The Great Canadian Darkness

Average Day in Canada

You can feel it, don’t you? I know you feel it.

If the title caught your eye, you know what this is aboat. You know what it's aboat because you can feel it, viscerally. You look around every single day while you're oat and aboat. You feel it commuting to work and back. You feel it when you go on a grocery run. You feel it going downtown.

You feel it every time you have to call the CRA about why your account is locked. All you want to do is file your taxes this year, but the web developers who made the site have friends in parliament and they outsourced the federal contract to a company overseas while pocketing the rest of the departmental budget. Someone answers the phone. Shouting, they ask you for your name and birth date. You tell them your birthday is August 20th. Sukhdeep, "John," insists that your birthday is August 2nd, and to prove your identity, you need to send physical copies of your identification to a tax office halfway across the country to unlock your account. This is going to take 6 weeks at the minimum, but "sorry saar, pleased to be helping you today saar, no I cannot unlock your account saar." You ask to speak to a manager; he tells you to please hold and then hangs up. You think, "man, this really Sukhs.".

Sukhdeep 'John' made his family proud when he landed this job with the federal government. All the cheating, failure to interpret course materials, and regurgitating test answers from students more cunning than himself paid off. He paid triple the cost for a garbage startup diploma mill degree in 'business management', but it doesn’t matter. If you Sukh Dikhs Deeply enough, you too can worm your way into the federal apparatus and access millions of Canadians' personal income tax information. If you’re especially devious, you might even pull a pro-gamer move from the Old Country like stealing millions in Covid relief money. If this sounds like too much work for dubious returns, you might not be brown.

'John,' on his next call in Poonjabby, unlocks the personal income tax account of Jasleen. Her account was locked because the automated system detected fraud. Multiple people were using her Social Insurance Number. Jasleen assures Sukhdeep that nothing is wrong, and that everyone in their household pitches in. Their 'household' of 4 international students, not including her 6 family members (who are not on the lease and sleep on second-hand mattresses in the living room), splits the rent of a two-bedroom condo for $2700 a month. They’re saving up for a down payment on a wood-drywall-insulation poopshack in Bramladesh, Brampton. It's not worth $2,000,000. Meanwhile, you’re considering buying an RV, or a tiny home on Crown land. All of them work at Walmart or Tim Hortons', plus side hustles in security where they diligently stare at their phones all day (occasionally catching sight of fentanyl zombies walking out of stores with unpurchased goods), but their combined income is well over $310,000. Their cousins work for any of the five Canadian banks, that deliberately do not have any Canadian clerks save for senior management, and solely advertise with the purpose of scamming their own people into foreign debt slavery. They drive nicer cars than you, thanks to financing and pay a 7% interest rate for the latest, greatest BMW. Getting your driver’s license in Canada is easy. You simply need to be brown, take the test in Surrey or Brampton, and slip the driving instructor $300. None of them care if they go bankrupt, because they can just leave the country. Much of their money is converted to rupees anyway, to help sponsor more of their grandparents. The two-bedroom Jasleen occupies is owned by a Chinese family who live abroad 2/3rds of the year. Their family is rich because they employed child labor in their Guangzhou factory, and by golly did they own the means of production. Now they speculate on Canadian housing markets to evade taxes in the Mainland. They pretend they’re from Hong Kong. The earnings they make on the luxury properties are spent in British Columbia’s casinos. Why do you care? You can’t afford a house anyway, Gweilo. Also, they’re literal CCP spies.

It’s Sunday, and to give yourself some leisure time from the 50-hour workweeks you’re doing these days (50% of your income goes to rent), you put off getting groceries on Saturday. You spent your Saturday doomscrolling, looking at AI-generated sigma male lifter memes on Instagram & X (formerly Twitter), and trying to understand skibidi toilet since you got no rizz (in Ohiotario). You go outside and get in the car. Realizing you’re low on gas, you pull into the local Petro-Can. $2.17 per litre. You think about how unacceptably high that is, but at least it’s less than what is was during the lockdowns. You drive 20 kilometres to work and back every day. On the side of the gas station, you see a figure curled up into a ball, and a faint, flickering light. A Canadian homeless man is huddled under an umbrella, tilted on its side. He’s wearing a Canadian Forces cap. There’s an encampment not far from here. Most of its inhabitants are also Canadians. A quarter of the people in that syrupean favela work full time and live in their cars because they can’t afford rent. The local boomers think they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but they’re a paycheck away from running out the fire exit of a Canadian Tire with a polyester budget tent that doesn’t breathe. You smell a faint mint, like an After Eight you had once at your late grandparents'. You know that smell. With the homeless man is a small can of propane he stole. He’s trying to use a small burner to light the last traces of fentanyl in the bubbler pipe to no avail. You sympathize, but you’re tired of these junkies. Really tired. Petty crime has exploded in your area. Smash and grabs on cars, and auto theft are at an all-time high. You can’t keep anything in your shitbox Honda Civic anymore, not that it matters. Another $400 plus tax on your credit card for that rear window (if you’re lucky).

Ignoring his attempt at smoking opioids that are mass-produced in the Chinese Mainland for the purpose of warfare against Westerners, shipped to the Port of Vancouver, and distributed across North America by Triads, you fill ‘er up and get back on the road. Pulling into your local Walmart, you see a filthy twin-sized mattress strapped to a car. You think about how much better it would be to bite the bullet and buy a new mattress that’ll last a long time, but this is a resource-scarcity (poor) mindset. In the driver's seat is a woman in a hijab. A man, presumably her husband, sits in the passenger seat wearing a knockoff designer tracksuit and fake jewelry. In the old country, only he would drive. Here, his wife can gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss her way through a Human Resources department. Three children sit in the back. One of them is severely disabled and you can hear them screaming through the windows. It sounds like a deaf lumberjack shouting “timber.” You think back to that memory-holed Joe Rogan episode with Gavin McInnes where they discuss how disgustingly inbred and unhealthy the Muslim world is. Mom and dad are probably cousins. Sweet Home Islamabad. She turns the keys in the ignition and their car sputters off. You walk into the Walmart and begin to peruse meat & produce. "$21 for a 6-pack of Halal chicken breasts,” you think. That’s not even going to last you a week. For the artificial, water-inflated weight, you’d expect a cheaper price. You need your protein for the gym, and those broccoli-haired zoomers with racially ambiguous perms, in their filthy crusty white socks, crocks, and pyjama pants are looking lean these days. No cap. Their cross earrings glisten in the selfie-optimized fluorescent downlighting of your overpriced fat-friendly commercial gym. Ground beef and pork it is, that stuff is bussin'. We Go Jim.

Remembering that milk and eggs are another affordable way to get your macro-nutrients in, you also remember you have to prove your Indo-European Steppe ancestry to anons on X.com. You mosey on down to the dairy section for your pasteurized 3.25% homo milk. You heard what I said. The "homo" abbreviation never felt more fitting. It's $8.68 not including tax for 4 litres. "This would be $3 in the States," you think. You can't buy raw milk because the dairy cartel is too chickenshit to compete with European cheese makers and hides behind protectionism to cope. Canadians bear the brunt of high costs. Another glance and the brick of old extra old white cheese is $11.26. That was all before the oligarchy of grocery chains claimed Long Coofid hit their distribution network. Besides, probiotic bacteria are bad for you, chud. Trust the experts at Health Canada, who as of 10 years ago were still telling Canadian parents their children needed 5 servings of carbs a day from refined, processed white rice & pasta. Glancing over to ice cream, you see a Canadian mother in her mid-30s, with four children and no visible father. All of them are wearing pyjamas. One of the kids has a Sonic the Hedgehog knapsack. Two are running around, loudly. You remember how well-behaved you were compared to these goblins. "Children should be seen, not heard," you think. One is hitting another as mom fails to control the situation. Controlling your children is literally fascism though, and also toxic masculinity. Children have rights now, bigot. You need to stop watching Andrew Taint Tate and Benzo Peterson. The only son, barely 11 or 12 years old, is wearing purple eyeshadow with glitter, a trans flag around his neck like a cape, a pair of headphones (self-diagnosed autistic), and is walking with a cane despite no discernible disabilities (he has none). The international TikTok clinic told xer/xim they were all the above. Mom just wants to fit in, so she rolls with it. Junior wants hormone replacement therapy and hasn’t told her yet. If she has a problem with it (she doesn’t), the horse police will show up at her door and remove her children. You move on and pivot to the egg fridge. A dozen eggs is $7.97 not including tax. "These would be 50 cents in the States," you think.

You finish up gathering the essentials: eggs, milk, cheese, ground beef, winter vegetables, and a lucky value pack of pork chops with clearance stickers on them. After the collapse of the medical system in 2023, healthcare practitioners decided it was cheaper and easier to kill you instead. Are you fat? Do you have cancer and you’re too poor to go to the states for treatment? Atherosclerosis? Why don’t you kill yourself? The nurses will shake their asses on TikTok to remixes of Jennifer Lopez’s 'Booty' as your woes are euthanized away. This made you decide to clean up your diet, get more active, work out, and generally watch your health. You walk by aisles with chips, soft drinks, Pop-Tarts, and skim by frozen pizzas. You hear a loud and obnoxious voice speaking with familiar ups and downs in its intonation. Before you is an ugly face grizzled by decades of nothing but white rice, mashed chickpeas, and tikka masala. He’s FaceTiming his extended relatives 8,000 kilometres away. They’ll be joining him soon, but he’ll be leaving for 3 months to visit first. The kids are playing with toys from halfway across the store and have no intention of putting them back. They drop them in the middle of the floor and leave for Canadian staff to pick up. The cart is full of the worst junk imaginable.

Instead of waiting in line for boomers to stand slack-jawed and stare at debit machines beeping 'REMOVE CARD', and then ask the cashier if they accept scratch tickets (they don’t), you make your way to the self-checkout. Two stands catch your eye. One has leftover paper plates from Diwali, the other has plastic and paper cutlery for the Chinese New Year. Passing by girls' clothing, you see shirts with the word 'JUSTICE' printed across the chest, next to other shirts that say '#ATTITUDE'. You get into the self-checkout. While scanning your items, you notice the Punjabi clerks aren’t paying attention. They exchange pleasantries and send memes to each other on TikTok. Two separate couples are deliberately not scanning items. “Times are hard,” you think. A Canadian kid with his father audibly asks why they have to pay when others steal. “It's the right thing to do,” he says. The kid looks confused, and a little sad. His young heart aflame with indignation. He’s right. It makes you sick.

After making your way out of that consumer nightmare, a microcosm of the absolute state of this country, the international economic strip that it is, you get to putting your groceries in the car. You hear a commotion. Two more homeless Canadians are having a domestic dispute in the Walmart parking lot. You’re pretty sure they’re the type to call each other “king” and “queen” since she’s got two, faded tattoos of bows on the back of her thighs. He accuses her of stealing $3,000 from him, then it changes to $3 million. She’s got a face tattoo across her brow, in a ghetto style that’s supposed to be reminiscent of the cursive writing in the American constitution, popularized by black rappers. You think about how you just need to save up enough cash to move to Alberta. Wages are higher, taxes are lower, you hear. That Premier, Danielle Smith, seems reasonably sane enough despite the character assassination over not allowing children to mutilate their genitals in horrific ritual sacrifice to the DEI God and greedy doctors. You’re no cowboy or a tradesman with a coke problem, but it’s the last place you can moderately get ahead in this country.

The fighting couple gets louder, but you remember not to intervene because there’s a high chance he's her ride or die, her pimp, or sugar daddy, or whatever. That means she’s going to throw hands with you, even if he throws hands with her in broad daylight. You get back in your car and pull out of the parking lot, leaving the duke and duchess of fentanyl to their whims. At the next intersection, you see two Lamborghinis revving their engines. In the cockpits of these ground-based jets are two Chinese guys. You think about how these cars cost a whole house, sorry, a quarter of a house since that's $800,000 on average now. These guys are Triads or high-up CCP party officials. They are to fentanyl what the cartels down in Mexico are to cocaine. You hear the screeching of tires and the roaring of engines. They fly down the street. Across the street, a police constable with a cup of Tim’s coffee in his hand watches and does nothing. Escaping the escapade of the dancing dragon, you begin driving home.

You hear the honking of horns, you see the picketing signs. Another goddamn protest. Familiar faces appear in front of you. Septum piercings, pink, blue, or green hair. Dark red highlights. Korean style round glasses, and fat miserable bodies clad in form-obscuring, ugly thrifted clothing. Every single one of them is a student, a university faculty member, or already works for the government. They have Death Eater tattoos. One of them meets your gaze. Their SSRI and birth control stare pierces your soul. All are holding signs with “#LANDBACK”, chanting slogans about residential schools or whatever. You know it’s bullshit, and you know that orange shirt day is completely fake. An attempt to make the aboriginals into Canada’s African-Americans, or Canada’s Jews. No bodies were ever found, you think, squinting at the grotesque, mostly-lard biomass passing by. No bodies were found, over 100 historic churches were burned, no one was arrested, and a whole shitty (non-stat) holiday dedicated to the nonexistent industrial genocide narrative which is about to be made illegal to question. You’re not even a Christian, but nobody is going to jail for it. You kind of don’t even like Christianity. It still makes you sick. 100 churches were burned, by self-loathing, sadomasochistic do-gooders who would destroy you for a $20 salad. The type of people laying awake at night because other people dare think differently.

You're going to have to take an alternative route.

About a block away from your apartment, you spot the alcove of a half-burned-down building. You're stuck at a stoplight and turn your head to look at the dejected inhabitant of that miserable place. What you're greeted with is the beautiful imagery of a homeless man, prone, in what appears to be a sleeping bag. There appears to be a bump, moving up and down, reminiscent of someone stroking his penis, or enjoying some late-night head. That’s exactly what’s going on, but it ends abruptly when you hear the man shout and ask, "What the fuck is wrong with you, nasty ass bitch. Fuck!" You cannot bear the second-hand embarrassment any longer. His bum-ette partner appears to have vomited all over him, profusely apologizing inside their shared sleeping bag. Averting your eyes, you notice approximately four, two-litre empty plastic bottles of dirt-cheap cider. Somebody pulled a hatchet on you once in a similar-looking place and called you a "tough guy" for asking why he was "digging for gold." Probably shouldn’t have egged him on, but that’s ancient history now.

The light turns green. You’re desperate for a visual palette cleanse. You spot the familiar silhouette of a massive knapsack and a lean, wiry figure on the street corner. They’re doing the fentanyl zombie dance: knees buckling and fully extending, repeatedly, whole upper body tilted at a 90-degree angle at the hips, bent over and stiff as a board. You’re so tired of these junkies, man. They can smoke in parks and public spaces now, eh? Can’t crack open a beer on a park bench, but you can fire up that bubbler pipe. You have to stand 7 meters away from doors and entrances, but open-air fentanyl use in kids' jungle gyms is a-okay to our longhouse courts. In the distance, you also vaguely hear weird Christian music playing. There are Black Israelites in purple uniforms on the sidewalk, yelling at a small black boy about how he is the real Jew, how white people were created in a cave by an evil wizard named Yakub in the Caucasus Mountains, and that melanin is magic.

You finally pull into the parkade of your building. A family of four SEA monkeys are chirping away in Tagalog as they've moved most of their furniture into the lobby but are struggling immensely to fit the couch into the elevator. It’s one of those cheap, fake leather couches you get—Mainstays brand. You realize they’re part of the already-large family of four or five who conspicuously live down the hall, just adjacent to the Arab family with the creepy hijab-wearing woman who only takes phone calls in the stairwell. Not a single one of them speaks English or French. The kids don’t appear to go to school. The parents are home 24/7 and don’t appear to work. Dad sports a mean tight-fade haircut, track suits all day every day, and a fake gold chain, while mom dresses in rags that look like they were cutouts from a Persian rug store. “Where do these people even come from?” you think. You dodge the Filipinos and take the stairs instead. Overlooking the communal area of your building, what appears to be a family of fourteen Tamils are hanging out. You watch a Tamil woman in full traditional garb scoop up a handful of curried white rice with her bare hands, bring it to her mouth, and eat it. No napkins, paper towels, or cutlery. It’s one of the most surreal things you’ve ever seen in your life. You think there’s practically no excuse for this. It’s not simply their culture; this is objectively unhygienic, primitive, and disgusting. You’ve seen enough. You pivot down the hall into the stairwell leading to your floor.

Every door in this goddamn building is practically falling apart. This shack was built in the late 1970s, and yet the market price for these units is $500,000. Completely insane. They can’t even fix the doorknobs, which spin in place when you turn them in either direction. They’re probably planning to renovict the owners and destroy it for even bigger and more expensive units, and if they don’t, they should. No reasonable person would want to live here if they had the money for one of these units, period. If you had that kind of money and a cushy work-from-home job, you’d be finessing the cost of living by gentrifying some poor Maritimer town and displacing the locals where land is still $10,000 a pop. “Fuck you, I have mine,” is the Canadian attitude after all. 40% of the GDP wouldn’t be real estate if it wasn’t. You finally reach the door of your apartment. Inserting the keys into the door, you breathe a sigh of relief. It ain’t much, but it’s home. You drop your bags on the floor to pick up later, kick off your shoes using your heels, and sloppily walk to the couch. You just need to sit down for a bit, and the inevitable desire to scroll through your phone kicks in. Gotta check those socials; you’re a wannabe niche internet micro e-celeb after all. People like your uneducated but snappy hot takes.

Instead of a normie cat meme or perhaps something about Helldivers 2, you go on Xitter dot com greeted with a viral video of white girls somewhere in North America shaking their asses on camera with characteristic red party cups and iPhone 15 Pro Maxes in every hand. "Girls just wanna have fun," goes the discourse. It’s all so tiresome. You wish white girls would do some cute Celtic folk dances, maybe even step-dancing (you're not really impressed by this, but it's better than watching them dance to jungle beats). You then remember that you can't dance either. There’s nothing wrong with having fun, but really, there’s no alternative. “White people” (Anglos), don’t dance. At least the Quebecois pretend they can still do le gigue.

Immediately under the white woman shenanigans is a now-deleted post by a Jeet. He gloats about how when the "Britishers" came to India, they threw bread crumbs at children the way a man might feed a flock of birds. He says that his fellow Jeets deserve access to white people and that they have no right to complain. He believes this is revenge for "pilfering the gems of India." You laugh at this taunt, remembering that beaches in Ontario have signs not directed to anyone in particular, but are mysteriously in English, French, and Hindi about not defecating in the sand. Very curious. Poo in the loo.

This is boring (and depressing). You go to Google dot com and type “Canada Reddit”. The top post, a "secret" leaked report from the horse police to federal ministers, claims that they’re worried about revolutionary activities once Canadians realize how dire their situation is. Golly gee, you don’t say? They carefully, of course, pin the blame and public outrage at the obliterated quality of life for the next three generations on misinformation and disinformation. These are contrary to The Science and Our Democracy. The Right Side of History must win in this endless campaign. The federal government, of course, is not responsible. The 2.2 million LEGAL immigrants per year, the population increase from 35 million to 42 million between 2015-2024, solely due to immigration in a scheme sponsored by a Blackrock-affiliated think tank founded by a Jewish man, had nothing to do with it. Who could have possibly foreseen this wanton destruction by tripling the speed required to reach 100 million people by 2100? The line must go up and to the right. You will own nothing and be happy. You will eat the maple-flavored crickets, or so the regime wants you to believe.

You scroll through more posts. Toronto Police are openly telling the public to leave their car keys by the lanyard so that when the inevitable car-thief break-in occurs, they don’t assault you in the middle of the night for them. They’ll arrest you if you defend yourself, by the way. Proportional use of force and all that, chud. Nuh-uh! No self-defense for you! If you kill your enemies, they win. Scrolling further, a gold heist. Every single one of the perpetrators is brown, with a token Caribbean they managed to rope into their scheme. Brown people stealing at Toronto Pearson International? What a surprise. You’ve had enough. You mosey on over to your bed, resisting the urge to doomscroll further. Your phone is plugged in. You’re consumed by darkness and the sounds of the city by your open window. It gets too hot in there, so you crack it open. It’s not uncommon to hear a homeless person scream at the top of their lungs in the dead of the night followed by an ambulance and the inevitable police siren, but you’re so used to it, they put you to sleep. 6 hours and 15 minutes, your alarm says.

You toss and turn for 30 minutes before passing out from exhaustion. Ready to do it all over again tomorrow.“The Canadian Dream,” as they say, or whatever bullshit American idiom Poilievre has appropriated “for freedom” these days.

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Thank you for reading. Almost every single experience here from the reader’s perspective is, unfortunately, a real-world anecdote that I’ve personally witnessed living in Canada. Reality is stranger than fiction. If you found this relatable, please support my writing and follow me on X at @FortySacks.