Canada is Dying review: Fan service that stands on its own two feet
Canada is Dying review: Fan service that stands on its own two feet
Deja vu of the worst kind
If you haven’t already, check out my YouTube video essay Is Vancouver Dying? which responded in-depth to the first instalment of Aaron Gunn’s “…is Dying” series.
I finally watched Canada is Dying through, and it is in many ways a carbon copy of its progenitor, Vancouver is Dying.
They follow the same formula, the framing is exactly the same, and most of the turning points mimic those of the original. Sure, most of the cities and faces—save some cameos fans will be happy to see return to the franchise—are different, but the end result is ultimately the same.
Both videos start off almost identically with a string of high-profile, shocking violent crimes played over voices making stark comments about how everyone is terrified of their own communities and everyone else is getting free drugs.
They then turn to Aaron Gunn who asks: “What is happening to [Vancouver/Canada]?” In the former case, Vancouver is a wealthy city and how could it possible see rises in violent crime. In the latter, Canada was once perceived as immune to homelessness and violent crime [citation needed], but that’s all changing.
But what is the problem, asks Gunn, setting up the framing of the videos. Is it that we’re just too light on the criminals and giving everybody who wants them a bunch of drugs?
The implied answer is yes. We then are shown another string of shocking, violent attacks before hearing from the mother of a victim.
(In the sequel, Gunn notes: stranger assaults are no longer just a Vancouver thing! But I’m not aware of if or when it ever was one, and he makes no effort to establish this.)
I don’t bring up the formulaic approach to Gunn’s messaging to downplay any of these incidents. All of these assaults and homicides he mentions are truly horrific things that never should have happened.
I bring it up because I think Gunn is largely trying to capitalize on the success he saw in Vancouver is Dying. He saw a winning approach to fear mongering, using anecdotes and contextless data and essentially duplicated it.
I’m not a Star Wars person per se, but I couldn’t help but think throughout: this is like Episode 7 all over again. It’s the same movie but the Death Star this time is bigger and louder. They feature cameos from the cast of the media they mimic. And the beats are all the same.
But Canada is Dying goes further, and it’s shown in the length of the videos. The 55-minute runtime of Vancouver is Dying is bumped up by nearly half an hour.
Part of this is likely due to the fact that he tours a number of cities. Rather than hanging solely around Vancouver, Gunn also hits Toronto and especially Nanaimo.
But there’s another way Canada is Dying diverges from the original.
Vancouver is Dying came out immediately prior to the Vancouver municipal election, and while it didn’t endorse any one candidate or party—various individuals involved in the project endorsed or donated or were otherwise involved with different slates—it made a point of taking aim at the sitting mayor, Kennedy Stewart.
It’s hard, if at all possible, to detach the timing of it and its explicit target on Stewart from political attack ads. It plays like the Willie Horton attack ad Bush Sr. pushed against Dukakis in 1988.
Canada is Dying, by comparison, came out immediately prior to the Alberta provincial election, and while it doesn’t explicitly endorse the United Conservative Party, it plays like an advertisement for their approach to the toxic drug crisis. The only people you hear talking about it are its proponents and beneficiaries—Premier Danielle Smith herself appears, alongside her chief of staff, who is a major voice in Vancouver is Dying, Marshall Smith.
They talk in glowing terms about the “Alberta model” for drug policy, which they say focuses on treatment and gets people into treatment with no wait times. And as they do, Gunn plays soaring drone footage of a treatment centre being built by the province, as inspiring music plays in the background.
They present the “Alberta model” as something new, but there’s little evidence it’s any different from what we’ve always done—lock people up or coerce them into the types of treatment that are generally poorly backed up by the science. It’s not only decades old but has long been favoured by institutions—including BC, where the recovery industry remains the primary form of treatment for substance use disorder.
Alberta officials claim that, through their focus on treatment rather than harm reduction, they’ve tamped down the toxic drug crisis, pointing to a decrease in deaths in 2022.
Nowhere to be seen is talk of recent spikes in overdoses in the province—January-April saw a 46% increase in ambulance calls for opioids compared to the same period in 2022, hinting at a particularly brutal 2023.
And Euan Thomson noted last month in his Substack, Drug Data Decoded, that ambulance calls closely mirror data of overdose deaths.
“If these data are predictive of mortality … we could see the fifth- and second-highest drug poisoning mortalities on record for the first and second quarters of 2023,” Thomson wrote. (Only January’s mortality data is available so far this year.)
Now, it’s not possible to include every detail that might provide a whole picture, but Gunn’s videos are defined by an utter lack of nuance. (This plays into the whole political ad vibe they have.)
There are two particular examples I want to leave you with here, and they’re some of the most egregiously blatant pieces of misinformation that I’ve noticed from Gunn’s videos. (His “...is Dying” videos, that is. Despite the YouTube algorithm’s belief to the contrary, I do not particularly want to watch more of Gunn’s work.)
In the video, Gunn tells us the BC government is amping up safe supply. And the example he gives is that Adastra, a cannabis production company, got into the business of manufacturing cocaine. In a news release, Adastra made mention of safe supply, giving people the impression they’d been licensed to produce cocaine for safe supply—an understandable inference!
There’s just one itty bitty problem with that: Adastra had to issue a correction after it came out that this had nothing to do with safe supply. The cocaine was being produced for medical purposes, as it’s used particularly to stop bleeding in nasal surgeries.
In fact, the company is facing a class action lawsuit by investors who bought Adastra stock following the announcement.
But Gunn makes exactly zero mention of this. It’s hard to believe Gunn didn’t know about this. If you Google “Adastra cocaine” the first items that come up are stories about the lawsuit. But hey, maybe he just didn’t bother to check back on this in the nearly two months between the story breaking and him publishing this video. But neither case—lying by omission and utter laziness—is a particularly flattering look. Neither paints him as any kind of serious person doing serious journalism.
The second example is almost exactly the same.
Gunn ends his video by saying he’d been filming around the Downtown Eastside when he heard there was a pop-up shop selling a variety of tested and clean drugs. After taking some time to congratulate himself on running into a couple of fans down there, Gunn tells us he sees no police around. But he offers little context about this pop-up shop. The implication seems to be that there’s little repercussions for setting up the shop.
To be fair, he doesn’t go quite as far in the video as he did in a tweet the day of the pop-up shop that aged incredibly poorly, incredibly quickly.
Now, leaving aside whether or not we need demedicalized access to clean drugs like MDMA, cocaine, amphetamines and more—and most experts, like BC’s chief coroner, say we do—there’s a teeny tiny problem with this: the guy got arrested.
Like, he got arrested very quickly. For trafficking drugs.
In fact, that was the entire point. He wants to launch a charter challenge.
To summarize: Gunn’s second instalment in his “...is Dying” franchise (can’t wait for “World is Dying”!) plays a lot of hits fans will recognize from his first outing that some might see as cynical fan service if not for the promising additions of new misinformation that he pushes.
I give it four melting-face emojis out of five.