The central point of this book is that canada is not good and that it's birth as a settler colony for the dispossession of Indigenous nations continues to be fundamental to its present nature, both in terms of the ongoing settler-colonial relationship to Indigenous peoples and lands, and in terms of Canada's foreign policy.

I completely agree, but the book is not good. If you need a compendium of bad things Canadians, the Canadian state, or Canadian business have done, this works. If you think being Canadian makes you good, or that "the world needs more Canada" maybe this book will be eye-opening. But it's theoretically very weak. It doesn't really think through any of the concepts or processes (for example, what is Canada?). Despite the fact that the author is clearly a communist, it's often very idealist. Canada is a bad idea which makes Canadians think bad ideas which makes them do bad things.

The parts where I was less familiar with the topic were more interesting but also I had little trust in the author by those points. For example, I don't see how his portrayal of the Red Power movement as "explicitly communist" and the Sandinistas as supported by "Indigenous organizations in North America, especially AIM, many of whose members went to Nicaragua to fight alongside the Sandinistas" is anything other than dishonest. Communism/Marxism and the Sandinistas in particular were contributors to major schisms in the Red Power and AIM movements, and the Sandinistas in particular. Russell Means, one of the most prominent AIM members, opposed the Sandinistas due to their relocation of many Miskito. The Miskito opposed the Sandinistas and fought with the Reagan-funded Contras. Means gave a very well-known speech "For America to Live, Europe Must Die", much of which is dedicated to arguing that Marxism, anarchism, etc. are all part of the European (colonizer) tradition and so has nothing to offer to decolonization movements. I don't mean that the opposite of Shipley's point is true, but that it's much more complicated and it is inconceivable that he doesn't know that.

He also bases much of his section on Rwanda on the work of Robin Philpot, who denies that genocide is an appropriate word for what took place in the country in 1994. Philpot is not a respected or reliable source here.