If Canada Were A Person, They Would Need a Team of Psychologists, Preachers and CBT specialists to Straighten Out Our National Character.

A Canadian team winning a Stanley Cup would help too.

In marketing, the buyer persona is used to identify a prototypical customer. It is the consumer brand’s quintessential average person (the one that doesn’t exist; nobody is average), but it is an attempt to imagine a brand’s key customer. But rarely in consumer marketing is the buyer persona a raving lunatic whose driving force in life is self-hatred and who lives in a fetid pond of historical self-regret.  

What is my point, and what right do I have to take this narrow and tortured segue to tell you why my Canada is trudging down a wide but broken path that leads to poverty and depression? But nations, even in a ‘diversity is our strength utopia’  like Canada, where diversity generally means that we self-isolate, don’t talk, and don’t attack each other on the streets, except in the occasional Kalistani rally or a pro-Palestinian rally, still have a buyer persona that needs a team of psychologists. 

If we turned Canada into a buyer persona, we would need a lot of therapy and CBT (not that stuff associated with weed, but real cognitive behaviour therapy (which works).  

And maybe more than one Ketamine infusion.  

Let’s turn Canada into a person, make them mixed race. Their name is Teddy. They are 32, and they are mixed Filipino and Bahamian.  They live in Mississauga and make $62K working for  Bell. They are single, male, and though not admittedly into the gender flavour of the week cult, they call themselves male.  Jonah is depressed. He spends three hours a day on TikTok, where the algorithm has told him that he has 14 different medical and psychological conditions. He carries this with him; he has been told and believes he is ill-conceived and damaged.  His parents consider them genociders because his great-great-great uncle killed a slave in the Bahamas; there is a row of bumps outside the family cottage, likely caused by burying two deer that their friend Shimon PIllock hit when drunk on a Friday night in 2005.  He figured it was better to bury them than have the two retrievers, Steve and Madpoo, hauling in liver bits to drop at the base of the kitchen table.  But Aunt Whister, before she went into full non-communicative dementia, called them murdered ex-house slaves and that rumour has percolated around the house for a few years.  

Jonah has been taught that self-hatred is a virtue; he has been told that it is a form of humility, and he has been told by mentioning self-hatred over and over it is good - indeed, self-hatred is the latest and hippest form of humility.  

His parents frequently mention that they likely were large contributors to global warming because they drove a 74 Maverick with a hole in the catalytic converter. Every time there is a heavy thunderstorm, small flood, extra warm winter or extra cold winter or any summer day that is over 32 C, it is global warming, and they are all guilty; guilt is in the family's DNA, even though they are more prosperous than their parents; even though they live in a better house and drive a Tesla, they are taught daily that they should hate themselves.  On Saturdays, they pick up plastic straws on the side of the road, and each straw is an emblem of coming doom and a reason for self-hatred, even though the roadside might be cleaner than it was in the '90s.  Jonah’s younger sister is 17 and has had two classmates kill themselves after watching six hours of Tiktok a day. Their algorithm decided they didn’t measure up, but they were ideal candidates for 30 seconds syndromes on how to recover from feeling sad; it used to be called a hangover, but now it is a deeply infused piece of DNA damage that they are stuck with - as they forever see advertisements about mental health (though no benefits, $230/hour for qualified therapy.

When Jonah’s sister mentioned once to her teacher that she was depressed, her teacher said to go to the nurse, where the nurse gave her a Tylenol with parental permission and told her she might simply have been put in the wrong body by God.  So, that little piece of madness lingers in her subconscious. She is told that happiness is always just around the corner, just in the same way that Pepsi tells us the same thing when they introduce mango flavour, except this involves cutting off her breasts and taking drugs that will make her sterile for life. 

But she resists, and she is left with another brick in the wall of her building, which is made of guilt and damage.  She is discouraged from aspiring to any greater things; it is better to focus on the guilt of how our society, and by implication, her, brings ruination despite all the metrics showing improvement across every board. 

Instead of trying to inspire and improve productivity and prosperity, we hire more civil servants at a rate much faster than population growth. They are assured Liberal votes, and their conception of work is often passing the time at Costco with their phones; they can’t do anything; they think that reading emails and spending all their time on TikTok during four meetings a day is what work is. 

Avoiding negativity and avoiding the hobgoblins of environment, racism, and historical embarrassments is not aspirational; it is not even close to that; it is nihilism, it is hopeless, it is self-hatred, and it is our national character. 

Our PM says that because natives killed natives, the entire nation is guilty of genocide, and our enemies laugh at us because of this.  We are so foolish that we don’t realize that we have enemies; despite half the world trying to immigrate here, somehow we are a shameful hellhole; we must hang our head; we have done no good; we are Canada. 

Aspirational? 

We have squeezed the land supply and added so much regulation that building a new home is not only expensive, it is almost impossible; we have stolen an aspirational point of pride from our youth, and as is typical in Canada, we still claim that we have done it for the greater good, we have restricted land supply or enforced absurd zoning requirements for some reason that we will always attach some fake altruistic enviro reason to, we spout nonsense like where in this vast country if we take out a three section farm we will influence the food supply and contribute to global warming (because farmers don’t use fuel to run their farms you know, they all still use hoes and sprinkle seed from a side pouch like Jonny Appleseed).

The sad thing is many believe this. 

Again, if our national persona were real people, they would need therapy and have to bring in a few helpers.  We speak about mental health, but we engage in the worst forms of mental health. 

We preach fear; we allow content to be driven by algorithms that are utterly immoral and have no other purpose than to appeal to our basest nature and desire for attention that social media wants to monetise.  Social media is a deep, evil, destructive force in society, and we would be better off without it. 

Self-harming rates in young girls, rates of depression, and even perceptions of racism have all been tracked evenly and upward with social media use. 

You can't raise a child on criticism; you cannot continually tell them that their world is corrupt, that they must not do this, or that their entire world is something to fear.  We mock the American dream, but it brings hope; in our pseudo quest to protect our citizens, in our arrogance, we know nothing better than nannyism, so we are destroying hope.  

Hope is accompanied by agency, and we are fighting agency. Every negative interaction in people’s lives is the fault of some mysterious outside force. There is no hope; we cannot change the world, sputter away, or scream at rallies, but all we do there is scapegoating. Goebbels was quite the master at it.  

But it will not revive a society; we need hope back; we need to say it, articulate it, give a reason for it, and preach it.  It is not black and white; of course, there are things in our society we can improve, but we are a good society. 

We carry our boxes of trauma around like Tefillin and tell our Indigenous brothers and sisters that we feel really bad about Indigenous schools, and we act like this is this is enough.  We cruelly try to steal agency from Indigenous; we don’t give them property rights; we ask them to carry around their boxes of trauma so they will feel better, but it is only us we are trying to feel better.  

We don’t even give them decent drinking water or decent homes. When economic hope through energy comes to them, we let white environmental radicals convince them that their lot in life is to stay miserable and impoverished, having their children so hopeless they sniff gasoline out of plastic bags when all they want is a decent life, to be able to raise their children in dignity.  Do you understand what level of despair it must take to sniff gasoline? This is a true national tragedy; we should be ashamed, never let it happen, and pour money into secondary education like we never have spent money. Our schools for the indigenous should be the best in the world, and they should have the best teachers in Canada, each making no less than $150K pa.

We have stolen their future in our hubristic dreams; we have stolen their opportunity to form their own aspirations, and we have done it in the name of our own future. 

Canada is a good, noble country.  My maternal grandfather fought in WWI and was wounded at Passchendaele, and my paternal grandfather was orphaned and homesteaded; he failed at first but became a successful farmer.  His son was shy, perhaps a little autistic, but full of talent; he was a great artist and good at math.  

My grandfather, abused and abandoned, orphaned at eight, still believed he bought a house in Edmonton; he moved in with my uncle and father; he believed in them; my uncle, the kindest man you would ever meet, became the Urologist, my father became a mathematician.  

They did not see their society as genocidal, as shameful, as desperately needing to overcome our history, our history that we were not ashamed of but proud of.  They had hope, and their generation was proud, confident, and strong. They did not need therapy. They were not passive, weak, feeling like a broken generation, and hopeless about the potential of even buying a house.  Granted, the houses of my generation are a lot nicer than the $23K four-bedroom house my dad bought in Winnipeg, but it was ours; we were not ashamed, we had hope, we were alive, we were not broken creatures needing therapy.  

Our brand persona for this country created by a foolish PM and self-hating academia needs treatment, but that is our fault; we have pushed that persona to be what he is.  It is not endemic; it is sad; it is pretending that self-acknowledgement and humility are the same things as a person being completely psychologically destroyed and desperately needing therapy.  Forget this self-hatred that pretends to be a virtue; we are Canada, we are great, and our spirit is not dead, as our World Juniors take Gold at the championships and cling together in joy and belt out an off-key oh Canada without any woke language changes, they are full of hope and joy.  That is Canada. 

We did not need to let it go; we need to return.