This
article is essentially a simplistic comparison between the United States and
Canada, in which the latter generally comes out the winner. The author begins by
establishing his credentials – six weeks spent in Canada, driving across about
one-quarter of its width, covering less than 1% of its land mass (this place is
HUGE). The rest of his knowledge comes from reading.
I have
some credentials in this area, too – six decades spent in Canada. I have the
great pleasure of being born here and travelling across most of it. And living within 100 miles of the border
with the United States, but consciously choosing never to cross that border. [I
did as a much younger man, and did not find it appealing. But that’s a whole
‘nother story.]
This
author has got a lot right in his story. But there is too much wrong or
misunderstood to just let it go. And contrary to the usual perception of
Canadians as unfailingly polite, I’m going to exercise editor’s privilege here
and insert my comments or rebuttals (in bold, for emphasis), wherever I damn
well please.
Paul Richard Harris, Editor
Axis of Logic
A few summers ago, I spent six weeks in Canada, as
part of a 10,000-mile Great Lakes Circle tour. From Pigeon River on Lake
Superior to Kingston on Lake Ontario, I drove and camped my way across Ontario.
On Manitoulin Island, I went on a fishing charter captained by a retired nickel
miner named Tom Power. The Nickel Belt is a stronghold of Canada’s most
socialistic party, the New Democrats. When the conversation turned to politics
(as it often did with Canadians during the George W. Bush years), Tom made a
statement that would have tabbed him as a Marxist crank on the other side of
the lakes.
[Just
to be clear, Manitoulin is nearby but isn’t really part of the Nickel Belt. And
the New Democrats (or NDP) might be the closest thing we have to ‘socialist’,
but no rational person could think of their policies as socialist. In fact,
from a US perspective, this whole country is generally ‘socialist’ because we
actually have social programming designed to cradle the weak and unfortunate.]
“I don’t understand why anyone has to earn more
than $200,000 a year,” he said. “I mean, honestly, what are you going to do
with all that money?”
[Tom
had a good point.]
Right then, my rod bent toward the water, so I had
to abandon our discussion of economics to land a six-pound salmon. But I
thought about it again in Toronto, when I visited Jane and Finch, an immigrant
neighborhood that was reputedly the most dangerous turf in the Greater Toronto
Area. I expected to see Johnny Too Bads in beehive rasta caps, and dingy
apartment blocks with smoke burns around broken windows. To my disappointment,
it didn’t look like a slum at all. It looked like my grandparents’
civil-service ghetto in a suburb of Washington, D.C. The housing projects were
clean white monuments. Ranch houses looked out on barbered greensward parks.
“There have been some shootings lately,” a
Guyanese-Canadian bureaucrat told me at the Community Information Center inside
the local shopping mall. “But we don’t have ghettoes here like you would think
of in the United States. We have scatter housing. We try not to concentrate poverty
in one place.”
[Jane
and Finch is not a nice area. But it is nothing compared to MANY blighted areas
in the US. Although I haven’t live there since the 1970s, I was born and raised
in Toronto and know the city very well.]
The manager of my guest house was a Bronx
expatriate who understood both his countries better than they understood
themselves.
“If you want to see your name in lights, go to the
United States,” he explained. “If you want a stable middle-class existence, go
to Canada.”
This was all different than the extremes of
opulence and destitution I was used to at home, but I didn’t really experience
culture shock until I crossed back into the United States, on the tramp ferry
from Kingston to Cape Vincent, N.Y. After weeks of driving through Canada’s
orderly fishing ports and suburbanized metropolises, I was suddenly seeing …
rural slums. Small towns blighted by abandoned gas stations. Dingy farmhouses
with empty, eyeless windows. At the Erie County Fair, outside Buffalo, I
witnessed a pageant of American poverty: a man swinging his lone leg between a
pair of crutches, a phlegmy, smoky laugh gurgling from a mouth with
intermittent teeth, a woman whose clothes were so packed with flesh she had to
swing her shoulders robotically just to move forward.
I hadn’t noticed such poverty in Ontario. More
significantly, I hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t noticed. For most of the summer,
I’d been traveling through a country that tries to drag all its citizens as
close to a middle-class lifestyle as possible. Southern Ontario is the least
exotic place on Earth. What’s remarkable about a nation full of people with
good teeth and summer cottages?
[If Mr
McClelland didn’t notice poverty in Ontario, he wasn’t looking. It is
everywhere, particular among our Indigenous Peoples. All things are relative, I
guess, because that socialism I spoke of before generally does manage to keep
people on life support. Barely.]
That’s why I wasn’t surprised by the Luxembourg
Income Study’s announcement that Canada has surpassed the United States as the
country with the most prosperous middle class. I assumed
they’d always been ahead of us, or at least since the Guess Who
hollered, “I don’t need your ghetto scenes.”
[Once
again, everything is relative. Our middle class has – in ONE STUDY – recently
been seen to have surpassed that of the US. So what? You can step in dog poop,
which smells; or you can step in sheep poop, which doesn’t. Either way, you’re
stepping in poop.]
As Americans, we like to be No. 1 at everything,
including being average. We’re still the wealthiest country, controlling 39
percent of the world’s financial assets — three times as much as runner-up
Japan. But losing the middle-class crown is a blow to our self-image as the
Land of Opportunity, and the surest sign that the Great Recession and the Great
Divergence have permanently altered our nation’s character.
To understand why Canada’s middle class is faring
better, I talked to four Canadians who span the nation geographically, from
Ottawa to Vancouver, and politically, from welfare-state liberal to prairie
libertarian. The incipient reasons, they all agreed, are the increase in prices
of Canadian exports, especially oil from Alberta and Newfoundland, and the
crash of the American housing market, which would never have happened in a
country as risk-averse as Canada.
[FYI –
Ottawa to Vancouver is about half way. It’s not really ‘spanning’.]
“There’s no way in Canada you’re going to get a
zero-down mortgage,” said Jason Clemens, executive vice president of Vancouver’s
Fraser Institute. “We have a much more conservative banking culture. Our banks
hold all the mortgages they sell. They never got into the bundling.”
[Rubbish.
I am a Director of a Credit Union and I can assure you that mortgage bundles
ARE sold by Canadian financial institutions. The difference is they aren’t sold
like lottery tickets – there are controls on them.]
But the Canadian middle class hasn’t taken the lead
because it’s getting richer, said Miles Corak, a professor of economics at the
University of Ottawa. Median incomes have been flat since 1980. It’s taken the
lead because the American middle class is getting poorer.
[Precisely.
So how exactly is that a credit to Canada?]
“What we’ve seen is a troubling decade for the U.S.
in the 2000s,” Corak said. “We didn’t get hit by the recession and the dot-com
bust.”
Beneath Canada’s contemporary advantages, though,
are historic factors that make it a more equal society than the United States.
No. 1 is the fact that the nation is too far north to have supported plantation
agriculture. Because of that, Canada never imported slaves, and never created
an economic structure whose success depended on the permanent exploitation and
marginalization of an ethnic underclass.
[This
is flat out wrong. Canada was very active in the slave trade until it was
outlawed in 1833 (which is, admittedly, before we were Canada – but you get my
drift). We did not, as noted, have a plantation economy; but slaves were still
valuable commodities in Canada. Our economy still depends very much on an
underclass – it just isn’t ethnically derived.]
“The conservative movement in the States has been
more successful in creating a low-wage economy,” said Rick Smith, executive
director of the Broadbent Institute, a progressive think tank founded by a
former leader of the New Democratic Party. (Smith was speaking from the
Canadian Labour Congress convention in Montreal, which allowed him to point out
that Canada’s 33 percent unionization rate is triple ours.)
[So why
not reference the vigourous efforts by government and business leaders right
across this country to abolish unionism?]
Canada’s high school graduation rate is 8 points
higher than ours, and Canadians claim it’s because their education system is
less segregated by race and class.
“One of the things that doesn’t happen in Canada to
the extent it does in the U.S., we don’t have large-scale concentrations of
poverty,” Clemens said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a public school where
all the students are poor. Canada doesn’t have the slave history that the U.S.
struggles with. We had immigration, but we never undertook these large-scale
concentrations. At my kids’ school in Vancouver, you have kids from fully
subsidized social housing sitting side by side with kids from different backgrounds.
The kids have those social role models.”
[Canada
HAD immigration?? We are a nation of immigrants (my apologies to First Nations
Peoples). Toronto, referenced earlier, is the most ethnically diverse city in
the world. But the author is correct that rich and poor and all the colours of the rainbow mingle much better here
than in the US – except for the private school kids, and that is really only a
small subset.]
(Lest Canadians get too smug, the poverty among
Natives is shameful: Their incomes are 30 percent below the national average.
In Thunder Bay, I saw Cree beggars panhandling in front of the casino, and
families pulling up to grocery store in overloaded cars with sagging shock
absorbers. But aboriginals make up only 4 percent of the population, and
colonization didn’t create the same level of historic resentment as
enslavement.)
[I’m
grateful the author acknowledged our deplorable history with our Indigenous
Peoples. But to qualify it by saying they make up only 4% of our population is
a low blow.]
Canada also benefits just by sharing a border and a
language with the United States. We spend 4.2 percent of our GDP on the
military — one of the highest rates in the world. Canada only has to spend 1.3
percent of its GDP on tanks and bombs, because we’re not going to tolerate an invasion
of our next-door neighbor (and No. 1 source of oil). That frees up their budget
to support a single-payer healthcare system, and to subsidize university
tuition. A year at the University of Toronto, Canada’s most prestigious
college, costs about $12,000.
“[E]ducational attainment in the United States has
risen far more slowly than in much of the industrialized world over the last
three decades,” the New York Times wrote in an article on Canada’s
triumphant middle class. “Americans between the ages of 55 and
65 have literacy, numeracy and technology skills that are above average
relative to 55- to 65-year-olds in the rest of the industrialized world … Those
between 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries, well behind their
counterparts in Canada.”
While those factors contribute to Canada’s smaller
underclass, the English-speaking superpowers siphon off some of its would-be
upper class. In the U.S., the top 1 percent of earners take home 47 percent of
income; in Canada, it’s 37 percent. There are plenty of rich and famous
Canadians, from Steve Nash to Conrad Black to William Shatner, but most of them
went to the U.S. or England to get that way. (The “tall poppy syndrome” is a
real thing in Canada. Black renounced his Canadian citizenship to accept a life
peerage in the British House of Lords, calling Canada “an oppressive little
world” and “a Third World dump run by raving socialists.” His lordship’s
attempt to reclaim it, so he could avoid serving a sentence for fraud in an
American prison, provoked a nationwide outburst of schadenfreude.)
[Conrad
Black is hardly a ‘tall poppy’. He’s a big shithead. But he renounced his
Canadian citizenship in a spat with a former Prime Minister and in order to get
the Queen of England to make him a Knight. And also because his wife is
British.]
Economically, Canadians have both a lower ceiling
and a higher floor. Taxes are higher. In Ontario, federal and provincial sales
taxes total 13 percent, and the top tax rate kicks in at $136,000. But the
minimum wage is $11 an hour, the lowest income tax rate is 4 percent, and the
working income tax benefit is more generous than our earned income tax credit.
“If I’ve got the capacities and the real talents, I
would do better in Manhattan than Toronto,” Corak said, echoing my Toronto
innkeeper, “and if I come from a lower socioeconomic level, I’d rather live in
Toronto.”
Canada is a land of averaging out. The United
States is a land of extremes, something I never really understood until I
visited our neighbor. We have Harvard University, but we also have inner-city
school districts with 50 percent dropout rates. We have the most billionaires,
but our economic inequality more closely resembles the Third World than it does
other industrialized nations. Canada’s middle class is No. 1 because we had a
bummer of a decade, but unless we can solve our political and economic
divisions, it’s likely to remain No. 1. It’s impossible for the U.S. to emulate
Canada’s success, because Canadians deliberately adopt un-American policies,
just to establish a distinct national identity. To quote a T-shirt I saw in the
Sarnia Duty Free: “Canadian: An Unarmed American With Health Care.”
“There are a lot of reasons that Canada will do
pretty well,” said Steve Lafleur of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in
Winnipeg. One is immigration, essential to a country with a below-replacement
birthrate. American immigration policy is focused on controlling the flow from
a much poorer nation on our border. Because of its geographic isolation, Canada
is able to pick and choose who enters the country. “We’ve welcomed the best and
the brightest. The closing of the American border is going to hurt in
attracting the talent to build Fortune 500 companies.”
In 1904, Canadian Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier —
the man whose face is on the $5 bill — made this prediction: “The nineteenth
century was the century of the United States. I think we can claim that Canada
will fill the twentieth century.”
He was only 100 years off.
[Believe
it when I see it. But, for the record, aiming to be the next ‘United States’ is
a really poor goal to be shooting at.]
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