Why Did Canada Go Mad? A Conversation with Jonathan Kay
4 June 2026
With Jonathan Kay
North America
Jonathan Kay of Quillette walks through the chain of events that remade Canada's public culture — from the contested Kamloops residential-school claim of 2021 to the capture of media, schools and health institutions by an ideological consensus that moved faster than evidence. The episode asks what happens when institutions abandon evidence in favour of moral urgency, and draws lessons for the European debate over gender medicine, where systematic reviews have begun to force exactly the reckoning that Canada's professional bodies have so far resisted.
Jonathan Kay has spent years at the centre of Canadian intellectual life — as a long-time editor at the National Post and more recently as a writer and podcaster for Quillette. He is well-placed to describe the speed at which Canada's institutions adopted a new cultural consensus, and what the adoption of that consensus cost in terms of journalistic honesty, public debate and protection for dissenting voices. The episode opens with the Kamloops announcement of May 2021 — the claim that ground-penetrating radar had detected what appeared to be 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school. Within weeks, the story reshaped Canada's national calendar and its tolerance for disagreement. Kay examines how a contested forensic claim, one that has not been confirmed by excavation, came to be treated as settled fact by governments, broadcasters and school systems alike, and what the rush to certainty reveals about evidence-based reasoning in Canadian public life. That pattern — ideological urgency overriding the demand for verified evidence — recurs throughout the conversation. Kay describes a "darkness" that settled over Canadian public life in 2021 and persisted afterwards: a reluctance among journalists, academics and officials to question prevailing narratives, and a set of professional consequences for those who did. An episode involving an Ontario teacher illustrates how quickly schools became sites where institutional conformity was enforced rather than questioned. The conversation closes with a discussion of child protection and the question of how professional bodies come to endorse clinical approaches that outrun the evidence supporting them. This is familiar territory for European observers: systematic reviews in Sweden, Finland, England and Denmark have each concluded that the evidence base for puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones in minors is weak, and national guidelines in those countries have been substantially revised or restricted as a result. Canada's trajectory — consensus moving faster than evidence — illustrates exactly the risk those European reviews were designed to address. Kay ends with a note of cautious optimism. The "Elbows Up" sentiment he describes — a renewed Canadian willingness to assert national distinctiveness and resist external pressure — he sees as a possible opening for a more confident and honest public culture. Whether that extends to a serious evidence review of gender medicine for children, and whether Canada's professional bodies will follow their European counterparts in reconsidering the basis for their guidelines, remains to be seen. What the episode makes plain is that the mechanisms of institutional capture are not unique to any one country, and that the corrective has, wherever it has arrived, depended on the same foundation: rigorous evidence, transparent review and the protection of voices willing to raise legitimate questions.
