A new documentary is challenging the image of Canada as a progressive model for the United States, with filmmakers traveling across the country and interviewing more than 4,500 Canadians as they examined mounting concerns over healthcare, affordability, drug policy, immigration, crime and government spending.
“Broken Country,” directed by Canadian filmmaker Mira Metter and coproduced by her husband, Mike Werry, takes a critical look at how life in Canada has changed over the past two decades and the government policies the filmmakers argue helped drive that transformation. The filmmakers also interviewed more than 70 policy experts for the project.
Among the Canadians featured is a man who suffered a spinal injury and waited 15 hours to see a surgeon. According to materials provided by the filmmakers, his doctor later told him that surgery within an hour could have resulted in a full recovery. Three years later, he lives with chronic pain, can walk only a short distance without a walker and was subsequently offered Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) while seeking treatment for his pain and disability.
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“One of the people that I interviewed for this film was a gentleman who had simply slipped and fallen on ice,” Metter said. “And he was rushed to emerge in an ambulance and ended up waiting over 15 hours just to get admitted. And in that time, he was given multiple bags of morphine drips to sort of soothe the pain. But by the time he had gotten to see his surgeon, he was unable to feel anything below the waist, and he ended up having spinal cord damage that was permanent.”
Metter said from the time of recovery it took over 10 months to see someone at a pain clinic to discuss managing his pain.
“And when he finally arrived, they asked him, ‘What is your pain level?’ And he said, ‘It’s a 10 out of 10.’ And they offered him MAID, which is medical assisted suicide,” Metter said. “And he said, ‘I’m not a lost cause. Like I’m just in a lot of pain. Like why are you offering me MAID as a solution to my pain? I just don’t want to be in pain.’ And from the interview subject, he just felt like it was such a betrayal to him and the system.”
According to the BBC, Canada’s MAID law, which legalized euthanasia in 2016, is responsible for one in every 20 deaths in Canada.
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Another report released in November from SecondStreet.org, a Canadian advocacy organization, found that 23,000 Canadian patients died on medical waitlists over the past year.
Metter also said rampant immigration is taking its toll on the country.
“I think one of the biggest issues that we’ve had with immigration on this side of the border is that we opened the parameters on immigration for temporary migrants, so student visas, temporary workers, and the numbers that came in, we didn’t have any of the resources to accommodate it,” Metter said.
“Canada in one year or over two years had like 2.3 million people come in,” Metter added. “We’re a country of 40 million people. Toronto is the biggest city in it, but that’s still an exponential number of people to come into a city that’s just not designed for that, and wasn’t braced for that kind of intake. And so, the situation has just become really gridlocked in every single sort of resource and everything, even the streets, you try to drive in Toronto, and you’re going to have a really hard time going a mile or two.”
Adolescents are also being impacted from policy decisions that are being made.
“The drug epidemic in Canada is similar to the drug epidemic that is being faced in various pockets around the U.S.,” Metter said. “We have, however, taken on the stance of safe injection, safe supply sites, where we allow sort of a location for people to get materials to use for consuming drugs where they’re supervised.”
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Metter said that what stood out to her is that everyone across the country is struggling, regardless of their politics.
“I think the most interesting thing about talking to as many people as we did coast to coast across the country, is that no matter what their political stance is, and we never asked that, people are experiencing the same hardships, the issues that everyone is facing, they’re facing together,” Metter said. “And so, when we removed this lens of, you know, slogans or echo chambers or positioning, and just ask genuine questions like, ‘Can you afford a home?,’ and ‘Are you living paycheck to paycheck?,’ and ‘Are you able to access healthcare when you need it?,’ ‘Have you ever had to wait a long time to receive healthcare?,’ ‘Do you have a primary care doctor?,’ across the board, people were struggling with these same things.”
“And I think that is something that gets really swept under the rug, is that people are really struggling, really genuinely struggling just to get by,” Metter said.
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“Broken Country” is set to be in theaters mid-September with a limited release on Sept. 18 across Canada and the U.S. and subsequently available on Amazon Prime Oct. 26.
Fox News Digital reached out to the office of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for comment.
