70% of Canadians claim to have done a favor for their neighbor.
Over 50% of Canadians believe that most of their fellow citizens can be trusted (Turcotte).
And it’s no surprise because Canada has a certain reputation: it is harmless, void of all the unkindness that has claimed the United States since its creation. This is so much Canada’s reputation that the overwhelming cry after Trump got elected was, “let’s move to Canada!” with the assumption that it, unlike the United States, isn’t overtaken with subscribers to Trump-esque rhetoric.
But looking closely at Canada, particularly with respect to its prison system, it is jarringly similar to the United States, nearly the only difference being their respective reputations.
While the United States is infamously known for its brutal and discriminatory prison system, Canada’s government has constructed a deceivingly
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By tailoring only to the country’s homogenized majority, Canada’s conservative government has made its nation seem like the pinnacle of kindness and generalized trust. But beneath the surface, it’s the prison system that secretly bears the brunt of Canada’s vast racial and demographic discrimination.
The Canadian government is so occupied with maintaining the appearance of high generalized trust in its political culture that it vastly over-convicts in its prisons, a practice that is reminiscent of the United States prison system. In a recent Huffington Post article, journalist Jim Bronskill investigated Canada’s “broken bail system,” discovering that nearly half of the inmates in Canadian prisons “on any given night have not been convicted of anything” (Bronskill). Furthermore, University of Ottowa criminologist Cheryl Webster has described Canada’s approach to conviction