For a long time, from maybe around summer of 1997 and for quite some time thereafter, I wanted to move to Canada.
I did not even really care what part of Canada. Just wanted to live there, because it seemed to me that they did things better. They enjoyed a very high standard of living - so high, that it literally led the world for about eight straight years which, to my knowledge, is still the record.
They lost that top spot, I believe, to Norway. Perhaps it was deserved, because this distinction was used as a political football in Canada. Yet, it still ranks among the very top nations in this category, consistently ranking with other perennial leaders, like the Scandinavian nations and Australia.
Canada has much more to offer than most Americans give it credit for. Americans, who far too often collectively are dismissive of anything and anyone outside of American borders, seem particularly dismissive of Canada.
But it is a beautiful country that is wonderfully diverse. Toronto was voted the most ethnically diverse city in the world for many years running recently, and when you go there, as I just did, you can see why. It also has the distinction of being the greenest city in the world, in terms of the most park space. Go there, and it feels like a cleaner Manhattan. It has an elegance to it that is largely absent in the chaos of Manhattan.
Canada also, of course, is bilingual. Québec province is predominately French (and contrary to the belief of far too many Americans, French is not even close to being the language of a majority in Canada, and Québec province is the only predominately French-speaking Canadian province), and it offers some things that you simply cannot find in the United States, such as a walled city (the only one north of Mexico on the North American continent). Québec City is also beautiful, with a distinctly Old World charm. It has stone homes dating back to the 1600's, and these line cobbled streets. There are old churches and other buildings, pristine parks, and sidewalk cafes. Québec City is far more provincial than Montréal, yet Montréal also still retains some of that same Old World flavor, while also being a modern and dynamic metropolis.
Canada has been blessed with much of the same tremendous natural beauty as their southern neighbor. It has the Maritime provinces, which is kind of like Canada's answer to New England, more or less. New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province (a fact that I find rather ridiculous), and is blessed with some incredible beauty, including the alien-looking Hopewell Rocks, carved from the fastest high tides in the world. Nova Scotia also has an abundance of natural beauty. The drive I took at Cape Breton Island was probably the most beautiful drive that I have ever taken. Prince Edward Island, home to Anne of Green Gables, has a lot of rural, farmland charm, and Newfoundland and Labrador are considered the East Coast's answer to Alaska, with wildlife and some harsh natural conditions that preserve the landscape and keep in unique.
Québec is known as "La Belle Province" (the pretty province), and is the largest province in terms of physical size. Ontario is the most populated, with the largest city in Toronto, and the capital city in Ottawa, as well as numerous other cities. It has been blessed with the Great Lakes, and also has much to offer.
I have never been to the plain provinces, but understand that Manitoba, Saskatchewan have plenty of natural beauty and open spaces, much like the American Midwest.
Alberta is home to two prominent Canadian cities in Calgary and Edmonton, and also is graced with the Canadian Rockies which dominate it.
Part of the Rockies are also in British Columbia, which also has mountains further west. I have been to British Columbia, and can speak to the natural beauty surrounding it's two biggest cities, Vancouver and Victoria. The climate is ideal for lush greenery and gardens. Victoria feels like one of the most English cities outside of England itself. And Vancouver feels similar to Seattle in many respects, and enjoys the benefits of numerous beautiful gardens, as well as Stanley Park, which is one of the largest parks inside of a major city in the world.
That is to make no mention of the territories farther north, which I have never been to.
Quite simply, Canada has a lot to offer. While English and French both enjoy status as official languages, Canada's third language, widely spoken in cities like Toronto and Vancouver, is Chinese.
Yes, it is safe to say that Canada has far more to offer than most Americans assume it does.
Plus, politically, it managed to avoid the pitfalls of the Faux News Nation political thinking. I think that there are good reasons for this, not least of which being that Canada, despite it's enormous geographical size, actually feels a lot smaller and often largely overlooked. It is more divided than it's southern neighbor on many levels, with Québec having flirted with independence, and the overall unity often seeming fleeting and disjointed at best, even outside of Québec. It was not long ago that Newfoundland and Labrador were independent of Canada. And, of course, Canada is not as populated, or as powerful, as Americans, so I believe this accounts for what appears to be a far greater sense of humility. Throughout Canadian history, they have been dominated in turn and by degrees, by France, England, and even the United States (former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once compared being neighbors with the United States to sleeping next to an elephant), so they have been more transparently impacted more by people outside of their borders. In short, they have more a sense of their own limitations, and accept themselves as part of the global community, and not as much some special exception to the world, as Americans often tend to feel and express. In short, their heads are not as filled with their own sense of self-importance.
This has been reflected in a more balanced, and I would even suggest enlightened, political climate.
That is not to say that politics and politicians are not disgusting in Canada. Of course they are, as they are everywhere in the world. But Canadian politics look sane, and even often reserved, when compared with American politics, sadly.
As a result, Canadians are not so deathly and irrationally afraid of European influences as their American counterparts. In fact, they are more influenced not only by Europe than is the United States, but they are also more influenced by the United States than Europe tends to be. There are some positives that come out of this, and that is part of what makes Canada so unique, and so special.
One thing Canadians have, and that was particularly attractive to me, is a healthcare system that is affordable, and that works better than in the United States. That was no small part of the reason I was so interested in going to Canada (although far from the only reason).
Yes, Canadians have more of the privileges that Europeans tend to enjoy, and which Americans do not. And now, evidently, they have become wealthier overall than Americans. This, after the supposedly evil "socialized medicine" system that American conservatives continually rail about, and claim is the first step towards communism and fascist dictatorship, has long been firmly entrenched there. Not only do Canadians have such a system, but by and large, they support such a system. They, more than anyone else in the world outside of the United States (and frankly, I think many Canadians understand the faults of the American system far better than Americans themselves understand it, blinded as they are by their own sense of superiority to the rest of the world, collectively), know what the American healthcare system is all about, and they want no part of it. They much prefer their own system, thank you very much!
It seems that more and more Americans are beginning to recognize this. Sadly, however, this is occurring far too slowly, and has not made so much as a dent in the national political healthcare debate, where even the modest changes of "Obamacare" are harshly criticized, to the point that protesters like to slap a Hitler moustache on pictures of President Obama.
I personally think it is telling (and rather damning) that the healthcare debate, which is more or less settled in Canada, still is a raging and nagging sore on the American political landscape. It just keeps coming up, and people keep talking about it as a broken system in need of being fixed, and in need of greater fairness. Unfortunately, it is also seen as a business, and the need for huge corporations to maintain their "freedom" to rake in enormous profits tends to far outweigh the "freedom" to adequate and affordable health coverage for the many. Again, it is exactly the opposite of what it should be, and my suspicions are that the sense of superiority, of entitlement to being seen and admired as the leaders and role models for the rest of the world that so many Americans believe themselves to be, gets in the way of actual progress. "We don't want to stoop down to the level of the Europeans, do we?"
Am I wrong? Does that not seem to be the overriding mentality? And not just on this one issue, either. The biggest problem Americans face politically, and otherwise, is not inadequate healthcare, a sagging economy, growing disparities between economic classes and a widening gap between rich and poor, or out of control corruption in Washington, or religion versus science, or the abortion debate, or waging unjust and unpopular wars, or even the poisoning of the environment. To my mind's eye (and maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but that does not make it wrong) is that Americans tend to be too arrogant and presumptuous about themselves, and their implied superiority over the rest of the world. When you take that kind of approach, that everyone else should be taking lessons from you, and that they themselves have nothing to teach you, you are shutting the door on any influences than your own, and almost always to your own detriment. Every empire in thr world eventually fell, largely because they became too inward looking. Why does present-day America seem to be compared so frequently with Rome? Because the same rot from the inside it settling in, and people are growing comfortable with it.
In any case, here is a very interesting article on this very topic, showing that Canadians have more than just beer and hockey and linguistic controversies to define them. This article is from a newspaper in Bangor, Maine, not that far from Canada, and makes some interesting observations. The author points out that the Canadian healthcare system, far from bankrupting the country, costs the average citizen less than the average American pays for healthcare in the United States, and that this may have contributed to Canadians now generally enjoying more wealth than Americans. It is a good and important article dated from earlier this year, and I recommend it strongly. Here is the link:
"Canadians Pay Taxes for Universal Health Care, and Now They're Richer Than Us" Saturday, 22 June 2013 11:29 By Philip Caper, Bangor Daily News | Op-Ed
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/17149-canadians-pay-taxes-for-universal-health-care-and-now-theyre-richer-than-us
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