If Canada is smart they'll figure out a way to incentivize businesses and workers from knowledge economies like the coastal blue states to move there. I'd love to live and work in Canada but I'm not taking a massive pay cut to do it.
I refused moving from Canada to the US multiple times because the extra pay wasn't worth the downsides. There is value in things that are hard to translate into simple numbers like money. And that's as an immigrant to Canada.
Living in Canada gives access to universal healthcare that won't bankrupt you if you need medical help, whereas in the US getting sick can financially collapse everything you've worked for - all so some CEO can have their yacht. Chances are also significantly higher in the US that you will be shot dead in a grocery store or movie theater.
Maybe it's because I've lived in Canada for 4+ decades now, but I wouldn't exactly call what we have access to universal healthcare. It's hard to find a family doctor, if you do find a family doctor, whether you can get reasonable appointment access, is highly dependent on the doctor and not always available. If you do get an appointment and you need to see a specialist or other service that needs a referral you often face a substantial wait list. It's nothing like what it was in the 80's and 90's where appointments were always easily same day or next day and wait lists were short or non existent. To me this is just broken in the opposite way that america's system is broken.
Also, the gun thing makes me think people don't understand statistics. The number of gun related deaths in the usa was 14.6 per 100k people in 2021 and around 0.5 per 100k in Canada, so yes it's drastically higher in the usa but that ignores that 60% of those are suicides and it ignores the highly geographically concentrated nature of the problem.You avoid a handful of neighborhoods and think happy thoughts and your gun death risk basically disappears. unadjusted its a ~1% risk over an 80 year lifetime in the USA vs 0.04% in canada. When you take into account reality and realize you aren't suicidal and you aren't going to visit or live in that tiny handful of extremely high risk neighborhoods the USA risk also drops to almost zero, even over a lifetime.
Canada is a country that takes better care the people living there, and that changes how people behave. Public health care, less inequality, no school shootings... overall a more caring culture where I am happy for my children to grow up.
I lived for a few years in the UK and it reminds me a bit of that.
> I'd love to live and work in Canada but I'm not taking a massive pay cut to do it.
Then you have your answer. Canada is not "US with free healthcare". It has a different history, economic and political setup. A quarter of the population are Francophone, and they govern very differently from the rest of Canada. Canada's wealth is also concentrated in the mining and natural resources industries, not in knowledge economy services. You cannot tweak policy here and there and turn it into a nation of SaaS billionnaires any more than you could in the UK or France.
For a real-world juxtaposition of the differences, think of Blackberry. In 2007, they saw the iPhone and told their partners at AT&T that the bandwidth load a portable Youtube/Internet device would put on AT&T's towers would cause call interruptions. Lo and behold, they did: AT&T was synonymous with dropped calls from 2007-2010 [0], when they finally spent billions into upgrading their towers to 4G. Blackberry ultimately lost the handset market, but for many other reasons besides their oft-mocked reaction to the iPhone.
I suspect they'll have to fry the housing crisis fish first, it doesn't matter how favorable your business environment is if nearly no one can afford to move and live there.
Housing is absolutely insane up here. At least Carney seems to want to tackle the supply side[1] instead of adding more tax breaks and savings schemes for buyers.
You should read his plan again. It's not for you, it's for business and/or government owning rental property that you will then pay to rent. It's going to enrich large companies like Brookfield, not help the average person own a home. The part about manufactured homes is also dumb. Unless he's invented better manufacturing technology, those are more expensive to build than stick frame.
This country is the second largest in the world and filled mainly of forests. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of land and construction materials at the same time.
This is not what the crisis is about. The housing crisis is not a lack of space to build nor a lack of materials. It's a lack of housing that's both desirable and affordable. Most people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere with nothing around, even if it costs very little. Look at Italy for example, they're giving houses in rural areas away for free, granted you agree to permanently live there, and they still don't have much in the way of takers.
To add more context, the point of the original quote* (and the paraphrase) is to draw attention to an ironic situation and perhaps offer some hope that the situation is fundamentally solvable.
> workers from knowledge economies like the coastal blue states to move there
In the 1980's a British researcher living in the U.S. became angry with the election of Ronald Reagan and his desire of using A.I. research for military purposes. He then moved to Toronto.[1] Last year that scientist, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, received the Nobel Prize for his research in A.I. that helped turn Toronto into a world hub in technology.
In the early 2000's it was the turn of an American scientist, angry with the policies of George W. Bush, moving to Edmonton, Alberta. This year that scientist Dr. Richard S. Sutton won the Turing prize for his research on Reinforcement Learning.
I have hopes that Donald Trump might become the best president that Canada never had.
Canada has good universities, but not many notable tech companies. The last big one was RIM and they collapsed under the iPhone. Shopify seems to be doing OK though.
RIM was already dying technically. They had a few corporate-friendly features (push notifications, some good security features) but even by the standards of the 2000s their software was lousy and the hardware unremarkable. It looked like the same problem as Nokia at the time, and Google a decade later, where the management were so busy milking the cash cow that they neglected long-term R&D and responding to market trends. I think even without the iPhone to copy from, Android would have killed them because the tech stack was a generation newer and far more capable.
That's not going to happen because the labor markets are fundamentally different. USA has a drastically stronger capital market that invests dramatically more in startups. While this is true, the wages will always be dramatically higher and the growth in jobs will always be dramatically more in the usa. After those companies grow decently, Canada will be the first or second stop for those USA startups looking to save some dough on wages hiring cheaper labor and as a place that will be much easier to migrate even cheaper third world labor to for a similar, cheaper purpose as hiring Canadian. Americans moving to Canada for Programming jobs will be ideological, not sound financial decision based.
This is a surprising win for an incumbent party. Whenever I look at basic life issues in Canada I'm blown away. Somehow salaries for engineers are about half what they are in the US, but real estate prices are comparable in large cities. And nation wide the national come price is 678k compared to around 420k in US. Who does this work for?
The liberals have moderated a bit. I remember seeing an ad saying that if elected they would remove trade barriers between Canadian provinces, which is pretty crazy that they exist in the first place. Free trade within your borders should be the starting ante for a country
Finally, there was the increase in immigration which no one really seemed to ask for, that they're also pulling back now due to backlash.
Anyway, I don't really see the tide stemming but who knows. I can't remember a time in the US where an incumbent party has won on so many negatives.
When Carney became a candidate for the Liberal Party leader, he seemed to mimic most of the Conservative talking points, i.e. get rid of carbon tax, etc.
But the 51st state/tariff talk from the south overrode whatever problems Canadians seemed to bitch about daily in 2024.
The immigration increase was a surprise for most Canadians - increase immigration by 4x without corresponding increase in support costs???
You have to look at all the parties and how they traditionally align to understand what happened. We have two very far left parties (green and NDP),a fairly far left party (Liberals) that is historically closer to center left a center right party (conservatives) and in quebec a quebec nationalist party (bloc). What we had this election was a massive move to center right with a big upswing in conservative votes and at the same time we had an utter collapse of the far left NDP and green party vote which mostly went liberal and a softening of support for bloc in Quebec that mostly went liberal. So the conservatives captured a percent of the popular vote that would have been a staggering majority at any other time and still lost because the concentration of the very far left vote into the liberals overwhelmed it.
I would also say the liberals have not moderated a bit, they just said and did some disingenuous things to trick people into thinking this guy was more like Chretien, when his books read like the green party mixed with greed. Time will tell if this view proves correct or not.
Extremely rare and improbable. It took the left wing of Canada to intentionally sabotage themselves and shift politics to the right. A bizarre choice with no benefit to themselves. Canada is no longer left wing I guess?
>Whenever I look at basic life issues in Canada I'm blown away. Somehow salaries for engineers are about half what they are in the US, but real estate prices are comparable in large cities. And nation wide the national come price is 678k compared to around 420k in US. Who does this work for?
Senior IT positions are more like 3x the salary in the USA.
Housing is much worse than that. Shack in Canada, Mansion in the USA for the same pricing. Housing supply is greatly reduced by governments, housing demand is greatly increased by the federal government.
>The liberals have moderated a bit. I remember seeing an ad saying that if elected they would remove trade barriers between Canadian provinces, which is pretty crazy that they exist in the first place. Free trade within your borders should be the starting ante for a country
Mulroney, Chretien, and Harper had significant majority governments who attempted multiple times to remove those trade barriers. there's a 0% chance Carney will be able to remove these barriers. In fact I predict more trade barriers will be going up soon.
It's not typically a huge problem because Canada is ridiculously wide. We are 2 hours from the USA for trade; but multiple days away from trading interprovincially. So we traditionally just trade with the usa, but TRUMP.
>Finally, there was the increase in immigration which no one really seemed to ask for, that they're also pulling back now due to backlash.
Basically didnt even come up in the election. It was one of the censored subjects.
>Anyway, I don't really see the tide stemming but who knows. I can't remember a time in the US where an incumbent party has won on so many negatives.
Consider the media. The incumbents gives billions of $ to the media who write puff pieces.
China interfered in our election to benefit the liberals. The state media wrote "Carney being targeted by china" but that is to say Carney was being targeted with SUPPORT.
Popularity polls always showed Polievre as a deeply unliked candidate, even within Conservative voters. It seems like many Conservatives remained loyal to their party while pinching their noses at Polievre, who lost in his own riding. He has not announced his resignation as party leader yet, though.
The leader of the social democratic party NDP did announce his resignation last night as he also lost his seat in parliament.
> Polievre, who lost in his own riding. He has not announced his resignation as party leader yet, though
His campaign against Mark Carney came down to his argument that Carney was not a legitimate PM due to being appointed by his party following Trudeau's resignation, rather than by competing and winning a parliamentary seat in an election.
Now the tables have turned: Carney has won his seat in the election, Polievre has lost his. Will Polievre hold himself to the same standard he held Carney to?
That was always a dumb argument. First, because our laws do not require the prime minister to be a member of parliament. Second, because Carney called for an election right away after becoming PM, which is a sensible thing to do anyway.
Mark Carney is most popular Prime Minister in history of Canada. 1.5 million more votes than anyone ever before.
Liberals at 45 year high.
Pierre Poilievre(leader of conservatives) in a safe conservative riding lost. Bucking multiple political science theories.
Conservatives at 37 year high, gaining significantly in the election.
Jagmeet Singh(leader of NDP) resigns after losing the NDP party status and his own riding; at their debt level they likely stop existing as a party.
Green Party only earnt 1 seat; Elizabeth May's riding. Her co-leader came in 5th place in his riding.
Very significant national unity crisis is now happening. Left wing no longer exists in Canada.
Carney to immediately start negotiating new trade and security agreement with Trump. Which is significantly more than CUSMA ever was. Estimated to add ~150 billion additional to the deficit. Trudeau said Canada would stop existing as a country if this happened.
Canada's population grew by over 3 million since the last election. So yes, the parties will get more votes. That combined with the utter collapse of the NDP and Green party votes, meant more vote share goes to the Liberals and Conservatives.
The left wing has been rotting out from under the NDP's guidance for years. They are no longer a grass roots party and are primarily controlled through their central offices (both federally and provincially). Provincially the NDPs have been moving towards the center to govern for years as well, just look at the Alberta and BC NDPs and their policies/actions.
The land on which those provinces sit are based on treaties signed between the First Nations and the government of Canada, not with the provinces, so that settles that.
This. Exactly. Alberta and Saskatchewan did not exist as independent colonies. Treaties were with the federal government. This is a non-starter and will never happen as WEXIT separatists dream it could.
Danielle Smith’s hands will be full with a healthcare contracts scandal that looks like it may be really bad, and also the embarrassment of aligning herself with a foreign dictator who wants to take Canada over.
The amount of Canadians that think they have a first amendment right to free speech is growing. The only way to avoid this is going to be actually doing a good job of lowering income equality and lowering living costs (as % of income).
(Take your pick as what counts as the 1st Canadian amendment but it's not free speech [1])
Jagmeet Singh, NDP leader (left-wing, typically blue collar worker-centric), also didn't win a seat (he came in 3rd place in his riding).
Singh announced he would be stepping down as NDP leader (many noted that he had qualified for his pension recently). NDP lost many seats (> 2/3 pre-election seats) and official party status (12 MPs min).
Looks like many typical NDP voters jumped to the Liberal bandwagon to fight off the threat from down south. I hope that's what POTUS was expecting when he started the 51st state trolling.
And people were worried about political/election interference from China...
A weird read on the situation. Canada would have a conservative government today if Trump hadn't pushed tariffs back in February. PP just didn't have a strong "rah rah" response to those and it probably cost the conservatives the election.
Carney is also very shrewd. He quickly adopted the most popular conservative positions as his own (e.g. "axe the tax") to appeal to conservative voters. The culture war, meanwhile, is very much here. Similar to the US, conservatives did surprisingly well with young men[1].
I presume it means something like, you can get arrested for not having your kids attend public school.
If that was their point, I suspect it's over-exaggerated, if not a complete distortion. Are private schools legal in Canada? I'm not Canadian, but a quick web search seems to indicate that they exist. Is homeschooling legal? Again, a web search seems to indicate that it is.
Private schools and homeschooling both very much a thing. In Ontario there is even a publically funded Catholic school system parallel to the generic one.
