NewsCanadaHumour & WeirdCrimeCanada

15 of the wildest things that happened in Canada in 2022 (PHOTOS/VIDEOS)

National Trending Staff
National Trending Staff
|
Dec 27 2022, 6:20 pm
15 of the wildest things that happened in Canada in 2022 (PHOTOS/VIDEOS)
@paigesellis/Twitter

As we prepare to ring in 2023, we’ve got to acknowledge that 2022 has been quite the year in Canada, especially in terms of absolutely wild news.

The True North went through some of the most shocking, hilarious, tragic, and hard-to-forget moments in its history. From a hunt for a public poop flinger to seven interest rate hikes from the Bank of Canada, we basically covered the whole gamut.

Today we recount some of the wildest things that happened in Canada throughout the year.

Poisonous package

2022 in canada

Girish HC/Shutterstock | bangoland/Shutterstock

Calvin Bautista, a New York resident hailing from Richmond Hill, Ontario, was charged with a pretty weird crime — smuggling three Burmese pythons into the US from Canada on a bus. The Burmese python is one of the biggest snakes known to man.

The act could mean 20 years in prison, a fine of up to US$250,000, and a term of supervised release of up to three years for Bautista, according to the US Department of Justice.

Poo flinger on the loose

After two individuals terrorized Toronto by flinging their excrement at random people back in 2019, another contender emerged this year.

During the height of the so-called Freedom Convoy demonstrations, Toronto Police Service arrested a man for “throwing feces at another person.” His charges? Assault with a weapon.

Guess anything’s a weapon if you’re brave enough.

MILF on top

Adult entertainment website Pornhub released its search data for the year 2022, and it showed that Canada has some serious mommy issues.

MILF — short for Mother I’d Like to F**k — was the top-searched term on Pornhub in the country. Y2K fashion is back, and so is the Stifler’s Mom phenomenon.

The Great Rate Hikes of 2022

This is a grim one. In 2022, Canada experienced some of the worst inflation in its history.

To curb this, the Bank of Canada upped its interest rate a record seven times this year, making affording a home or mortgage an evermore distant dream for most Canadians.

No phone, who dis?

On a warm July Friday, millions of Canadians woke up to a world of disconnect.

A massive, nationwide network outage at Rogers debilitated not only its customers but also others. People could not call the police or an ambulance. Debit card machines stopped working. Crowds of professionals flocked to their nearest Starbucks location to get work done.

The internet apocalypse was truly like something out of a sci-fi film, and it’s hard to believe it happened mere months ago.

Finders keepers

A Canada Post employee got in trouble after police recovered hundreds of lost packages, just ahead of the holiday month.

RCMP officials and Canada Post’s postal inspectors raided an employee’s home with an arrest warrant on November 23 in Wainwright, Alberta. According to the Crime Reduction Unit, “a significant seizure of stolen property in excess of 500 deliverable items.”

Silver lining

2022 in canada

Bullion Exchanges/YouTube

A punctured tire is nothing to celebrate, but it sure was a happy accident for one Canadian man when he found that his flattened tire was caused by a huge silver bar.

Tommy Sondy of Kingston, Ontario, was driving on a highway in October when his car bounced over a speed bump of fortune. His tire blew out, and he decided to get out of the car to look for what had caused the puncture. To his surprise, it was a massive bar of silver — 100 ounces hefty and 99.9% pure.

But the most shocking part would have to be Sondy’s sense of goodwill. He said he did not want to keep the bar and is working on returning it to its rightful owner.

A massive Diwali “fight”

In a hilarious turn of events, a massive parking lot “fight” reported to police turned out to be nothing but a bunch of Ontarians celebrating Diwali.

Peel Regional Police received multiple reports about 400 to 500 people brawling in a parking lot in Mississauga’s Goreway Drive and Etude Drive area. What they tried to raid was a huge Diwali party with fireworks, music, and dancing.

The Lisa LaFlamme effect

After CTV ended ties with longtime employee Lisa LaFlamme, all of Canada came together in support of the grey-haired journalist they love to see on TV.

It was shocking that in 2022, ageist and misogynistic rhetoric had led to a well-known, loved, and seasoned journalist being “blind-sided” by her boss. Repercussions have continued for Michael Melling, who reportedly fired LaFlamme. He was let go from CTV earlier this month.

ArriveCAN’T

Two Toronto tech companies have shown the Canadian government how things are done after they recreated the ArriveCAN app for much, much less than the feds paid.

TribalScale and Lazer Technologies held “hackathons” demonstrating how the app was cheap and simple to create, causing some uproar for Canadians who felt like their tax money was wasted on ArriveCAN, which, the government said, cost $54 million.

The wrong Queen

This one didn’t technically take place in Canada, but it happened to our prime minister.

Canadians ripped Justin Trudeau to shreds online after footage surfaced showing him singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” with a hotel pianist.

What made this fun-sounding experience awkward is that it happened mere hours before the royal funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, which Trudeau had flown to the UK to attend.

The clip was shared far and wide, and we might not see the PM’s inner theatre kid come out any time soon.

A Canadian Jeopardy! super-champion is born

Toronto-based tutor Mattea Roach made it to Jeopardy! and had a record-breaking winning streak of 23 episodes.

Canada and the world fell in love with Roach’s charming personality, and the 23-year-old managed to pay off her student loans.

The “Freedom Convoy” occupation

Can you believe the “Freedom Convoy” demonstrations happened this year?

It feels like a distant memory, but thousands of Canadians protested against the government’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate in February 2022, bringing the whole country to a standstill. Fleets of trucks and motorcycles made their way through Canadian cities for weeks, and nearly a thousand people were ticketed by police in Ottawa alone.

The feds called the protests an “occupation,” and it impacted the country’s economy heavily.

Ikea monkey turns 10

This year marked one decade since a fashionable little monkey made headlines across the world for walking into an Ikea in Toronto, wearing a luxurious shearling coat.

Daily Hive’s Isabelle Docto caught up with Darwin, the infamous Japanese rhesus macaque. His story starts off sad, but he’s currently living it up in a sanctuary with his monkey buddies.

Disturbing irony

A Canadian reporter was sexually harassed while reporting on Hockey Canada’s sexual assault allegations.

BNN Bloomberg journalist Paige Ellis was reporting from the streets of Toronto when a passerby in a Maple Leafs jersey began to shout obscenities at her, startling her.

“There’s something grimly poetic about being sexually harassed by a man in a hockey jersey while talking about alleged sexual misconduct by hockey players,” she wrote in a tweet.

National Trending StaffNational Trending Staff
+ News
+ Canada
+ Humour & Weird
+ Crime
+ Canada

SUBSCRIBE TO THE HIVE

Get the latest news sent to your inbox and stay in the loop