Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once

I came across Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once by Tristin Hopper from a popular on-line reading list. When I saw the book I was surprised that it was only 97 pages long, supplemented by 29 pages of endnotes. I had no idea who the author was, but I falsely presumed that he must be an American. I was wrong: Tristin Hopper is a Canadian who writes for the National Post.

Hopper covers eight topics such as euthanasia, the legal distribution of drugs to addicts, gender identity, bail and prison sentencing. As a conservative old-school gay I can side with Hopper on most of his points. The author is not a fan of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. While I myself am (or was), I was often exasperated by what cause Trudeau was going to apologize for next. I was surprised Hopper never mentioned feeling the same way about the steady flow of Trudeau tears. The Liberal policies regarding gender, bail, prison sentencing and health care are major targets of Hopper’s for what Canada is allegedly doing wrong.

The tone is often whiny, and the brevity–in spite of the voluminous endnotes–makes the book come across as one big bitchfest. I agree with Hopper on the sad state of Canadian health care where long waits may lead to patient deaths, but his take on euthanasia is tabloid-level ludicrous, where doctors are left shrugging to their patients who, when faced with the wait of over a year for a vital operation, are offered the choice to do themselves in instead.

Gender identity is covered in the chapters entitled The Transing Canada Highway and A Whiff of the Orwellian. Hopper covers the foolishness of supplying women’s sanitary products in men’s washrooms and the non-binary and transgender hysteria affecting workplaces and schools. Trans activists Jessica Yaniv and Kayla Lemieux are profiled, two femmes fatales whose multiple court cases tested the legal system, often with nuisance cases. Hopper portrayed Lemieux as more of a legal monkey wrench while Yaniv was painted as a simpering nutcase who is never happy being out of the public eye, always demanding Insta-attention for her legal battles.

Hopper supplied two apt quotes in the book’s conclusion. They reflect what happened to our country when we decided to let criminals get instant bail, or when we decided to give drug addicts free fentanyl. Euthanasia as a health option? Putting biological males in women’s prisons? Hopper says we’re going to Hell:

“If I can sum up over what went wrong with Canada over the past decade or so, it’s that the country decided to run absolutely everything on the honour system and didn’t have the imagination to consider why this would be a bad idea.”

and:

“There were vanishingly few safeguards in place, and many Canadians lacked the imagination to conceive that their system was capable of such dysfunction. A national faith that ‘this can’t be happening in Canada’ ended up yielding a whole bunch of ghastly scenarios that were only happening in Canada.”

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue