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.
One of the best Universities and provinces is Vancouver , BC.
Tell your daughter to inquire about University of British Columbia.
Good Luck!
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.
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 ? .