Sorry to be a party pooper. What most people have said about VISITING Canada is quite accurate to my experience, as well. Immaculate streets, no hand-guns, cheap excellent hobbying, friendly people. The outback, especially the lower Canadian Shield between Toronto and Ottawa, provides some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, each and every season of the year. There is nothing better than camping in an Ontario Provincial Park. If I ever propose marriage, I plan on doing it at the Tommy Thompson cairn on Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park, north of Toronto. The landscape holds a special place in my memory, and provides a type of serene counterpoint to the rest of this post of mine. Visiting a Canadian campground or touristing in a Canadian city can be a safe, happy (and currently quite cheap!) experience.
But the story is UTTERLY different for MOVING there.
I found that Canadians in general harbor a deeply felt resentment about the United States, and generally defend quite bigoted decisions on the basis of such nebulous concepts as "national unity" or "protecting our culture" (as though Anglophone Canadian culture EXISTED independent of the United States' influence AT ALL). Being an American citizen in Canada and trying to get a fair shake in the beginning stages of a standard career, would be like being a black man in 1930s New York and trying to become a stock broker. They have laws that make it illegal.
This is a little-known truth about US-Canada relations, and doesn't come up much in discussions. I lived there for a decade, and found I had to leave because ... well ... the bigotry got to me. Every DAY there was overheard somewhere "those stupid Americans" or "let me tell you what this dumb-fuck Yank did yesterday." If you replace "Americans" and "Yank" with "Ethiopians" and "Nigger," you get the picture.
In fact, speaking specifically about law and immigrations regulations, there are three legal categories in Canada: Local, Immigrant, and Immigrant-American. This allows the authorities to deny jobs to needy young American students, American beginners, et cetera, as long as it's in the name of "protecting Canadian culture." So you get remarkably bland, but very "Canadian" (because it was made there) movies, for example about gansters in Chicago, filmed with quite lucrative Canadian government underwriting, and absolutely no right for an American to work on the set, even if he is of landed-immigrant or resident-labourer status. But an Ethiopian immigrant with an identical Visa, with restrictions identical to the ones on the American's Visa, has full right to work there.
My recommendation to any half-way intelligent American who thinks that living in a more liberal and slightly more socialist nation would be a tempting reason to move to Canada: DON'T DO IT. You'll be a second-class citizen. And worse, this bigotry is not only legally mandated and taught in the schools, you'll also find that most participants in that bigotry will deny that they act like that. Don't give them the benefit of your time. Imagine how awful it must have been for a sensible, sensitive, well-educated German to grow up in the 1930s. Surrounded by people pushing bizarre notions on you, knowing you couldn't REALLY stand up for "the right" without risk of serious reprisal, probably initially not particularly interested in politics as much as just getting on with a "normal" life. Well, that's about how bad most Canadians feel about their daily life, especially when the subject of Americans comes up. Don't be so miserable as to surround yourself with Canadians, if you're an American.
I've lived in both places. I've been an American in both. Canada is no place for Americans. They'll drum the life out of you, sniping back-stabbing bigoted negative moment by bitchy underhanded secretly immigrant-bashing moment. They'll also tell you why they're right, about Canada being "better" than everywhere else -- the UN says it has the best standard of living (this was repeated a gillion times; never mind that the UN study uses watchdog statistics for EVERY NATION EXCEPT CANADA, for which the UN was requested to use official government statistics!). You'll also get this bizarre thing: "Canadians are so much better than Americans because we don't hike around talking about how much better we are. I mean, right now, I'm not really loud and obnoxious about how much better I am than everyone else, like an American would be." !!??
A cute quote. The difference between Canada and America: in the United States, nobody does what he's told unless he fears reprisal, and then he resents having to do it. In Canada, everybody does what he's told. And exactly no more what so ever. At all. Ever. And resents having to do it.
That having been said, I like very much their social system, the fact that everyone gets free health care and other necessities. And the average man-on-the-street will be much more worldly aware, particularly of European politics, and well-read than an American. As individuals, I'd rather have a Canadian or two sitting next to me at a dinner party. They'd be more likely to have read the newspaper that day, to have passed a few college courses, to think that thinking mattered. The average American would be likely obese and reactionary, and politically utterly uninformed. I have several great friends I left behind in Canada, who sympathize with the fact that I had to get out in order to get a life, because being an American there is nigh-on impossible. I miss them, their witty repartee -- they can always be relied on for a sardonic aside, a good sense of irony. But ironic life is also negative life, and it gets ya down, especially if you're the brunt of the irony 9 times out of 10.
Further, I'm not a lone voice in the wilderness. Every American I met in Anglophone Canada reported similar experiences. They all would take me aside, at some point early in our contact, and say something with a conspiratorial hush ... "Say, I hate to be negative, me being a guest here and all, but did you notice how NEGATIVE they are about us?" It came up time and again. I can't believe I was "just a fluke," or that I brought this negativity on myself.
They are, after all, a nation of backpackers who jingoistically display their national flag on their packs all over Europe, just to prove they aren't the typically jingoistic Americans.
Oh, by the way, I wasn't there after September 11th, 2001. Maybe things have changed -- I'll bet a lot of the world feels awful guilty about bad-mouthing Americans after that. If I were to have a high-level job with an American company, and I were asked to move to Canada for a while, I'd agree to do it, but it would have to be a limited time-frame -- no more than five years. As it was, I was trying to START as an American in Canada, and I found it utterly impossible. The fact that upon return to the USA I instantly got decent employment, at a level I deserved, that was well above what Canadians were grudgingly offering, indicates not only that the economy south of the border was so much stronger; but also that there were some other clear factors impeding my progress in several larger Anglophone cities in Canada.
Oh, by the way. None of the above applies to Francophone Canada. They love Yanks. They think (for some bizarre reason) that it's "Québec et les EE.UU. contre Canada" (Quebec and the United States against [English-speaking] Canada).
-- Modified on 10/9/2002 6:44:43 PM
sorry couldn't resist that. Hey we even have indoor plumbing, just got that last year though.lol.. Oh no Im on a roll.lol... Hey we have Dana up here , for now anyway..we have to be civilized..