Broken Country, the independent Canadian documentary on how one of the world’s largest and most resource-rich nations ended up in decline, is playing theaters across Canada and the United States, and writer-director Mira Metter spoke with Fandom Pulse about making it. The 113-minute film takes on Canada’s healthcare crisis, housing costs, drug addiction and opioids, and immigration, drawing on interviews with thousands of Canadians and more than 70 policy experts. Metter discussed why she made the film, the 393 hours of footage behind it, and why the filmmakers say it promotes no party or agenda. The film is available online and has screenings in select theaters.
You’ve said you were fed up with what you were seeing and with the “why try, nothing’s going to change” attitude around you. Was there a specific moment or incident that made you decide to make a film?
It wasn’t one moment so much as a drumbeat. The film came out of conversations that were happening more and more around me, at dinner tables, at school pickup, with friends and other parents. I’ve spent my career telling stories for a living, and I thought that if we can start informing people and bringing Canadians into the conversation then we can start making change.
You both come from families tied to Canada for generations. How did that shape what you wanted the film to say, and what you were afraid of getting wrong?
It made us want to tell the truth plainly, because we love this place and you don’t help something you love by pretending it’s fine. But I also did not want to sound like were tearing Canada down. That’s not what this is. My biggest fear was that people would hear “broken” and think we’d given up on the country, when the whole point is the opposite. You only call something broken if you believe it can be fixed.
If a Canadian had to watch only one section of the film to understand the country’s trouble, which would you point them to?
Healthcare. It’s the one that touches every family, and it’s the one Canadians have been taught to be proudest of. When you learn that more than 15,000 people died on waitlists in a single year, or you hear about a man who waited 15 hours in an ER with a spinal injury and was offered medically assisted death, it stops you cold. It also shows the pattern that runs through the whole film: a system that used to work, a lot of money still going in, and outcomes getting worse. If you understand what happened to healthcare, you understand the questions we’re asking about housing, crime and everything else.
You interviewed thousands of Canadians and more than 70 policy experts, and 32 made the final cut. How many hours of footage did you end up with, and how long did the edit take?
I actually did the math on this with my editor and here is the breakdown:
Total footage 393 hours, which is 16.4 days of non-stop playback.
Expert interviews: 186.5 h
Street interviews: 124.4 h
B-roll footage: 53.5 h
It took a long time to properly go through everything, find the flow for the film, and identify the most important points that people seemed to be calling out for. Roughly a year and a bit all-in to get a final edit.
How do you decide which 32 voices make the film and which 40-plus don’t? Did anyone you wanted to interview turn you down?
I wish I could have featured everyone I interviewed, but trying to keep this a 2-hour film required merciless editing. Basically, I looked for two things: people who could explain a problem clearly to someone who isn’t a policy wonk, and a real range of perspectives. If an interview repeated a point someone else made better, it didn’t make the cut, and that’s no reflection on the person or their perspective.
You funded this entirely with Canadian money and Canadian crew. What was the hardest part of doing it without a studio or broadcaster behind you?
The freedom is that nobody could tell us what we were allowed to say. The hard part is that there’s no infrastructure behind you. We’ve had to build the audience one social post, one podcast and one conversation at a time. Mike likes to say we’re running it like a start-up, and he’s right. But I wouldn’t trade it, because a film that asks hard questions about government probably shouldn’t depend on government money or special interests to get made.
You say the film is fact-checked. What does that process look like for a documentary? Did anything you believed going in turn out to be wrong?
Every number on screen had to trace back to a source we could hand to anyone who asked. And then we had to find a secondary source to support that source. And then a lawyer to vet it all. If an expert said something we couldn’t verify, it came out. We also employed a team of researchers to fact check and ensure journalistic standards across the entire film.
I didn’t go into this holding pre-determined conclusions. I came in wanting to understand what happened and where things fell off. So, there was no real ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, just a lot of information, stories and data.
The site says the film “promotes no party and no agenda.” Everyone is so tribal now that people will assume you have one anyway. How do you hold that line, and has the pushback come from the left, the right, or both?
We never asked anyone how they voted, and we never asked experts to tell us which party was to blame. We asked three questions about every issue: what’s happening, when did it last work, and which policies threw it off course. Those are questions anyone can answer honestly, whatever their politics. Some people I’m sure will decide what the film is before they see it, but we made every effort to include all the perspectives we heard across Canada.
Your lineup includes think-tank voices like the Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe, a former Trudeau economic advisor, and a former federal minister. How did you get people from different camps to agree on camera?
We didn’t ask them to agree with each other, and we never put them in a room together to debate. Each person spoke to what they know. What’s striking is that when you set their answers side-by-side, they line up more than you’d expect.
The film asks “which policies threw it off course.” Did the experts agree on the answer, or did you find places where they split?
They agreed on the diagnosis far more than on the cure. Almost no one disputed that affordability is worse, that healthcare access has declined, that there’s a serious housing crisis or that it’s harder to build things in this country than it should be. Where they split was surprisingly less clear.
You’re screening in Phoenix, Santa Barbara, Portland, and Philadelphia, and Americans often point to Canada as a model for healthcare and government programs. What do you hope U.S. viewers take away, and what has the reaction been at those Q&As so far?
I’d hope Americans take away that a system’s reputation and its reality can drift a long way apart, and that it’s worth examining before you borrow from it. This isn’t a film about which country is better. A lot of what Canada is struggling with - from housing costs to the drug crisis, and affordability issues - are happening in the U.S. too. The value is in seeing how good intentions and bad policy can play out over time. Some see this as a bellwether to policies promoted in the United States, especially ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
After talking to this many people, are you more hopeful or less hopeful than when you started? What would the first fix be?
Both, honestly. I was taken aback by how hopeless so many people seemed about the future. That stays with you. But I came out more hopeful about Canadians themselves. People were incredibly honest and generous with us, and nearly everyone wanted things to get better rather than just wanting someone to blame. The first fix is admitting there’s a problem, because you can’t fix what you won’t name
Make sure to watch this incredible documentary and learn the specifics of how far Canada has fallen.