on the show for quite some time, and it was before He was even the Prime Minister of Canada. It was back in his days when he was at HSBC, then he was the head of the Central Bank of England.

Mike Werry [23:25] And the Bank of Canada.

Marty Bent [23:28] And the Bank of Canada. And he is part of that Davos class that wants Agenda 2030. Obviously, they're out of favor here in the United States, and I think they've receded a bit, but When he was sort of implanted as the Prime Minister of Canada, I was like, this is some sort of World Economic Forum ploy on the Canadian people. Because if you think of all the resources you have considering a population of 40 million and the Great North that is Canada with all the lumber and oil and gas and steel and rare earth minerals that you have at your— right below your feet, you should be one of the most prosperous nations on the planet from a per capita perspective, but it's just a regulatory framework that doesn't allow that. Instead of recognizing that problem and still going towards the net zero goal of the 2030 agenda and telling Canadians, well, you're the problem, we need to bring in more, more labor to fix this, is completely insane.

Mike Werry [24:32] Well, I mean, a couple of things. One, Nobody read his book Values. He wrote a book called Values, which explicitly exposes his views on, you know, the economy and clean energy and, you know, emissions and all that sort of stuff.

Mira Metter [24:54] And his idea for population growth and the, like, widening of, you know, the wage gaps and class systems and All of it. It lays it all out.

Mike Werry [25:04] Yeah. And so like, he's part of the whole, like, you know, the 2030 and all that sort of stuff. Yes, there's WEF. Yes. But he's part of the Whole Century Initiative. And the Century Initiative is stating that, you know, Canada should have a population of 100 million people by 2100.

Mira Metter [25:23] Yeah,

Mike Werry [25:24] I think it's 2100. Yeah. Which is, you know, an unfathomable number. And that's all due to bringing in, you know, new immigration. But it's also, you know, left a stifling, which we cover very deeply in the film, a stifling of our natural resources industry. And we should be pound for pound, you know, one of the most economically strong countries in the world, um, just given everything that we have here under our, under our ground.

Marty Bent [25:56] Yeah, go ahead, Mira.

Mira Metter [25:57] I was going to say, like, just to add to that, you know, you think of the size of Canada And you think of all the resources that we have and you think, okay, well, like, could you handle having a lot more population added to the country? I just want to highlight, like, while we have all this land, most of it is in the north and it's almost— it's not uninhabitable, but it's not easily habitable. Habitable. Habitable. Habitable. It's not that easy to live there because It's frozen a lot of the time. You have to ship food there. So like, if you look at our more northern regions, the cost of like, you know, essentials is insane.

Mira Metter ⋮ Like you're talking like $30 for milk kind of vibe. And it doesn't exactly lend itself to like growth in, in those areas. So you have a population that really hugs the American border. That's if you look at a populace, the population map, We're like a hot dog right across the border. So it's not like we have actual ability to, to populate the entire landmass of Canada when a good majority of it is, is frozen and doesn't have the infrastructure to support urban, urban sprawl.

Mike Werry [27:17] But it does have resources.

Mira Metter [27:19] It does have resources.

Mike Werry [27:20] And we have stifled and maligned and overregulated, you know, Takes 20-plus years to get a new project, you know, through, through the regulatory process. A mine or, uh, you know, a new oil field or—

Marty Bent [27:35] A Keystone Pipeline, you know, a big—

Mira Metter [27:37] Pipeline, LNG gas. Yeah, we have the Ring of Fire in Ontario, Northern Ontario, and it's like has almost every sort of relevant mineral that runs basically everything that our modern society needs. And not only have we not started to actually harvest any of these minerals, we haven't built the road to get there. And it's been over 20 years.

Mike Werry [28:05] So there's a— there's an ad that plays in Toronto or in Ontario that infuriates me. You wouldn't see it, but it's basically— it's the government of Ontario basically like promoting the Ring of Fire. And it promotes it as if it's already a thing. And we're still 20 years away from— we haven't even started building the road to it. And Mira interviewed a number of subjects for the documentary, and they were talking about the Americans and people from all over the world who would literally come up with blank checks. And we're not talking about blank checks for, like, write yourself $20 grand. This is $20 billion or $100 billion or a trillion dollars, whatever you need. We need these resources. We will give it to you. And it was always, well, the 27-year regulatory study away. And the time horizon for anybody who's willing to give money is just not there.

Mira Metter [29:02] But if you think about it, I'll just take this a step back and bring it back to what we were talking about in terms of, like, You know, population and jobs. If we actually started to take on those projects, building the infrastructure to access that alone, let alone, you know, the, the community that we would build around it, the jobs of running a mine, we could employ so many people for generations just to develop these things that the world already is in the market for. And to me, that's just so backwards.

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Marty Bent ⋮ Bitcoiners, you found sovereign money. Now find sovereign health and sovereign healthcare. Well, I was going to say it is, and Mark Carney is a believer in the, the 100— was it 100-year Century.

Mike Werry [32:00] Yeah, the Century Project.

Marty Bent [32:03] The Century Project. Even if you want, like, let's run with the assumption that Canada could, uh, support a population of 100 million. That's not the way you do it. You don't like say we need 100 million people, so we're going to do this, that, and the other thing. It should be an emergent process where it just naturally happens because people coalesce to that area because it has the foundations of providing a better life for individuals who decide to pair up, have families, immigrate legally for good reasons, do that. You can't just say, hey, we're going to go from 40 million to 100 million over the next 20, 30 years, and we're just going to import everybody in. That's not how it happens.

Mike Werry [32:45] Yeah. It's funny. I was having a very deep conversation with somebody the other day talking about basically high-skilled labor jobs, right? Like, Everything from plumbers to oilfield workers, right? The jobs that we have so, in many cases, maligned for so many years are—

Mira Metter [33:08] The best jobs.

Mike Werry [33:09] The best jobs out there. Oilfield workers make 3 times the average wage of a lawyer. And the reason why is because they're the people who are getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning in -45-degree weather to go turn— to get a wrench out and turn a knob on an oil well. to heat someplace in Quebec, yet we're told that they're doing something evil. But we talked to a number of indigenous leaders, or Ramir talked to a number of indigenous leaders who were talking simply that their goal is economic sovereignty, and economic sovereignty comes from accessing the oil and gas on their land and the natural resources on their land.

Mike Werry ⋮ that provides the best and the highest paying jobs for their people. And so it benefits all Canadians. And so the Canadian promise of go to university, get a job, work hard, buy a house, it's very different than the American dream of you can land on the shores of Philadelphia and become Elon Musk. It's much simpler and much more Canadian. But that promise of going to university, it's really high-skilled trades that we need to sustain and to grow the Canadian economy. And that's going to be our future.

Marty Bent [34:42] Well, and this highlights something that is discussed in the The documentary, I never knew this and I thought it was interesting. I forget the gentleman who said it, but he's comparing America's saying of the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Like life, liberty, pursuit of happiness is the American dream. In Canada, it's 3 things as well, but the last one is the only one I can recall, which is like a competent functioning—

Mike Werry [35:09] Peace, order, and good government.

Marty Bent [35:11] Peace, order, and good government. And I think that's really the thread throughout the movie is beginning to ask or present the critical question to Canadians and other outsiders who watch the documentary. Is the government actually good? Is it, is it doing what it's supposed to do? And I guess that's the question I have, is that, is that the point of the documentary is to really incite that question into the minds of Canadians? Or should we start thinking critically about our relationship with the government? And how the bureaucracy has outgrown what it was supposed to do or what it was intended to do originally.

Mira Metter [35:48] I think the point is, is to say like, hey, this isn't working. This isn't working for actual people and people at large, like masses, like the majority of people, like what we've elected, what we have chosen, our social services, the things that we pay our taxes into. They are not serving. They're not doing their job anymore. And we need to actually understand why. Where did it break? And can we course correct it? And what is the pinpoint? What do we hold to account? Because I think in Canada right now, there's this complacency that's set in where it's like, oh, okay, this is what it is.

Mira Metter ⋮ It sucks. You know, taxes going up. Oh, shucks, you know, but it's not just okay. It's not, oh, shucks. It's not, it's not good to just like ride with it because you're going to get drowned in it. And I think that's what's happening right now. People are drowning in affordability issues. People are drowning in a job market that's flooding with unemployment. People are drowning in their taxes. We have one of the hugest housing bubbles, right? And they're comparing what's happening in Canada right now to America's 2008 housing prices. And for the majority of Canadians, all of their wealth has been locked up in their homes and their home values.

Mira Metter ⋮ And that's been like the only thing that's been ingrained in most Canadians, like buy a house, overspend on a house, And that's what's happened. And now their house valuation is dropping. We have 5-year term mortgages. Those are based off of interest rates. Well, those are skyrocketing. They're doubling. So people's mortgages are going up exponentially. The cost of food, the cost of, you know, gas, the cost of everything is very inflated, very high here. And those prices don't come down. And people are like, really so buried in the struggle that they're not looking up to say, wait a second, is this fixable? And why is this happening?

Mira Metter ⋮ And what can we do to course correct? And I think that was really the point of the documentary, is to help people navigate through, you know, the day-to-day of just trying to survive. and pinpoint the things that are supposed to serve them that are not, and what it is that we should be asking for. Because I do believe that in democracy, I do believe in good governance. I just don't think that we have been served properly. And I think that we have such incredible taxes. I don't know where they're going. And now, I mean, I didn't know. Now I know they're going to bureaucracy. They're not going to pay directly for our healthcare or our police force.

Mira Metter ⋮ We have almost no defense. It's—

Mike Werry [38:58] Laughable.

Mira Metter [39:00] It's laughable, but it is an erosion of public trust and it's eroding our culture. And what's happening is that people who have the ability 2 are leaving and they're leaving at scale.

Marty Bent [39:18] Do you really think Canada is losing its culture?

Mira Metter [39:21] I think that we have had this situation where our former prime minister, you know, was saying that we're like a post-nationalist country and like, you know, there is no real culture. And, you know, we have prime ministers saying like Canadian values are Muslim values and it's like You know that those are not Canadian values, and I think that when you have someone in those posts sort of not understanding what the Canadian values are and what Canadians really value, why people choose to immigrate. Like everyone in Canada is some form of immigrant. Like I'm, I'm, I'm from immigrants. Like you know it's on one side anyway. On the other side, they were immigrants earlier, but like they're all immigrants. You know, like this is. This is what Canada is fundamentally made out of. But we all came under one creed, you know, and when, when that starts to erode, when you have huge masses of people that don't want to function in a society with you under that creed.

Marty Bent [40:27] Yeah, I think the Cuban— I think the Cuban nipple crisis was the worst thing that happened to, to Canada. In some time, I think. Sure, the what?

Mike Werry [40:40] The which?

Mira Metter [40:41] The Cuban.

Marty Bent [40:41] The Cuban nipple crisis. He's Fidel Castro's son, so he's got.

Mira Metter [40:48] Oh! I didn't.

Mike Werry [40:51] I didn't put the two and two together. No, I think you know we had so many conversations while filming this about what is Canadian culture. And, you know, I think pre-2014, it was still hard to define, but it was really an ethos of hard work, you know, entrepreneurship. Um, we were definitely much more cautious and much more conservative than Americans are. And I don't mean conservative as in, like, conservative from a political standpoint, just, like, reserved. Yeah, subdued. subdued. And I think, you know, now it's almost impossible to define what a Canadian is. The only way that Canadians seem to be able to define themselves are what we're not, which is American.

Mike Werry ⋮ And so when you're— when your only mentality is, is, is what is— well, we're just not American. And so, you know, that's helped to stoke a lot of faux patriotism and the Elbows Up movement, um, over Trump. And but it's also healthcare. And then so you've— but, and if you poke holes in healthcare, it's— it gets people's backs up. But everybody knows, anybody and everybody who Mira spoke to throughout this process, and anybody that you speak to on the street that has an experience with the Canadian healthcare system knows that it's not working and will freely admit it. But if you try to say, we need to do something different, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's a bridge too far.

Mike Werry ⋮ We can't change anything.

Marty Bent [42:36] So it attacks the ego of the collective culture.

Mike Werry [42:41] It does. It's a sacred cow.

Mira Metter [42:43] I feel like the biggest problem that I think most countries are facing is similar to the one that Canada is facing right now, is that, you know, you go so far down a road that like anytime you question anything, it becomes combative and polarized. So you can't even have an open conversation where you're assessing whether, you know, a policy, a program, an ethos is actually correct and has served and is doing its job. You know, like healthcare, we for sure need a healthcare program, but like, can we have the conversation about how, how the funding comes through? Because that's, that's a huge part of the problem.

Mira Metter ⋮ Can we have the conversation about the fact that it's not really all universal, that we have a two-tier system already? So like, let's leverage people who have insurance to cover that and expand it so that we're lifting some of the burden off of the public, like the your public stream. If you can't have that conversation, and that's political, just to have that conversation of making sure people are healthy and that we're not expanding a MAiD program to the point of it becoming just an option, like a menu item. Yeah. You actually have to be able to critically assess these kinds of things. Well, you see it in France right now.

Mira Metter ⋮ Like, they have uncontrolled riots. Well, everyone's like, well, where are the police? Well, they made choices to defund their police. You know, they like— they, they have reduced their protection.

Mike Werry [44:24] And so did we.

Mira Metter [44:25] So have we.

Mike Werry [44:26] And so have a lot of Americans.

Mira Metter [44:28] So that's what happens when you don't have that social service functioning at an optimal level to service and do their role in society. Is that the correct choice? I would say no.

Marty Bent [44:42] No, because it's, it's, it's so pining about liberal democracy and sort of collective goodwill, if you will. And that's a facade for anarchy, anarcho-tyranny, which is what, what is spreading. Like, France, I think, is objectively at this point like a great example of anarcho-tyranny because they've essentially refused to, uh, combat the, the rioters. And I mean, it's not just the riots of the last couple months, but this has been building, frog boiling in water situation where the state has no, no leverage on violence over, over the rioters at this point. They've sort of demilitarized themselves and the police forces aren't equipped enough to handle the riots in France. And that can come to other areas. I mean, you've covered it pretty well in the documentary, too. I mean, you mentioned it earlier, like leave your keys in the car so people aren't breaking into your house. But you—

Mike Werry [45:45] But if you look at the protests that are happening, you know, in cities like Montreal or Toronto, Toronto's main intersection is taken over every single weekend by a pro-Hamas pro-Palestinian protest. So the entire intersection shuts down on a Sunday afternoon, and the police can do nothing, and they're waving terrorist flags. And they haven't turned into riots here, but you can see the same things. You can see what's happened in New York at certain times where there have been very close to riots. You can see similar things potentially happening in LA. You can see similar things happening. They're happening in Brussels and Milan and Rome and London and other places as well. And it is, you know, a lot of it is, you know, well, there's a lot of different reasons for it, but—

Marty Bent [46:42] Yeah. And I mean, I think it's governments drunk on power, bureaucracy that is a metastasizing tumor that just needs to grow. Yeah. I think that was— Another great, great quote from the same gentleman. His name is escaping me, but the Oscar Wilde. Yeah, the Oscar Wilde.

Mike Werry [46:59] He's got some of the best. And that, that quote there is that, you know, it's, it's, um, it's Oscar Wilde. And, you know, an expanding bureaucracy needs to expand to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy. And so, you know, if you think about the fact that 80% of new jobs that have been created since, I think, 2014 but I can be corrected on this, have come from the public sector. So that's government jobs, right? 20% of Canadians are employed directly by some level of government. And when you add in consultants and when you add in other functionaries, that number goes up to 40% of the population. If you take America, that's what, 160 million? Imagine 160 million Americans employed by the federal government. Well, their only job is to add more layers of bureaucracy. And a bureaucracy's only job is to grow.

Mira Metter [48:02] Mm-hmm.

Mike Werry [48:02] Right? And so you see that with many different programs. But you can talk about MAID. MAID is a bureaucracy. MAID is government-assisted suicide. Right. It is a bureaucracy has been created around it. Now that job of— now the job of the bureaucracy is to grow. We made a great step a few weeks ago in terms of reversing some decisions around, you know, youth and teens and mental health. But their policies are to grow because they want more funding.

Mira Metter [48:37] You also look at it in the housing, right? Like we have a housing crisis here. We don't have enough housing. Well, we've created bureaucracies and tons of regulation around building, how we can build, what we can build, how much it costs, all of the different sort of levels of payments that everyone has to pay in order to build. So if you're a developer, you're pretty much like tapped before you've broken ground. And so what's happening is, is you have all these developers saying like, this is ridiculous. It's like taking me 7 years to dig a hole to get all of the regulation because of all the regulations costing me millions of dollars before I've sold a unit.

Mira Metter ⋮ Like, I'm outta here. So we have this situation where we're— we used to have a million things happening, all like cranes in the air, lots of development. Now we have these sites that are going into foreclosure. So the foreclosure rate on new housing starts is insane. It's going up and we're saying, but we need, I think it's 7 million new homes by 2030 in order to match the population as it was like a year ago, 2 years ago. Well, our starts have gone down. You have more sites in foreclosure and we're so far off of meeting that projection that it's It's a joke.

Mike Werry [50:03] So I think the stat is we haven't had a year since 1970 where we've built— we've had more than 250,000 new housing starts.

Mira Metter [50:10] Yeah, that's the average in a good year. Right. But that's directly tied to the cost of paying through a bureaucracy to build a home.

Marty Bent [50:19] You just need to 28x that in the next 3 years.

Mike Werry [50:22] Easy peasy. But you've got— you've had This is actually— it's been promised 7 times. I did the research the other day, 7 times under Trudeau and now Carney about this build new homes plan. Not one home has been built, suffice to say, under 7 different policy announcements. And the last one was all, we're just going to put everybody in these pseudo shipping containers. built by Brookfield, which Mark Carney used to be a part of and all that sort of stuff. And that's the answer to it. And the problem is we interviewed a guy who runs one of the largest developers. He's one of the largest developers in British Columbia, in Vancouver, which is— Vancouver and British Columbia have the 2 highest housing costs. And there's actually a website out there. It's Crack Shack in the United States versus million-dollar house in Vancouver. We cover this on a different interview.

Mira Metter [51:33] But, or the other one that I love is like crap shack in Vancouver versus palatial palace in Europe.

Mike Werry [51:41] Yeah,

Mira Metter [51:41] that's a good one.

Mike Werry [51:42] Yeah. So like, for the, for the same, for the same price as you can buy like literally a one-bedroom condemned shack in Vancouver, you can buy a literal palace in France. or, um, you know, that sort of stuff. But, you know, he was sort of saying, well, part of the problem is that the municipal governments, they don't have a lot of opportunity to, um, make money. So what they— their, their main, their main revenue, revenue comes from property taxes and development charges. And so the only way that they can make new developments— and we're talking massive condos, which is what you see primarily in Toronto and Vancouver— The only way you can make them economical is just to squeeze every floor in there with these 500-square-foot shoeboxes and try to sell them for $700,000 to $1.5 million and base off of the floor height, which is ridiculous. You laugh, but that's what they're going for.

Mira Metter [52:44] That's been basically the past 15 years of development.

Mike Werry [52:48] Yeah. But if you think about it, You go back to Canada's population growth, and I'm talking about our natural birth rate. And if you think about the ability for somebody who— let's say Mira and I met, and this was, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, and we were— We did. Okay, let's say we sort of— our life was 15 to 20 years earlier, right? And we're lucky we have a house. It's a very average middle-class sort of neighborhood house. But to raise a family in 500 square feet, it's an impossibility.

Mira Metter [53:41] So of the people that I spoke to, that was a huge factor in family planning. You know, not just affordability, but like, where am I putting a child? I can barely afford this, you know, 500, 600, 700 square foot shoebox that I'm spending, you know, $4,000 to $6,000 a month on. Because, you know, again, their mortgages have doubled. Plus, like, you know, all of the amenities that they pay for, and there's no affordability, there's nowhere for them to go. in order to have the space to have a family. And then on top of that, like, you know, their spouse just lost a job. It was either through, you know, the collapse of, you know, their entire department, or, you know, their company relocating to the United States because it's cheaper and easier to operate. And, you know, food just doubled, you know, our cost of food has gone up 35%. So all of those factors, including and most importantly about the affordability of a home, uh, has really impacted the populace.

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Marty Bent ⋮ There's a bunch of conservatives who will like basically look at a spreadsheet of economic data and say, well, like the problem is like the Americans aren't having enough kids, so we need to import all this. And it's like, it's seeped in this disdain for the native population, which is like, you're not good enough, you're not working hard enough, while completely neglecting— all of the negative sort of fundamental variables that these individuals have to deal with in the first place. And it completely distorts the conversation because you're using economic spreadsheets to dissect the problem and GDP numbers and birth rate, whatever it may be, while not really diagnosing the core of the problem, which again, coming back to it, is regulatory government bureaucratic bullshit, for lack of a better term.

Mike Werry [58:36] It's funny. So I started my career in investment banking, right? So I know the difference between analyzing something on a spreadsheet and thinking something looks brilliant on a spreadsheet and the reality of it in action. And the two don't often translate. Right? Just because something looks good on a spreadsheet. And when Mira went out and interviewed 4,500 people on the streets and saw the hopelessness and the, you know, affordability concerns, the seeing no future in Canada, you know, that comes down to— It is incumbent on any government to make it possible and affordable and likely to create a family, because that's the way that countries should grow.

Mike Werry ⋮ I mean, yes, we do need to accept new immigrants without a doubt, but it should be— there should be policies in place that should be, or, you know, just get out of the way, um, to allow for Canadians, Americans to actually have children and to make life affordable. Lisa Raitt, who was our former Deputy Prime Minister, gave a quote in the film, which I love, and it's talking about the wastage in government. And there is a bubble that happens. I mean, it happens— Trump's famous drain the swamp and all that sort of stuff. It happens in any governmental apparatus, whether it's Brussels or London or Washington or Ottawa here in Canada, where there's a bubble.

Mike Werry ⋮ And it's very hard to see outside of that world that you live in and how hard it is for the average Canadian. And they really do need to get out of that bubble and understand that it's not just about spreadsheets. It's about making life possible. Anyway, Lisa's, Lisa's point was governments decide how much they want to spend and then decide in Canada and then decide how much they're going to tax us. And every year that seems to go up, whereas the flip side should be, let's determine how much Canadians need to keep to be able to live a good life and then figure out spending from there.

Marty Bent [1:01:11] I mean, try to cut waste. What was the one stat? 90% of government executives have taken a bonus.

Mira Metter [1:01:17] Yeah, over— I think it's like 92 or something. 92% of government executives take bonuses, and those are taxpayer bonuses, right? So it's billions of dollars, like, for their salaries, plus hundreds of millions of dollars to bonus them. But then the issue becomes is And this is— you see this across the board, is there's an accountability issue because you have these committees, let's say, and it should be 2 people, maybe 1 person, and there's 12 people working on building, you know, a transit system in a city. I'll use Toronto, for example. For instance, we had this light rail that was being built, and if it was done by the private sector, It would've cost, I don't know, a fraction of what it did, and it would've been done in about a year or 2. We did it through the government. It took 15 or 16 years.

Mike Werry [1:02:13] 17 years. 17 years. From start to finish.

Mira Metter [1:02:15] Billions of like, I think like $20 billion.

Mike Werry [1:02:18] $50-some-odd billion over budget.

Mira Metter [1:02:20] $50 billion over budget. It was supposed to launch like 4 years ago, and then they're like, oops, we didn't build the tracks to the width of the carts that we ordered. And then there was like a whoops, we hit water under like the stream system that we were tunneling. And it's like, whoops. And then what happens is, is those whoops is those people that were in charge of the project have no accountability. They're not losing their job. They're just moving on to a different profile. So there's no—

Marty Bent [1:02:48] And getting their bonus.

Mira Metter [1:02:49] And getting a bonus, you know, great job, good work. You moved that forward, you moved that back in style, and then you did this. So good for you. And if that was a private sector, heads would roll, like people would lose their jobs. And, and that is a huge issue. We've taken— we've put too much onus and too much responsibility on core things that are actually needed to get done into heavy, heavy bureaucracies. And those bureaucracies cost the taxpayer on every single level. And it's just— it's not sustainable.

Mike Werry [1:03:19] But my number, my number on this will be wrong. And so It can be fact-checked, but it's not too far off. Somebody ordered— Mira mentioned this. So we designed it with track widths, right? The tracks have a specific width. We ordered, I think, 100 cars that didn't match the specific width of the tracks that were built. That's a $15 billion oopsie. Right? You know, that person, you know, wasn't fired. They were— they just moved on to a different role of like, you know, something else that they could do.

Mira Metter [1:04:00] Maybe we'll put you into a different level of urban planning.

Marty Bent [1:04:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't handle the trains, so we'll let you handle the planes. Go, go work on the planes.

Mike Werry [1:04:07] Exactly.

Mira Metter [1:04:08] Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you're like, oh my God. It was— it's a perpetual joke. Like, it truly is. And then they opened it and they're like, hey, we're open. We're like, you're open? Okay.

Mike Werry [1:04:20] But there's, you know, we've, we've had this for years under, you know, there, there is the, um, the one Arrive scam or like the Arrive— the ArriveCAN app, right? You know, a $50 billion, you know, debacle that should have cost $30 million.

Mira Metter [1:04:37] No, it should have cost $30,000.

Mike Werry [1:04:38] Sorry, $30,000 cost $50 billion or something like that. And And this was an app meant for Canadians who were traveling abroad after COVID restrictions got, you know, to fill out their information to get back into the country, proving that they had had their appropriate shots. And, you know, so none of that money has been recovered, but that all that money goes to, you know, people within the party apparatus. And it's, it's There is a level of incompetence, but there is also a level of— and a lot more of it is just pure incompetence, and then there is a level of corruption.

Marty Bent [1:05:20] Yeah. And this is endemic across the West. It's the great inversion of Western society, particularly as it pertains to the relationship between the government and the governed, which— all of us, or not all of us, I don't— I think the 3 of us are pretty privy to this, but I think most people have forgot why governments exist in the first place, and it's to serve the governed. 100%. And I mean, in the United States, this is what, uh, is really engendered in our— in the American spirit. And it's pretty weak right now, but this whole country was founded on like, you can't tell us what to do, you can't tax us, like we're gonna revolt.

Marty Bent ⋮ And now it's like, uh, yes sir, here, take 40% of my paycheck. Yes, I'll shut down my business. I'll pay the taxes on time. I'll do all that. And that, again, frogs boiling in water, this expanding bureaucracy that needs to expand to continue the expansion of the bureaucracy itself is the status quo of governments in Canada, in America. We may not be as bad now, but we're heading in that direction. You look across the pond to Europe, it's the same thing. And I think I'm very happy that you made this movie for Canadians and others to look at and say, hey guys, these problems are very obvious.

Marty Bent ⋮ Like, we need to figure out what's going on here. This is— this relationship between the governed and the government is not working out anymore.

Mira Metter [1:06:50] Well, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people forget and don't realize necessarily that the way that we operate, you know, as a democracy, as these Western democracies, it's fairly new, right? Like, they're young. But we all and our generations before us fought for these democracies. They fought for the rights that we have. And we actually have to uphold them. We have to hold the government to account to serve people. We have to make sure that it's functioning. Because if we don't, then we're just sort of letting it all fall to the waste. And I think that is the thing that you're seeing internationally right now, is that people are not really understanding, or they're, you know, painting it with a different brush, that these are fun— these aren't like— you weren't born with these rights. This isn't like something that's existed through time. People have fought for this. You know, you are privileged to have These rights. Stand up for it.

Mike Werry [1:07:55] Yeah, I think we, you know, we started, we started the podcast talking about the election of Olivia Chow last night in Toronto and, uh, what that means for Toronto for the next 4 years. And, you know, hopefully she does a complete 180 and is a different mayor. Um, it's unlikely, right? But the policies that got us into this mess, they sound appealing. Government giveaways, free healthcare or free preschool and free dental and free this, and it's never free. It's giveaways and it's bread and circuses and all that sort of stuff. And it's very enticing.

Mira Metter [1:08:50] But those are the exact same things that France has right now. They have free healthcare, free childcare, you know, lots of bursaries for all sorts of different social programs. And it's, it's like, it's burning.

Mike Werry [1:09:04] And this is a lot of the stuff that's on the same ballot, the ballot boxes with a lot of people in the, in the US. You know, it's—

Marty Bent [1:09:13] We got, we got city-run Grocery stores come into the financial capital of the

Mira Metter [1:09:18] world. That will never work. And it's not just saying that it won't work. It's like those are proven to not work. All you have to do is look at other examples of that.

Marty Bent [1:09:31] Well, they didn't implement it in the right way. We're going to do it correctly.

Mike Werry [1:09:35] But that's always the statement. But it's like, find me a socialist system that has actually worked. Because the example is always, well, they just didn't do it right. And we're saying from the Canadian perspective, we've tried it for 11 years, very, very, very hard. And whether it's really a combination of bad policy upon bad policy upon bad policy and some utopian thinking mixed in there, But it compounds and it leads to a degradation of society. And so you look at LA, you look at Minnesota, you look at New York City and things that are happening there, and you look at the choices that you have to make in one week from today, and this is in many ways, what we're seeing in France or the UK or Brussels or wherever you want to look at, same thing just north of the border. And this is the future if some of these policies are voted in.

Marty Bent [1:10:48] Yeah. And I saw you're on Bitcoin Sessions show as well, and I'm not sure if you guys covered it, but that's part of the reason— I'm not sure if you've been aware, this is a Bitcoin podcast. That's how it started. Obviously, we cover a wide range of topics, including what's going on culturally and politically. not only here in the US, but other countries like Canada. And to your point, Mira, about holding governments accountable, and to your point, Mike, about the decisions that we have to make, that's what I love about Bitcoin because it empowers you. You can just opt out. You don't have to ask for permission to adopt a better money.

Marty Bent ⋮ You just use the better money. Because I think that's another part of the problem for Canada, the US, other Western democracies across Europe is the money's broken. They're printing money to do all this stuff. A lot of this stuff is enabled by the expansion of the monetary supply or debt. In Canada, Trudeau famously sold all your gold, so you don't even have a hard—

Mike Werry [1:11:45] That was actually Carney's decision.

Marty Bent [1:11:47] Was it? Yeah.

Mike Werry [1:11:48] When he was governor of Bank of Canada. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:11:51] Yeah. Right before it ripped to $5,000 an ounce, just to get it all out. And I think Bitcoin represents a great hedge to accountability? Because I mean, you're talking to an American citizen who's pretty jaded about our processes here. I mean, just look at what happened in Brazil earlier this week. I think I'll say what I think. I thought that was overt election manipulation by the Supreme Court justices over there. And we're having a debate right now in the 9th Circuit about Californians, the Californian state legislature letting illegal immigrants votes. And I think even if you are good-willed, good-natured, and you go to the ballot box saying, I'm going to hold the government accountable by voting a certain way, the bureaucracy has gotten to a certain scale and a certain manipulative sort of tactic that they will do whatever it takes to effectuate and extend the bureaucracy.

Marty Bent ⋮ And so while I don't think that means just don't go out and vote. I think you should give it a college try to make sure that you have your voice heard at the ballot box. But I think you need to enhance that with options like Bitcoin to voice your displeasure with the incumbent system. And again, I think a lot of the problems that we're describing today are rooted In The Money Problem. Money's broken.

Mike Werry [1:13:24] No. I will say, and we actually didn't cover this on Bitcoin Sessions, this film was funded primarily through Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [1:13:33] Wow. Really?

Mike Werry [1:13:35] Yeah. And it has actually been amazing to me to see, yes, there is an incredible issue with the run-up of the M1 and the M2 money supply in Canada, the US, most of the Western world. And although we're big believers in Bitcoin, there are regulations that have come into place over the course of the last year and a half in Canada that have made fiat currency harder and harder and more and more regulated. We've got Mark Carney who has changed the rules around cash movement from $10,000 to $5,000. So the other day I had to go to the bank to— I had to move money from one bank to another.

Mike Werry ⋮ And instead of sending a wire and it costing me $50, I decided to take out $5,000 worth of cash. And so I wrote on— I had to write a long form, and then I had to go to the bank and give them the cash and write another long form. But now, we've got our banking system and the 6 major banks all talking about creating their own coins that can be regulated by the government. And that's why things like Bitcoin and other— let's really talk about Bitcoin because that's the best and most established, but that's why things like that are so important.

Marty Bent [1:15:17] Yeah. And that's why just what you just mentioned, Cardone cutting the amount of cash you're able to transact in half, it's like with inflation added to that, it just makes it worse. What, $10,000 in 1990 in purchasing power in CAD? That's what I was doing research on. $21,000 in purchasing power in 1990. Cool. If you had $10,000 in CAD and you saved it from 1990, or I forget how to phrase this, but long story short, the value of the CAD has been cut in half. And these are official inflation numbers, so it's probably even worse than that over the course of 36 years. And so by limiting or cutting the ability to transfer um, cash in half. I mean, it's— what would that equivalent be? It would be something like $10,000 in 1990. Now it's like they're preventing you from sending $2,000 in purchasing power in cash. It's completely insane.

Mike Werry [1:16:23] It is. And if you— so if you think about this, you know, we cover this in part in the film, but, you know, the average wage for a Canadian 10 years ago was $53,000 American dollars. It's still $53,000 American dollars, right? The average family of 4 in Canada makes $106,000 Canadian or whatever it is before tax. And then they're taxed roughly when it's— when all is said and done, oftentimes 60, 70% of their income goes towards taxes, whether it's— and that's not just income taxes, that's Hidden taxes on gasoline and carbon taxes and sales taxes and all that other sort of stuff.

Mira Metter [1:17:07] Payroll, property. Yeah.

Mike Werry [1:17:09] Um, but there is also the fact that the purchasing power in Canada has decreased dramatically. So not only have our wages stagnated, but we're—

Mira Metter [1:17:20] Our dollar's worth less.

Mike Werry [1:17:21] Our dollar is worth less, and inflation has eroded the value of that dollar. So Us making $53,000 USD per year on average, the purchasing power and what we can do for that has gone down dramatically.

Mira Metter [1:17:39] I'll say you mentioned 1990, right? So in 1990, the average home price was 2.5 times the average income. Today, the average home price is 9 times the average income in rural areas. And 19 to 30 times the average income in cities like Toronto and Vancouver. So right there, that's your purchasing power. It's crazy.

Mike Werry [1:18:07] Yeah. And Canadians are the most consumer-indebted nation in the world, at least in the West, at least in the Western world. So our average consumer debt to GDP is over 100%. And that's primarily because people are sustaining themselves solely on the value of their homes, which are declining right now, and mortgage rates are going up. But like on home equity lines of credit, on credit cards, all that sort of stuff, we are an incredibly indebted nation. And that leads to a systemic issue with our banking system. Our banking system is very different than the Americans, where you've got thousands of independent banks and community savings and all that sort of stuff, and you've got a few major ones. We really have 6 major banks and it's a systemic issue.

Marty Bent [1:19:03] Yeah. And I forgot what I was going to say. What was I going to say? Oh, you mentioned in the movie too, and this is one of the other qualitative sort of things you're not going to get on a spreadsheet, but what happens when this is the reality of people, they're going to get desperate, they're going to be pushed, to do what desperate people do, which is steal and turn to crime to get by. Work. It seems like that's happening. And that's the inability to recognize what to us may seem like very logical, sort of a logical pattern to follow is completely— and again, this goes back to like generally I'm still grappling back and forth with this.

Marty Bent ⋮ I lean more towards malice than suicidal empathy. But it's like how time and time again across Western nations, specifically in Canada, you're seeing the effects of these policies lead to increases in crime, unaffordability, turning to drugs, people deciding to just literally kill themselves because they don't think it's worth going on, and yet you double down to expand the bureaucracy. It's insane.

Mike Werry [1:20:21] I want Mary to go into this a little bit, but also to touch on the social mobility report.

Mira Metter [1:20:25] Oh yeah. We had the government of Canada last year put out a social mobility report basically saying that if the state of things remains the same, that It's projected by 2040 that people will become so desperate that crime will run rampant. There will be a huge gulf between wealth and poverty. The middle class will be completely eroded. Things like housing, employment, and education will become generational wealth that are handed down. You will not be able to access it without that. And that people will become— begin to hunt, live, and fish in city parks. That was put out last year. And this year, all of the data points that would suggest any type of change or betterment have actually decreased.

Mira Metter ⋮ So it's gotten worse. So we're on this projected course that was literally documented by the government. And none of the sort of things, the factors that impacted that could actually, you know, propel it to change it have been corrected. In fact, you know, you're talking about one of our speakers in the film that, you know, we're talking about this sort of increase in crime because people are desperate. You have, you know, just this cocktail of issues compounding people, and you, you, you, you bake them together. And of course, crime ensues. I was in the grocery store the other day. And there was a woman about my age.

Mira Metter ⋮ And she was stuffing her bag with chickens. She was literally stealing chicken for dinner, because it's that bad. Like, we have a food bank crisis here where we have the most insane explosion of dependence on food banks. Well, you know, when you have 59% of your food bank users are employed and have post-secondary education right now, what does that say about the cost of living and how your society is functioning, right? Yeah. And when people get desperate, like really desperate, they turn to whatever means in order to survive. And it's like, that's where you get, you know, these feudalist societies. And, and, and it's like, how, how can we not talk about that?

Mike Werry [1:23:09] 3 million food bank visits, which was a record. And that's, you know, remember, Canada has a population of 40 million. So very different. Like, if you do the equations for 10 times that, that would be 20— is that 23 or 230? 23. 23 million food bank visits in the month of June this year alone. A record number of Canadians reliant upon food banks just to get by. And, you know, you do have here in Toronto and the major cities, you know, as Mira was saying, watching somebody stuff chickens into their backpack. And this is, this is not somebody who is here trying to rob. There are, you know, theft rings and all that sort of stuff here too.

Mike Werry ⋮ But, you know, this is just somebody trying to feed their family. And you do have a situation in Toronto where you have Tom Caldwell as well in the film, um, who we've pointed to, who's got some of the best lines. Um, you know, same thing as is happening in San Francisco and in LA, where shoplifting has essentially been, um, decriminalized to a certain point. Here it's not so much decriminalized, it's the fact that people are just told to turn a blind eye to it. And so yes, there is an element of it that is criminal ring, and that is often through our liquor stores, which are government-run, which is a whole different thing.

Mike Werry ⋮ But, you know, it's, it's a lot of it is just people trying to steal groceries to get by. And that's a, that's a shame in a country like Canada that has, you know, some of the best food production in the world.

Mira Metter [1:25:03] And but then when you add in the crime rings, And the fact that, you know, those are growing exponentially because we have a catch-and-release system, meaning that like

Marty Bent [1:25:15] the

Mira Metter [1:25:16] police catch them and they are out on bail before the paperwork is dry, and then they're back on the streets repeating the crime. And

Marty Bent [1:25:25] anarcho-tyranny, it's here.

Mike Werry [1:25:27] We actually have a whole classification in Canada called super offenders, and those are— Mira, correct me— people who are charged on crimes, you know, over 50 times per year. And they are like literally brought in, out on bail the same day, and oftentimes arrested the same day or the next day, right? It's just sort of like this systematic process. And that was the one thing that Trudeau brought in was a, a 2-tier justice system, which was based around, you know, the, um, Your— it's essentially your— how marginalized you are as a human being.

Marty Bent [1:26:13] Yeah.

Mike Werry [1:26:13] And,

Mira Metter [1:26:14] you know, you get treated

Mike Werry [1:26:15] differently

Mira Metter [1:26:16] with the judicial system. So we just had a situation, and yeah, we just had a situation where, um, uh, it was at the Supreme Court, passed judgment saying that drug dealers have The right to deal drugs. Yeah, no, it's crazy. And if you think about that in a society, like, I've watched my kids be victimized by people who are on substances. I've been victimized by it. We were in Calgary for the Stampede, and I watched, you know, someone like a, like a family with young children standing at like a bus stop, like their tram stop. Surrounded by people smoking crack, and you can't get away from that.

Mira Metter ⋮ You know, we have a huge situation where our, our public transit is flooded with substance users, whether it's fentanyl, whether it's methamphetamines, and they're allowed to use them in these in these public places, and everyone else in society is victimized. And I watched on this in Calgary, this child, like, you know, like shrinking in fear, and the parents also scared, trying to like physically block the child who is literally a, a victim to crack smoke. And I'm thinking to myself, we're allowing the rights of drug dealers over the rights of—

Marty Bent [1:27:54] But it's catering to the lowest common denominator. I had this happen to me in New York. I went up to New York this summer and I got— I was going back, coming back to Philly. So I got off the A train, had to cross 7th Ave to get to Madison Square Garden, hop on the Amtrak, and I walk up and there's somebody smoking crack at the top of the steps in the middle of New York City. And I literally got crack smoke blown in my face. I think I got a little secondhand high, if I'm being honest. And there was 2 cops right there, and I was like, guys, you going to do anything?

Marty Bent ⋮ They're like, nah, we can't do anything. I was like, what is this? I shouldn't have to be able to walk in New York City, the financial capital of the world, without getting crack smoke, literally downtown, midtown. Midtown, right, or Hell's Kitchen, right by Madison Square Garden. Uh, I shouldn't— I should be able to walk without having crack smoke blown in my face. And if I am able to find a police officer who was literally standing right next to it and say, hey, you're going to do anything? They should probably do something. It's insane. Again, it's anarchy or tyranny and catering to the lowest common denominator, suicidal empathy, whatever you want to call it.

Marty Bent ⋮ Objectively, It's here. It's leading us down a terrible direction. And if we don't stop it, if we don't sort of stem the tide in the other direction, it's going to accelerate to— you're going to have a collapse of Western society or you're going to get something— the way that the tide's going to be stemmed is you're going to have people literally revolt and you're going to have violence in the streets. I know. Nobody likes to bring that up. That's literally what you're pushing people towards. You're creating this pressure cooker where there's going to be some sort of explosion. I mean, we saw fits and starts of that in Canada with the truckers rally during the COVID era as well.

Mike Werry [1:29:46] But you also see right now you've got 3— well, one province just finished a referendum on secession, but 3 provinces are actively looking to secede. And we do have the same problem here with police officers who are told not to interfere with somebody who is openly using drugs in public. They have no ability— they're actively told not to interfere. But just to jump back to the justice system just for one second, is we also have situations here where much like in the UK. It's actually similar to the UK, um, where we touched on temporary foreign workers and temporary foreign students, but there was a massive rise in asylum seekers, um, that didn't match anything, any core, anything correlated to, you know, wars or other things that would, you know, indicate people naturally seeking asylum. Um, and you have judges who are giving lighter sentences to rapists and murderers so that they will not be deported. And it boggles the mind.

Marty Bent [1:31:07] Yeah.

Mira Metter [1:31:09] And also, they're also lighter, like quicker turnaround, lighter sentences, um, than some of the people from The truckers' protests.

Mike Werry [1:31:20] And that carried on for years.

Mira Metter [1:31:23] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:31:24] Oh, there's a big story here in the United States now that a man was just sentenced to 80 years in prison for murdering the rapist of his niece who had gotten out of jail after serving a— I think it was like a rape murder of this 7-year-old girl, and the rapist spent 7 years In jail and got out, and the uncle got him, and then he's going to jail for 80 years. Um, not condoning murder or anything, but just looking at the imbalance of justice, uh, is, uh, it's hard to watch. And it's so blatant, it's right in everybody's face. It's like, and they tell you, don't believe your lying eyes. This is progressive. This is progression of society. And, uh, it's completely insane. But not to dwell and become too engrossed in the doomerism of the day, because it's very easy to do that. What are the positive things that you're seeing? What positive things do you hope to come from Broken Country?

Mira Metter [1:32:23] I really hope that everyone watches it and everyone watches it. No, but I really hope that people watch it and start to have the conversations that need to be had. In a more open-minded way, that it takes people out of, you know, their camps of, you know, political views and actually starts having the conversations that need to be had that impact everyone, and that we can start to find the way forward and fix things that need to be fixed. Like, I called this film Broken Country. Not because I want it to be broken, but because I wanted to fix what was broken, what is broken.

Mira Metter ⋮ And I think that, as you know, we've talked about, like, there's a lot of similarities between the issues that we're having in Canada and the issues that are happening in the States, as well as, you know, around the Western world. And we need to actually look at what's, what's not working. And I hope that's what comes. I hope that cooler heads prevail and we can actually have those chats, that we can sit down and open that dialogue.

Mike Werry [1:33:37] And I think to this point, we can have conversations like this and speak openly and frankly, but this film was done entirely apolitically. And it was done through a team, an extensive team of researchers and journalists, and then fact-checked and double fact-checked and quadruple fact-checked, and then ran through a legal team at great expense to make sure that everything was, you know, on the level, true and factual. And so we presented something that is

Mira Metter [1:34:17] data,

Mike Werry ⋮ data, and it is, it is just raw facts. And it is hard to Fight that, and every person that Mira interviewed, you know, from the furthest right to the furthest left, agreed that Canada was broken in some way, shape, or form. There's a difference of opinion, as there will always be, on how to fix those problems. But the point of this is for Americans, you know, before you go to the ballot box on. November 3rd and afterwards, you know, to watch this film and, you know, to look at potential consequences of some of the policies that are on the ballot box. For Canadians, it's about opening up a conversation and a dialogue.

Mike Werry ⋮ You know, it's about have— it's about being able to start talking about how to fix our country and not pretending like we are the country that we were 14 years ago where we were top of every list. and we had the strongest middle class in the world, and we seem to be reliant upon that. It's to actually say, hey, we've got some real structural issues here, and they're all solvable.

Mira Metter [1:35:31] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:35:33] I mean, if it can degrade that quickly, you can fix it as well. I mean, that's something we were talking earlier about Canadian culture. As somebody, I grew up playing lacrosse and was fortunate to cross paths with many Canadians in my Lacrosse days, played with many, um, in high school club and, and in college. And if I were to explain my, or describe my experience with Canadian culture, it's like tough as nails, funny, polite, like salt of the earth people. And that is a good culture that is worth preserving, uh, and worth fixing. And so I thank you for making the documentary. Number one, it's incredible.

Marty Bent ⋮ If you're listening to this, make sure you go watch it. Thank you. We'll link to where you can find it in the show notes. And then number 2, I hope you are successful in starting the conversation to begin fixing Canada because it's worth fixing. It needs to be fixed. And the Canadian culture that I know, that I've interacted with, is one of the best in the world. And it would be a shame to see it destroyed by a metastasizing bureaucracy that refuses to— Objectively look at the dire situation that they find themselves in.

Mike Werry [1:36:51] Yeah.

Mira Metter [1:36:51] Yeah. Well, thank you.

Mike Werry [1:36:53] Thank you so much, Marty.

Marty Bent [1:36:55] Mira Mike, it was my pleasure. We'll hopefully we'll do this again at some point.

Mike Werry [1:36:59] We'd love to do a follow-up.

Mira Metter [1:37:00] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:37:01] Yeah. All right. Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.