National Post journalist Tristin Hopper joins managing editor Harrison Lowman to talk about his new book Don’t be Canada: How one country did everything wrong all at once, which offers a darkly comedic and critical look at the disastrous policy ideas that are to blame for Canada’s downward cultural and economic spiral. And yet, Tristin is optimistic that despite the recent election of Mark Carney and the Liberal party’s return to Ottawa, it is possible to restore Canada to—in his words—a prosperous, pluralist wonderland.
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The following is an excerpt from Don’t be Canada: How one country did everything wrong all at once by Tristin Hopper.
The term “harm reduction” was first coined by social workers in the English city of Liverpool in the late 1980s.
The textbook example is to distribute clean hypodermic needles to injection drug users. The user is not dissuaded from using drugs, but it prevents them from contracting bloodborne illnesses as a result of sharing needles. Thus, harm is reduced.
Particularly in BC, Canada has taken this philosophy to its most flamboyant extremes. Patients admitted to BC hospitals are officially allowed to do illicit drugs at their leisure, provided that they still adhere to smoking rules if they’re lighting up a meth pipe.
A leaked July 2023 memo by Northern Health, one of five BC regional health agencies, chastised workers over reports that nurses were removing drugs and even weapons from hospital patients. “Staff DO NOT remove personal items from the patient’s room, even if there is a knife or something considered a weapon under 4 [inches] long,” it read.
Programs to distribute clean needles have been expanded to include all manner of drug paraphernalia, from single-use crack and meth pipes to snorting kits. Toronto Public Health now offers two types of pipes (stem or glass bowl), as well as cookers, acidifiers, and tourniquets, all distributed in brightly coloured bags carrying the city’s logo.
It became a minor scandal at a BC school district in 2023 when a drug safety presenter ended their presentation by handing out “safer snorting kits.” Inside were plastic straws, cards to cut powdered drugs into snortable lines, and well as a booklet filled with snorting tips. “Have condoms and lube with you. You may want to have sex while high,” read one.
In 2014, what is likely the world’s first crack pipe vending machine was installed in Vancouver by the Portland Hotel Society, a major contractor for low-barrier shelters and other homelessness services. In the fall of 2024, it became a scandal when hospitals in three BC cities installed “Care and Connection” boxes at entrances. A cheerful digital display gave users the option of anything from a Naloxone kit to injection supplies to several types of crack pipes.
The vast expansion in available supplies has occurred in tandem with programs to acclimatize city dwellers to the increasingly common sight of discarded needles.
A Toronto safe injection site was criticized in 2023 for putting a sign in its window promising a chocolate bar in exchange for a full container of discarded needles. In Edmonton, the Alberta capital, city hall commissioned a campaign of “see a needle” bus stop ads featuring cartoon needles and urging residents to call 311 whenever they see one.
Starting around 2018, the BC capital of Victoria began experiencing a spate of incidents of residents being accidentally pricked by discarded needles. In response, city playgrounds were given “safely sweep before you play” signs urging parents to clear any sharps or broken glass out of play areas before letting their children use the equipment.
Canadian high schoolers are now being trained as impromptu overdose paramedics. The Advanced Coronary Treatment Foundation, a group that provides free CPR and defibrillator training in Canadian schools, added overdose reversal to its curriculum starting in 2022.
The BC government now operates an entire network of former hotels and nursing homes to serve as “low-barrier” shelters where residents are permitted to do illicit drugs within the facility and are supplied with drug paraphernalia.
In 2024, it emerged that staff at one of these shelters, the former Tally Ho Hotel in Victoria, were required to wear respirators on shift due to the near-constant presence of drug fumes in the air. “Many of us have wound up in hospital for six, eight, ten hours,” one anonymous staffer told CTV.
Other sites have quickly devolved into focal points for drug and weapons trafficking. In 2016, BC spent $11.2 million to purchase a downtown Victoria care home in order to house the evicted residents of a longstanding tent encampment. Soon, police were regularly busting up whole criminal enterprises operating out of the building. In one July 2022 raid, they found two suites loaded with a small arsenal of illegal weapons ranging from shotguns to body armour to axes.
Even BC’s public bathrooms came due for a harm reduction makeover. In the spring of 2024, bathrooms at select BC public libraries were retrofitted to become miniature safe consumption sites, complete with sensors to alert staff if a drug user was no longer moving.
Amid all this official normalization of drug use, any attempt to discourage drug use was simultaneously framed as prohibitionist moralizing that would serve only to get people killed. This was neatly summed up in a BC Supreme Court decision, which effectively ruled that drug users had a Constitutional right to shoot up in playgrounds.
Only a few months after BC decriminalized illicit drugs, the province dialed it back ever so slightly with an amendment restricting illicit drug use within fifteen metres of a playground, skate park, or splash park.
According to BC Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson, even this most minor sanction against open-air drug use was a violation of the Constitutional right to “life, liberty and security of the person.”
“In British Columbia, they believe that addiction is a lifestyle factor; it’s like being vegetarian,” said Marshall Smith. Since 2018, Smith has been the central figure in a push by the neighbouring Government of Alberta to implement a treatment-centred addiction model deliberately designed as a counterweight to the harm reduction model pioneered in BC.
It’s much harder and more expensive than harm reduction, but the early results show it’s working. Alberta’s overdose deaths have begun to drop dramatically while BC’s keep rising.
Smith also happens to be a former homeless drug addict, where he had a front-row seat on the “Vancouver model” taking shape.
In 2004, his cocaine problem spiralled into meth addiction and, in his words, he “ended up vanishing into the streets of Vancouver.” He would spend three years as a rake-thin street hustler until, on the advice of Vancouver Police, he entered a government-funded addiction treatment program and got clean.
He said recovery is a much harder sell for an addict where there are now whole neighbourhoods constructed around making it easy to do drugs, which he credited to years of BC aligning its addiction policies with the wishes of drug user activists.
And that is indeed a thing in BC. The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) had been quoted in the BC media nearly 1,000 times since its 1997 founding.
Said Smith, “if you are going to have policies that are led by people who use drugs, you’re going to get the same thing over and over again; they want free drugs, they want the police to go away and they want a hotel room they can use in.”
Copyright © 2025 by Tristin Hopper. Reprinted by permission of Sutherland House Books.
