Wanker' Guide to Canada

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

If your idea of a national tour includes cultural highlights such as opera and concert halls, with perhaps a museum visit or two to follow, and close attention to all celebrated beauty spots, don’t travel with the Wankers. Again, if you’d just as soon not be arrested as a public nuisance or used as a thoroughly bad example by Miss Manners, don’t travel with the Wankers. Don’t even speak to the Wankers.

The tongue-in-cheek Wankers’ Guide To Canada follows the atypical Bulgarian family of Ignatz and Wanda, daughter Wankette and son Wee Willie, on their quest for landed-immigrant status, Canada Council grants, Unemployment Insurance benefits and all the other good things they dimly descry in this vast, unspoiled and totally unprepared country. Which, by the way, will never be the same after this onslaught of fairly (though not hysterically) funny mock-travelogue. Generously supplied with vulgarity and rudery, with malice toward everybody, and charity for none, here they are: the Wankers!