Canada Did What?!

He was an all-Canadian whiz kid, a celebrated rocket-engineering prodigy, who wanted to make this country a serious player in the 1960s space race. But when science sidestepped Gerald Bull’s plan to build gargantuan guns that could launch projectiles into orbit, he just … broke. He turned his brilliance in missile design to darker pursuits, building horrible weapons for sinister regimes. If it sounds like a spy novel, it ends like one too, with Bull meeting a violent, mysterious end of his own.

It’s lionized by politicians but, in the real world, Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms has proved less a symbol of democratic liberty than an agent of destruction. Since becoming constitutional law, the Charter has run roughshod over Canadian democracy, weaponized in the courts to overturn popular and vital policies. In 1982, there were plenty of people on the left and the right who tried to warn us of the coming devastation before it happened. It ended up being worse than they imagined.

Where can you slaughter hundreds of people and get away with it? Only in Canada, where authorities bungled the chance to stop an obvious plot to bomb Air India Flight 182 and then failed to bring a single one of the brazen terrorists to justice. It was the most preventable horror in our history, and we seem eager to forget it ever happened — even as more violence brews from the extremists behind the worst Canadian terrorist attack ever.

We all know how close Quebec came to voting for independence in the 1995 referendum. What most people never knew is the extent of the trickery behind the separatists’ undisclosed plan for the day after they won. It would have taken a difference of just a few thousand votes to unleash utter chaos on the country that could very well have culminated in bloodshed and possibly civil war.

We shouldn’t have been too shocked when Parliament blundered into honouring a veteran of a Nazi SS unit in 2023. After the Holocaust, this country became a favoured destination for countless European war criminals. They were actually welcomed by the government. Despite their crimes, they were left to live peaceful, prosperous lives and even built monuments here to their wartime exploits. What is shocking is that almost none of them faced a single consequence for their atrocities.