Why Did Canada Go Mad? A Conversation with Jonathan Kay
Canadian editor and Quillette contributor Jonathan Kay traces how Canada fell into ideological groupthink — beginning with the contested Kamloops residential school claims of 2021 and spreading through schools, media and public institutions. For British listeners, the parallels with the Cass Review's findings on institutional capture in the NHS are sharp and instructive. If Canada could lose its critical faculties so rapidly, Britain already knows the pattern.
Canada's recent history offers a cautionary tale that resonates far beyond its borders. In this conversation with Jonathan Kay — editor, writer and podcaster at Quillette — Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman explore how a nation famous for its politeness and institutional stability became gripped by a form of collective moral panic, and what the shape of that panic tells us about ideological capture more broadly. The starting point is May 2021, when a claim that ground-penetrating radar had detected 215 anomalies consistent with unmarked graves at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, set off months of national soul-searching. Churches were burned, Canada Day celebrations were cancelled, and public institutions rushed to demonstrate their contrition. Kay unpacks the chain of events that followed, and the way in which well-meaning grief hardened into a cultural orthodoxy that few felt safe to question. The parallels with Britain's own episodes of institutional self-censorship will feel familiar to many listeners. From residential schools, the conversation moves to Canada's classrooms, where a case involving an Ontario teacher became a flashpoint in the debate over how far schools had been captured by gender ideology. What that episode revealed was not simply the behaviour of one individual but the response of the institutions around them — school boards, unions and administrators who were by then operating under a settled ideological consensus that made ordinary professional scrutiny almost impossible. British audiences will recognise the dynamic: it is the same one that the Cass Review identified within the NHS, where clinicians who raised evidence-based concerns about the treatment of gender-distressed children found themselves marginalised or silenced. Jonathan Kay's perspective is that of a journalist who has watched a country he knows well transform within a few years, and who has remained willing to write plainly about what he observed at a time when that kind of candour carried real professional risk. His account of navigating a media culture that had largely closed ranks around a new orthodoxy offers a recognisable mirror for British journalists, therapists and clinicians who found themselves in comparable positions during the height of the Tavistock era, when raising legitimate clinical questions could end careers. The final sections of the conversation look ahead to Canada's prospects after this period of ideological intensity. For Britain, a similar reckoning is already under way. The Cass Review, the closure of the Tavistock GIDS clinic, the revised NICE guidance on puberty blockers and the growing number of detransitioners seeking legal redress all represent a slow institutional recovery from a period of comparable capture. Kay's account of what that recovery looks like in a neighbouring country — tentative, contested and far from complete — is as relevant to Bristol and Birmingham as it is to British Columbia.
