Canada, O Canada

It is challenging to meld peace order and good government to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I think we could settle on peace, order, good government, and happy, eh?!

I suspect very long term; we will be pre-eminent in North America; it won't be something we actively do or seek out; it will be more the result of what happens to the south of us. 

One of my great grandfathers was from Canada. I've visited the Niagara Falls area, but I've always wanted to go to Perth, where one of my great-great aunts lived. The photos are so beautiful. 

My daughter has already expressed interest in going to college in Canada. Assuming Covid is better next year, we are planning a road trip to Winnipeg to check it out. I think she just wants out, and sees Canada as "America, but fewer people and less stress." We'll see where her emotions are in a year ;)

Thank you Jeanne for starting this topic. I do have plenty of thoughts about it that I hope I can adequately express. 

As a Canadian I grew up like everyone else around me looking south of our border, shaking my head and thanking my lucky stars that I lived in a more civilized country. I took this attitude with me when I moved to the United States only to comically come across American's who looked south to the old confederate states and thank their lucky stars that they lived in a civilized state. That taught me a lot. We as Canadians are accustomed to believe that the worst cannot happen to us, that all those horrible things we read about on the news happens in America and we are safe. I used to believe this too, except that it is an illusion and one that needs shattering if we as a people are to grow and mature into a better nation than we are already. 

Growing up in Toronto felt very civilized, very orderly. I had an instinctive trust in the institutions of power, the government, the police etc.... As an adult I now have precisely zero faith in those same institutions but that's a topic for a different day. There were several points in my life when the brutal reality of what other parts of Canada are like intruded into my own consciousness. In elementary school one of my teachers told me that the reservations where some of our indigenous peoples live are like third world countries, devoid of adequate sanitation, running water etc... I couldn't believe my ears at that time but later I learned she was right. Years later living in Montreal I met some young people from Winnipeg who were first nations. They described such incredible racism to me that my eyes bulged. It was maybe a year later that Macleans magazine (a popular political journal) published an edition with a cover calling Winnipeg the most racist city in Canada and once I read the piece it confirmed what I had already heard before. I had other experiences also that taught me that my rosy perception was heavily skewed towards the fantasy rather than the reality.

At age 19 my mother had a nervous breakdown, she lost her job and we were almost homeless. In the end we moved to probably the cheapest apartments in the city that weren't government subsidized. I remember the cockroaches, the bed bugs, the unbearable heat in the summer, the cold in the winter. This wasn't first world living but we always had healthcare and I received welfare benefits that year as I was trying to finish high school and keep me and mom financially afloat. I went away to Queens university studying with the children of many wealthy people and I resented them. I hated them for how easy life was for them, how cheerful they were, how I felt judged for being poor, I was angry in a very deep way as I just struggled to survive on my own. I learned then that Canada still has classes and that I just did not fit in.

At age 22 I witnessed my first shooting outside my mother's apartment building. I witnessed other shootings later on as well, for some reason I didn't feel fear, it didn't matter much to me if I died, I think that's an attitude I still carry, it's why not much scares me. In 2010 Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto and I thought people were nuts. For the first time in my life I realized that there were a lot of angry people around me who voted conservative - this had never occurred to me before. I just always took it for granted that people were better than that, well lesson learned thoroughly since then. I saw in elections from 2010 onwards the seesaw of progressive/conservative victories and how the failure of progressives to deliver on their promises results in a right wing backlash that is mean, small minded, vindictive and petty. Exhibit A was Rob Ford, but this continued with Jason Kenney in Alberta (who I instinctively feel is in the pocket of the oil industry), Doug Ford as Ontario Premier, Francois Legault in Quebec (who is less venal than the others I mentioned) and of course the clown of Canadian clowns Andrew Scheer. Now obviously this is not nice of me to say, I have political biases I admit and I apologize if I offend anyone who likes these people - this is just my opinion. My big fear is that Trudeau has alienated a lot of people not because of policy so much as because of all the petty scandals that swirl around him - I sigh and roll my eyes every time something new comes up. This failure of his may easily translate to a much less enlightened government in the future as lefties like myself move to support the NDP and the conservatives attract more angry people to support them.

I've also seen the rise of big business as Toronto has grown exponentially since my childhood. The rise of endless numbers of luxury condo buildings, sky scrapers, luxury shops in malls, my mother complains that the city is pricing regular people out (a complaint I hear a lot actually). The city has become much more glitzy, glamourous and exciting since I was little, this has been especially noticeable in the last ten years. And while for me this is kind of exciting because I like shopping and selfishly I can afford nice things now, I see the resentment on many peoples faces as prices go up and life becomes harder. This is not just my hometown however - Vancouver is also experiencing much the same thing. My best friend who lives there complains about not being able to afford a decent family home even though both her and her husband are working professionals because in her words all the wealthy Chinese people have bought them up. I hear this complaint a lot from people in B.C., it is racist on the surface but reflects the reality on the ground and the resentment local people feel towards rich foreigners coming in and buying up all the space for themselves.

There is an irony in this however which I believe must be lost on the wealthy foreigners. They choose to dump their money in safe countries that have stable political situations but because of how selfish they are they then create unstable political climates simply by pissing off enough of the locals. Because Canadians believe that the worst cannot happen to us I'm afraid that we are asleep at the wheel and may wake up too late. I've seen resentment grow and I've seen the rhetoric get more belligerent. If American corporations increasingly choose to come north I am afraid that they will influence our politics in directions that are ultimately good for no one.
America has always been an extractive country, a vampire that sucks the blood of it's population to feed it's own insatiable greed and which then discards the bodies like refuse on the road. Canada has long said that it's people are it's strength and that therefore the nation should look after it's people, I hope they continue to try and do this but I worry about the future when I see how angry some people are becoming. More American influence in Canada cannot be a good thing, long term it will create the same conditions there that exist right here where I sit in New England, where people are angry in a way I've never seen before (rightfully so).
So yeah I worry about the future of Canada because I see the patterns of history playing out. But ultimately I don't think it will get too much worse before people decide to turn it around and make it better.

@natalie

Thanks for bringing up the perspective of indigenous people. I went to college in New York, 20 miles from the US-Canada border. While there, I took an "Intro to Canada" course, where I learned about the Westminster system of government, the development of French Canadian identity, and Canada's other regional contours (the "Wests," Maritime provinces). But in college, I also interacted with the Mohawk Tribe at Akwesasne, which is a nation that straddles the St. Lawrence River and covers territory in New York, Ontario, and Quebec. That contact with native people helped me understand the arbitrariness of nation states.

Akwesasne, which straddles so many borders, has attracted lots of journalistic attention over the years. But to the Mohawk at Akwesasne, the American vs. Canadian distinction doesn't matter. To them, their homeland has been arbitrarily split up by two colonial powers, and they can recite all of the ways they've been royally screwed over by corporations and government officials on both sides of the border. 

Part 2:

Which brings me to my next point; we have got to start letting go of the sacrosanctness of nation states. All modern nation states are infected by wetiko, which means all modern nation states are girded by an infrastructure of extraction and insatiable greed (Canadian poet and onetime Alberta oil worker Mathew Henderson explores the theme of Canada's infection with an extractive mindset in his collection The Lease, btw).The differences between Canada's infection with wetiko and America's is only one of degrees. So if all we're doing is comparing how country x is so much more progressive than country y, then we aren't exercising the true potential of our imaginations as we try to dismantle the old paradigm and create a more beautiful world.

The coming migration of millions of Americans to Canada will be accompanied by the movement of billions of more people elsewhere in the world as Earth's climate changes exponentially. The potential  upside of these mass migrations is that we will stop being so bound to the colonial construct of the nation state. The more beautiful world I imagine will be one where networks of sovereign communities cooperate to steward Gaia and where no country will ever be preeminent because there simply won't be any "countries" or borders as we understand them.

In the short term, I wouldn't worry about Canada moving right as a result of Americans moving north. There's going to be so much discontinuous change in culture in the coming decades that the left-right binary may become irrelevant.

@jeanne-mayell

Thank you Jeanne.

Sharon

@saibh

One of the best Universities and provinces is Vancouver , BC.

Tell your daughter to inquire about University of British Columbia.

Good Luck!

@jeanne-mayell

Your prediction on realestate is interesting.

Looking at the closures of many businesses ; I assumed realestate would drop between 2021-2024 and start to rise thereafter.

Thank you for your O Canada Post.....appreciate!

Warm wishes.

Sharon

@skbm Keep in mind that real estate can only get traction when Canada borders open again.  So yes, I was looking more long term.

Hi Coyote thank you so much for bringing up the need for us to reexamine and let go of nation states. In some ways I completely agree, nation states are artificial constructs that frequently divide up people that do not wish to be divided or that are not placed in accurate spots. Frequently people who live near borders have more in common with those that live on the other side of their border than they do with the rest of their country. When I moved to Kingston Ontario a 3 hour drive east of Toronto I met quite a few francophone families there. These people were not Quebecois, they were Franco Ontarian but it's interesting how the further east you go (and the closer you get to the Quebec border) the more of them there are. The people who live in the maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick etc... are historically similar to the people of Maine and other parts of northern New England, there has been a lot of cross migration in this region resulting in a lot of French and Old English last names around here (names that are very very Quebecois or Old New England).Culturally these people are more similar to each other than they are to other regions of their respective nations, they are divided by politics not by culture or history. 

I see the same patterns everywhere I look. The region of Alsace - Lorraine in France straddles the German border and has changed hands many times over the centuries. The people there are more German than French. On the border of Russia and the Baltic states where I was born the same phenomena can be seen, humanity doesn't neatly divide itself into tribes but rather one tribe flows into the other like a river thereby connecting us all. 

Having said all that however, while your vision of a world of unity without nation states sounds beautiful to me and is a world I want to live in, I cannot imagine it coming soon. This vision is actually also something Marx predicted. He predicted that capitalism would eventually collapse in on itself and that gradually we would evolve to a society of socialism without borders. So there is some precedence for this view point. I wish so much it could happen but until the majority of our species lets go of their egotistical and selfish impulses and chooses love over fear I don't see it happening. I can see pockets of such communities coming into existence but those communities will be threatened by the less enlightened among us, it may take centuries for things to evolve to a better place. 

I pray and hope and imagine a better world, maybe that helps it become a little more likely to happen.

Posted by: @natalie

humanity doesn't neatly divide itself into tribes but rather one tribe flows into the other like a river thereby connecting us all.

I so agree, Natalie! Ecology works this way too. There aren't hard borders between a desert and a humid forest. Rather, each biome grades into the other by degrees, over the course of dozens or hundreds of miles. And yes, I grew up in and currently live in New England (in Rhode Island now), so I'm familiar with the cross-border Quebecois and Acadian linkages. What also bothers me about nation states is that they are a delusional declaration of exclusive ownership to all land and resources within arbitrary political lines, when really land and natural resources are outgrowths of Gaia and can't belonging exclusively to anyone.

I didn't know about Marx's vision of a borderless future. I think because I'm young enough to potentially live into the 22nd century, I think a lot about what world I REALLY want to see in my lifetime. So I'm more inclined to think big while also keeping the near term in mind. You're right, it might take centuries for a borderless world of cooperative sovereign communities to fully flourish, but that doesn't mean I can't start planting the seeds of that world right now ? .