New Book Chronicles Canada’s Descent Into Madness

Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once. Tristin Hopper. Sutherland House, 2025.

In Don’t Be Canada, Tristin Hopper sets out to explain “the bizarre missteps and policy experiments that have helped Canada set new global standards for disfunction”. Unfortunately, there was no lack of material for him to work with.

Reading this book provided an excellent overview of Canada’s slide into clownishness, incompetence, and international ridicule. The serious – out of control immigration, stratospheric housing prices, a hate speech bill so tyrannical that it was denounced by Margaret Atwood and Amnesty International – was mixed in with the comically absurd. And perhaps no incident in recent years fits that last category quite as neatly as the case of the male Ontario teacher who underwent a startling summer transformation. As Hopper recalls:

“In September 2022, students at Oakville Trafalgar High School showed up to the first days of classes to discover that their shop teacher, Mr. Lemieux, was now Ms. Lemieux. And instead of wearing shorts and a loose-fitting polo shirt, Lemieux was now dressed in a blonde wig, nail polish, and a set of cartoonishly oversized prosthetic breasts”.

In an email at the time, Oakville parents were informed of the school district’s guidelines surrounding gender identity: “As a school within the Halton District School Board (HDSB), Oakville Trafalgar High School recognizes the rights of students, staff, parents/guardians and community members to equitable treatment without discrimination based upon gender identity and gender expression”. Lively protests erupted, with parents and students demanding that normalcy prevail.

If absurdity has been particularly pronounced in Canada, so has the counter-absurdity backlash. One year after this incident was the “One Million March For Children”, in which thousands of parents rallied in communities across the country. This wave of protest was not directly related to the strange incident in Oakville, but was a broader counterstrike against the promotion of gender ideology in schools. It was entertaining to see a sizeable contingent of socially conservative Muslim immigrants in these protests, facing off with hardcore socially progressive counter demonstrators who were no doubt beginning to rethink their previous support for an open door immigration policy.

The backlash against gender ideology in schools was followed by an even more significant backlash against mass immigration, one that continues to this day. Over the past several years, poll after poll has revealed that Canadians – once caricatured (mostly falsely) as extremely welcoming of high immigration – have begun to widely support immigration restriction. Some writers – not Hopper – characterize this as “moving to the right on immigration”. In reality, the issue of immigration is outside the left-right political spectrum. This is particularly evident in polls which show that the majority of Canadians who want lower immigration levels includes a majority of all age groups, both sexes, all regions, voters from all major parties, and – strikingly – both immigrants and native-born Canadians.

While Canada’s immigration overload truly began when Brian Mulroney departed from our historic “tap on, tap off policy” in 1990, it became very hard to ignore from 2015-2021, and reached the level of tragicomically absurd from 2021-2023. Informed by such luminaries as the Century Initiative, the corporate-funded immigration lobby that advocates for 100 million Canadians by 2100, the Trudeau government pulled out all the stops to let in vast numbers of permanent residents, international students, foreign workers, and asylum seekers. Population growth reached nearly 1.3 million in 2023, straining everything from housing to healthcare beyond belief.

Hopper chronicles the absurdist drama that played out at the time:

“In July 2023, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a special trip to Hamilton, Ontario to announce $45 million in federal monies to build 214 rental units. If each of those units ends up housing the average Canadian household size of 2.5, they’ll shelter 535 people in total. Canada was adding about 140 people an hour. So, in the time it took Trudeau to fly to Hamilton, make a speech and then fly home, the units were already a moot point”.

While some argue that the post-pandemic immigration wave was part of a malevolent plan, I am partial to Hopper’s view that there is as of yet no discernible reason for it: “The reason for the immigration surge was never fully articulated. Canadian cabinet ministers have been asked repeatedly why they allowed immigration to spike well beyond the country’s ability to absorb it. And the answer has usually been that immigration drives growth, or that the country had a labor shortage, or simply that Canadians love immigrants”.

What is scarier: that our government willfully inflicted out of control immigration on Canada for some ulterior motive, or that Ottawa was so blissfully unaware of the consequences of its actions that it did so accidentally?

Hopper writes that the ultimate irony of Canada’s downhill slide is that the Canadian public’s trust in public institutions and confidence in government remains much higher than in most other Western countries. To me, this makes the absurdities that much worse – to inflict bad policy on a trusting people is to take advantage of their good nature.

One thing is clear after reading Hopper’s chronicle of “how one country did everything wrong all at once”: restoring good government means reversing all of the absurd policies pursued in recent years by governments of every stripe.

As C.S. Lewis put it:

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it’s pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We’re on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”