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.

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 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.

It wasn’t that long ago that elective abortions were harder to get in Canada than anywhere in the U.S. What changed was one of the most actively forgotten political brawls in our history, sparked by one doctor, Henry Morgentaler, a Holocaust survivor who believed legal abortions could prevent future mass atrocities. The ordeal was so divisive, so heated and so unpleasant that an exhausted country gave up on finding a way through it, and instead just decided to never tackle the issue again.

He went out a weird, morbid old man, but John Diefenbaker was indisputably the biggest political sensation this country had ever produced. He won the biggest landslide in Canadian history. He walked through screaming, adoring crowds where tearful fans would kneel and kiss his coat. Sit back and listen to the heartbreaking tale of what it’s like to achieve the absolute pinnacle of political success … only to have it all stripped away, bit by excruciating bit. (Featuring special guests, diehard Diefenbaker buffs Jason Kenney and John Baird.)

Every democratic leader gets accused of being either a communist or a Nazi at some point. But Canada really did have a prime minister who was unashamed about his love for communist regimes, from China to the U.S.S.R. to Cuba. Pierre Trudeau regularly took their side during the Cold War and befriended their brutal dictators. He’s frequently voted one of Canada’s best prime ministers but we’re going to show you Pierre Trudeau’s little-known dark side. And boy is it dark.