Why Did Canada Go Mad? A Conversation with Jonathan Kay
4 June 2026
With Jonathan Kay
North America
Jonathan Kay of Quillette charts how Canada spent the early 2020s in a state of ideological panic — from the Kamloops 'unmarked graves' claim that drove months of national soul-searching to controversies in Ontario schools. For a UK audience that has lived through its own evidence crisis in youth gender medicine, documented in the Cass Review and NHS England's overhaul of gender services, the Canadian experience is recognisable: institutions that abandon critical scrutiny, media that amplifies narrative over evidence, and a culture that mistakes moral fervour for moral clarity.
Jonathan Kay has spent years watching Canada's institutions buckle under the pressure of moral certainty. As an editor, writer and podcaster for Quillette — a publication that has consistently argued for evidence and open debate over ideological conformity — Kay brings a forensic eye to a country that, in his account, spent much of the early 2020s unable to question its own assumptions. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, he traces the chain of events that turned a confident, pluralistic nation into one gripped by self-condemnation. The starting point is the Kamloops claim of May 2021, when reports of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school site set off months of national panic, institutional soul-searching and public mourning. Kay examines how politicians, media and civic institutions responded — and what it reveals about a culture that had lost its capacity for careful, evidence-based scrutiny. The willingness to suspend scepticism in favour of a compelling moral narrative is a failure pattern familiar to anyone who has followed how gender-identity ideology spread through NHS trusts, schools and professional bodies in Britain before the Cass Review demanded a return to clinical rigour. A segment on a case involving an Ontario teacher brings the analysis closer to everyday institutional life. Canada's schools and workplaces became flashpoints during the period Kay examines — places where the cultural pressures he describes were felt most acutely by those who found themselves out of step with rapidly shifting expectations. Kay's account of the 'darkness of 2021' describes a country in which dissenting voices were effectively silenced, not by law, but by the social and professional consequences of stepping outside a hardening consensus. The same pattern operated in the UK, where clinicians who raised concerns about affirming-care pathways for children found themselves marginalised or accused of bias. Kay also takes seriously the role of humour and popular culture in sustaining or puncturing ideological conformity. He reflects on Canadian television and the mechanisms by which entertainment became another arena for enforcing progressive consensus — and why those mechanisms are now showing signs of strain. The 'elbows up' mood he identifies in the episode's later sections, a phrase associated with a renewed Canadian assertiveness and national confidence, suggests a society beginning to recover its critical voice after years of self-imposed constraint. The episode closes with a discussion of child welfare — a subject that sits at the heart of the UK's own reckoning. The Cass Review, NHS England's subsequent closure of paediatric gender clinics, and the Supreme Court's ruling on the legal meaning of woman in the Equality Act have together constituted a significant institutional correction. Canada is still working through its version of that correction. What Jonathan Kay offers is a careful account of how liberal democracies lose their way when evidence is subordinated to narrative — and what the path back to honest public reasoning might look like.
