By Harry Storm
In 2003, Bono, the lead singer for the world-famous band U2, handed Canadians a feel-good mantra when he told a Liberal Party Convention that “the world needs more Canada.” The slogan caught on: It became a book by Heather Reisman, owner of Indigo books, and was printed onto mugs, t-shirts and other paraphernalia. In 2016, then President Obama repeated the phrase in a speech to the Canadian House of Commons, though what he meant was he wanted Canada to meet its NATO requirement on defense spending (more Canada, indeed).
I never liked the slogan; it reeked of arrogance, and self-satisfaction. If it were true, one wouldn’t need to say it, never mind see it repeated regularly. But in the early 2000s, at least I knew where it was coming from. Canada was nice. Canada was good. Canada was safe. And Canada was sane.
Not any more. Let me be clear: I am a proud Canadian. I think Canada is one of the best countries in the world to live in, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else (which isn’t to say other places don’t beckon, especially in winter).
But things are getting seriously loopy here in the Great White North. For the past several years, the political, social and cultural institutions that define Canada have gone – there’s no other way to say it – completely nuts.
Once known primarily for producing great hockey players and maple syrup, now Canada leads the way when it comes to useless “land acknowledgements” that pander to but do nothing for native concerns. The excesses reported vis a vis Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) policies – e.g. veterans offered MAID for PTSD, and hospitalized seniors being offered MAID because home care isn’t available – have raised eyebrows internationally. So have provisions of Canada’s online hate bill that would put people who haven’t committed a crime under house arrest because the authorities suspected they might commit a hate crime in the future.
However, it’s the transgender issue that has made Canada an international laughingstock due to its over-the-top application of transgender “rights,” at the expense of women’s rights and basic common sense. Unfortunately, most Canadians may be unaware of the depths to which Canada has plunged in this regard, because the mostly activist Canadian media, with few exceptions, have been resolute in their determination to never include news items that put transgenderism in a negative light, thereby “shielding” Canadians from some of the worst excesses of transgenderism run amok.
Irish comedian Graham Linehan, long ostracized from the entertainment industry in his country because of his stand against “transing” minors, has called the capture of supine institution after institution in his country a “mass psychosis,” and this applies as much or more to to Canadian institutions in thrall to transgender ideology, such as provincial boards of education and health authorities, and national sporting bodies, all of which have embraced transactivist demands.
Take healthcare. In Ontario, a “non-binary” person is suing the always-cash-strapped Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP), the agency that funds medical services in that province, because it won’t pay for his “penile-preserving vaginoplasty,” a procedure in which a vaginal cavity is surgically created while keeping the penis intact. Yes that’s right: this person, who goes by K.S., wants both male and female private parts; that is to say, he wants a “vagina” put in, while preserving his willie.
However, the procedure isn’t performed in Canada. It is performed at a clinic in Austin, Texas, for a cool $70,000. Sensibly, OHIP rejected the claim, noting that the procedure wasn’t listed in its Schedule of Benefits. K.S. then sued, and not so sensibly, the Ontario Health Review Board overturned OHIP’s decision. Now OHIP is appealing that decision to the courts.
Yet despite its efforts not to pay for the procedure, OHIP too seems captured by transgender ideology. In a submission to the board, OHIP wrote “not all medically necessary procedures are listed in the Schedule of Benefits,” effectively conceding that this procedure is medically necessary or at least could be so considered. As OHIP already funds vaginoplasty with penectomy (i.e. creating a vagina and removing the penis), K.S. argued that his physical health could be negatively impacted if his penis were removed, causing among other things, urinary issues (no kidding).
But why is it medically necessary for K.S. to have the procedure? In a letter to OHIP, K.S.’s physician wrote that “It is very important for (K.S.) to have a vagina for her personal interpretation of her gender expression but she also wishes to maintain her penis. K.S. is transfeminine but not completely on the “feminine” end of the spectrum (and) for this reason it’s important for her to have a vagina while maintaining a penis.” In other words, like all sex reassignment surgery, it’s really a quality of life issue, because these procedures are said to reduce the profound sense of unease from gender dysphoria.
Yet OHIP would never consider funding other procedures, such as rhinoplasty, face lifts and liposuction, that improve quality of life and reduce the profound sense of unease for individuals with body dysmorphia. Those procedures are deemed cosmetic and therefore are never covered, period, end of story. In short, despite its efforts not to fund this particular procedure (which I suspect will not be successful), the healthcare system in Ontario appears to be captured by transgender ideology, as are many other provincial systems across the country.
But healthcare is far from the only captured sector. Consider the following cases:
The Halton District School Board, which serves students in Burlington, Oakville, and Milton (between Toronto and Hamilton) vigorously defended the right of Kayla Lemieux, a male shop teacher who identifies as a woman, to wear fantastically oversized prosthetic breasts that effectively caricature and mock women.
Although the school board met with international derision and much criticism from parents of students at the school, its director of Education, one Curtis Ennis, doubled down at first, citing the Board’s commitment to a “safe and inclusive environment for gender expression” and insisted a new dress code proposed by the Board couldn’t be implemented.
Parents disagreed, claiming Lemieux was mocking women and education altogether, and rejected Ennis’ claim that it would be illegal to order Lemieux to dress appropriately, noting a legal opinion that “Every collective agreement permits the employer to require its employees to dress reasonably and even more so to require that a teacher of young people be a role model for civility and professionalism.”
A few months later, Lemieux was quietly removed from the classroom on full pay. He subsequently left the Halton School Board and was hired by the nearby Hamilton-Wentworth School Board. Despite previously claiming the breasts were natural and due to an illness called gigantomastia, a rare medical condition in which the breasts grow abnormally large and grow indefinitely, Lemieux has reverted to his original name, Kerry, and has been photographed in male attire and, no longer sporting the breasts (a medical miracle, no doubt).
The Orangeville Otters girls swim team can only hope for even a somewhat positive ending as above. That’s because the supervisors of their team, supported by all the relevant swimming authorities, allow a 50-year-old biological male to join the team at swimming competitions.
Melody Wiseheart, formerly Nicholas Cepeda, is a professor of psychology and behavioural science at York University in Toronto, specializing in children and young people (you can’t make stuff like this up).
In October 2023, he was spotted swimming in a competition for teenage girls representing the Otters swimming club at the Markham Pan Am Recreation Centre. After initially denying the story, the “competition coordinator” admitted that Wiseheart had taken part.
The coordinator says Wiseheart has the right to compete in teenage girls’ competitions under Swimming Canada’s “trans inclusion” rules. He has registered himself as female and so is treated as female. And although the competitions he swims in consist almost exclusively of teenage girls, this is simply a matter of convention. It seems that, since no adult had ever tried to enter a teenagers’ race before, there had been no need to draw up explicit rules.
In other words, Wiseheart did not even need to “identify” as a teenage girl to assert his “right” to enter the girls’ competition.
Despite the controversy that erupted, in December 2023 Wiseheart competed in the Trojan Cup event in Ontario and was seen using the girls’ changing rooms, where parents reportedly created a makeshift tent out of towels to hide the girls from view as they changed.
And believe it or not, that isn’t even the most outrageous part: Both Swimming Canada and Swim Ontario have defended Wiseheart’s participation. In a joint statement, the organizations maintained that “Swimming is for everyone… people of all shapes, sizes, genders, beliefs and backgrounds should have the opportunity to swim to the best of their ability… with the expectation that our registrants treat each other with respect and dignity, and keep our sport environment free from harassment and abuse.”
Here’s another example from the sporting world; A biological male weightlifter who identifies as a woman wins championships by huge margins, and then publicly mocks biological women for their “weak” performances.
In powerlifting competitions, the winner is determined by combining the top weights achieved in three categories: squat, bench press and deadlift. Biological male Anne Andres registered a total of 597.5 kg; the runner-up (i.e. the real female champion), SuJan Gil, managed a total of 387.5 kg. in other words, Andres defeated Gil by 210 kilos, an absurdly wide margin. Andres has also recorded a video during which he mocks a female powerlifter and her “little T-rex arms” and asks “why is women’s bench so bad?”
Andres received poetic justice of a sort when male powerlifter and head coach for Team Canada Powerlifting Avi Silverberg identified as a woman for a day, and entered the Heroes Classic tournament, beard and all, and easily shattered one of Andres’ “women’s” records. Silverberg’s entry was clearly a protest to highlight the absurdity of Weightlifting Canada rules, but it failed to bring any policy modifications.
It did, however, have the positive effect of enraging Andres, who was in the audience and, with a stunning lack of self-awareness, called out Silverberg’s supposedly “malicious intent.” The irony of this statement surely was not lost on the female powerlifters who are forced to compete against him.
These stories are but the tip of the Canadian iceberg. Canadian parents who staged protests to demand they be told by schools that when their child begins a transition process at school were tarred as “far-right,” social conservatives, and conspiracy theorists by the media and by left-wing groups such as the Council of Canadians.
Canadian prisons, astonishingly supported by the Elizabeth Fry Society, the advocacy group for women in prisons, now place biological men into women’s prisons, despite a Correctional Service of Canada study that revealed the vast majority of trans-identifying males in prison are there as a consequence of abusive behaviour, and 45% are there for sexual assault.
Courts in several provinces, including British Columbia, now compel all participants in court proceedings, including elderly lawyers, to state their pronouns when introducing themselves. Meanwhile, the Canadian Human Rights Commission rather absurdly says “there is an increasing normalization of views in public discourse that can sow the seeds of intolerance, which in turn can have devastating impacts that put fundamental human rights at risk,” by which they probably mean articles like this one. Like all institutions in thrall to transgender ideology, the CHRC confuses or conflates criticism of the excesses of transgender ideology with discrimination against transgender people simply going about their business.
It’s clear Canadian institutions across the board have been captured by an ideology that only a small minority of Canadians actually believe in, let alone support. Although Canadians tend to be very accepting of transgender individuals, transactivist excesses and stories such as those described in this article are stretching the famed tolerance of Canadians to the limit. Yet federal and provincial governments and institutions continue to push the transgender envelope, seemingly oblivious to the growing backlash.
I don’t know if, how or when the madness will end. But I do know that until the pendulum begins to swing back in the direction of sanity, the last thing the world needs is more Canada.
