News   Nov 01, 2024
Toronto’s Bike Lane Feud at an All-Time High
 2K     14 
News   Nov 01, 2024
Bayview Village Resubmission More Than Doubles Height Near Bessarion Station
 2.5K     3 
News   Nov 01, 2024
Drone Flight Captures Cladding Progress at Menkes' Maison 77 Clarendon
 740     0 

MacLean's: How Canada stole the American Dream

Macleans Canada Day features were a bit of an embarrassment. Their "Canada Day Features" were...

Special Canada Day Report: How Canada stole the American Dream
A nation living in sin: In Canada, we're 'shacking up' instead of marrying. The U.S. would be appalled.
Good health, for less: We're much healthier than Americans, even though we pay half as much for health care.
The insatiable north: We have more sex and more adventurous sex [then our American cousins], but fewer teen pregnancies and STDs.
The popular tourist: Americans stay in America, but 'world-aware' Canadians travel the globe

But yet Maclean's seems to be the type of magazine that would print an article complaining that Canadians compare themselves to Americans too much.

Their Canada Day Quiz, here, is heavy on pop culture and originally included two questions with incorrect answers. It featured the thoroughly debunked claim that the UN designated Toronto as the world's most multicultural city and stated that John Turner was the shortest-serving PM. Yeesh!
 
We do have it pretty good here in Canada, but it seems all we ever do is complain. Sometimes you'd think we lived in a third world hellhole based on the end-is-nigh newspaper articles I see every day.

However, constantly comparing ourselves to the US and gloating over every positive point is pretty embarrassing. Much of the wealth and prosperity we enjoy is precisely because we live next to the US, who has been happy to let us piggyback on their economy and the security their powerful army provides for many decades. Sure, let's give ourselves credit where due, but remember: pride cometh before the fall. And if the US goes into serious decline, Canada will decline along with it.
 
PukeGreen said:
We do have it pretty good here in Canada, but it seems all we ever do is complain. Sometimes you'd think we lived in a third world hellhole based on the end-is-nigh newspaper articles I see every day.

However, constantly comparing ourselves to the US and gloating over every positive point is pretty embarrassing. Much of the wealth and prosperity we enjoy is precisely because we live next to the US, who has been happy to let us piggyback on their economy and the security their powerful army provides for many decades. Sure, let's give ourselves credit where due, but remember: pride cometh before the fall. And if the US goes into serious decline, Canada will decline along with it.
Click to expand...

America doesn't let us do anything. Canada has earned it's prosperity.
 
America doesn't let us do anything. Canada has earned it's prosperity.
Click to expand...

Of course Canadians have worked hard for what we have, however, you have to admit that we have benefited from being located next to the largest economy in the world, and one with a free and open border we can use to exchange our resources and goods across. It is also fortunate that we can be the nation with the second largest landmass in the world, and yet having invested in a microscopic army in comparison to many others mainly because any potential aggressors know that invading or assaulting our country would raise the ire of the US military.

True the US has not "let" us do anything -- we have a mutually beneficial relationship, for the most part -- but if you look at history, or at much of the modern world, it is a rare occurrence to have a small and militarily weak nation prosper beside a powerful empire. If a nation like Canada had appeared in 1867 beside, say, Russia or China, we would have been assimilated long ago. I'm as proud a Canadian as the next guy, but this is just reality, and worth keeping in mind before we gloat too long and loudly that we're having a good year or two. It makes us look small and petty, frankly. It's also painfully shortsighted because like it our not our economies are tightly intertwined.
 
PukeGreen said:
potential aggressors know that invading or assaulting our country would raise the ire of the US military.
Click to expand...

This is the oft-used American argument (particularly after we refused to invade Iraq), as if we ought to be grateful that we are being "protected". Modern reality is very different. The idea that someone is going to invade us and that we need a military to prevent it, or that the US is protecting us is the stuff of bad Hollywood fiction.

Yes, we benefit from living next door to a large economy. But it doesn't mean the US is responsible for our success, as though they have consciously made certain efforts to help us out. Keep in mind that in many ways, they have done just the opposite - attempted through protectionist policies and government deals to take our resources and prevent our farmers, loggers, fishers, and filmmakers (to cite only a few examples) from prospering.
 
Every country makes the best of their position, including Canada. The US benefits from being beside Canada - we're their biggest trading partner after all. As for the military, the biggest threat to Canada is the United States. Not by military action, but by slow absorbtion by harmonizing policies. This has been slowly happening for decades, even as the two countries get farther apart socially.

The article would have been a lot more interesting if it had included other industrialized countries. I suspect we're somewhere between the US and Western Europe on most of the things they measured. We're missing out on a lot by not looking to Europe for ideas.
 
PukeGreen said:
Of course Canadians have worked hard for what we have, however, you have to admit that we have benefited from being located next to the largest economy in the world, and one with a free and open border we can use to exchange our resources and goods across. It is also fortunate that we can be the nation with the second largest landmass in the world, and yet having invested in a microscopic army in comparison to many others mainly because any potential aggressors know that invading or assaulting our country would raise the ire of the US military.

True the US has not "let" us do anything -- we have a mutually beneficial relationship, for the most part -- but if you look at history, or at much of the modern world, it is a rare occurrence to have a small and militarily weak nation prosper beside a powerful empire. If a nation like Canada had appeared in 1867 beside, say, Russia or China, we would have been assimilated long ago. I'm as proud a Canadian as the next guy, but this is just reality, and worth keeping in mind before we gloat too long and loudly that we're having a good year or two. It makes us look small and petty, frankly. It's also painfully shortsighted because like it our not our economies are tightly intertwined.
Click to expand...

"Mutually beneficial" is the key phrase. The US benefits from the goods that are traded to them as much as Canada does (although not necessarily in the same ways).

I would also agree with BuildTO that the idea Canada needs the US nearby to protect it is a pretty weak one.
 
CDL.TO said:
Their Canada Day Quiz, here, is heavy on pop culture and originally included two questions with incorrect answers. It featured the thoroughly debunked claim that the UN designated Toronto as the world's most multicultural city and stated that John Turner was the shortest-serving PM. Yeesh!
Click to expand...

That quiz was awful. I never did finish it, as if I care which comedian submitted a resume to a variety show, or negative-answer questions about obsure inventions.

That claim about the UN declaring Toronto the world's most multicultural city will never die, now will it?
 
syn said:
America doesn't let us do anything. Canada has earned it's prosperity.
Click to expand...
Canada has always benefited from its relationships with global powers, starting with Britain, and then the USA. In the mid-1800s only the massive military strength of the British Empire could stop the US from invading what would become Canada. The Duke of Wellington himself was pivitol in building the large forts in Upper and Lower Canada and in the Maritimes. The distraction and subsequent destruction of the US Civil War also protected Canada once the British built forts were outflanked by US western expansion.
 
Admiral Beez said:
Canada has always benefited from its relationships with global powers, starting with Britain, and then the USA. In the mid-1800s only the massive military strength of the British Empire could stop the US from invading what would become Canada. The Duke of Wellington himself was pivitol in building the large forts in Upper and Lower Canada and in the Maritimes. The distraction and subsequent destruction of the US Civil War also protected Canada once the British built forts were outflanked by US western expansion.
Click to expand...

Canada was a British colony at that point.
 
No, the trouble is that it's so difficult to arbitrarily claim that one city or another is more "diverse" than any other. For example, Miami has a higher percentage of the population that are immigrants. Do you go by % of people of certain ethnic backgrounds, or % of those who are immigrants, or % of those who are of a "visible minority"?

Toronto's immigration percentage will decline as the immigrants have children and the increasing population overall will increase the denominator while the numerator either plateaus, declines, or increases at a smaller rate.

Unquestionably, Toronto is a standout for both the numbers and depth of multiculturalism and diversity. But there isn't an easy way to quantify this.
 
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top