So what are the diffrences betwee America and Canada then? Eh?

Great Debates
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The thing is, regional differences overwhelm differences between the two countries, IMO. I’ve got friends from PEI, and they’re like Aliens or something. That culture is very different from what I’m used to in Alberta.

I’ve often said that the true alignments in North American run north-south, not east-west. For example, if you draw a line north-south through Alberta and down through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, etc., you’d find that most of the people have quite a bit in common. Denver seems quite similar to Edmonton and Calgary.

Likewise, Seattle and Vancouver could be sister cities. The East cost of the U.S. and Canada seem much alike, outside of the major metropolises.

On the other hand, if you draw your lines east-west, you rapidly find that the people are very different. Albertans don’t seem much like the people in the maritimes, and the residents of Colorado seem pretty far removed from either LA or New York.

But is there an overall difference, if you could average it all out? In other words, if you put all the Canadians and Americans in a big room, would you be able to separate them back out into their proper countries again just by looking at their various commonalities? I have my doubts.

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Which is also true of Australia, South Africa, and India. So are we to conclude that they’re all basically the same country as the United States and Canada?

What the heck are you talking about… who said anything about Canada being SPECIAL? Are you sure you’re reading the same thread as the rest of us?

There’s nothing about Canada, or any other country, that “deserves the protection of a separate country.” That’s nonsensical blather. Canada is a separate country for the same reason the United States is separate from the UK; because its citizens WANT it to be. All sovereign nation-states are expressions of their own will to exist. That’s true of Japan, China, Thailand, Norway, Russia, Brazil, ANY country - they are sovereign states because they possess the will and the means to be sovereign. Canada is sovereign because it has the will and the means to be sovereign - not because it “deserves” it. Who “deserves” what is irrelevant.

Why should the United States not be part of Mexico, or vice versa? Why shouldn’t New Zealand be part of Australia? Hey, here’s a good one; why shouldn’t Bangladesh be part of Pakistan? Because they choose not to be. Ultimately, an independent nation is just freedom of association writ large. The desire of the nation to BE a sovereign state is the only reason we have sovereign states.

NAFTA. Way ahead of you. It’s been in place damn near ten years now.

First of all, suggesting “user fees are irrelevant” is stupid. Of course it’s not irrelevant; it’s money the government is taking from you, often for services that just aren’t all that optional. I’d like to see you survive in California without a car. Do you know how much it costs to register a car in California? MY best friend paid $900 to get his new car plated. $900 US, mind you - about $1380 Canadian. I could register and Drive Clean my car for twelve years for that. If you can’t see how that’s the government taking money from you, you’re welcome to pay all my registration fees.

Secondly, if you’re defining “Standard of living” as being “net average annual income,” fine. But that’s the extent of the definition; don’t then pretend it means “quality of life.” It’s perfectly plausible to state that the USA could have a higher standard of living as per your definition but not be as good a place to live, due to factors besides average annual income. Have you balanced average income against the consumper price index? What about varying levels of risk aversion with respect to potential catastrophic medical costs? What about income distribution? Median as opposed to mean income? Crime rate? Life expectancy - Americans get sicker and die younger than Canadians, have you counted that? Why is LIFE EXPECTANCY less important than income? You can’t take it with you. What about racial and religious hatred and oppression? Political freedom? Quality of the local FM stations? It’s folly to assume standard of living = quality of life. I think we can safely assume Zimbabwe is a lot worse off than the USA, but the Canada-USA difference in income is not so dramatic.

Oh, dear. You were talking about taxes, and now suddenly you’re talking about exchange rate - two completely different things.

If you don’t even understand EXCHANGE RATE, you’ve a long way to go. A Canadian making the same as an American making $40,000 would not be making $40,000 CANADIAN, he’d be making $62,000 CDN. You can’t take the same NUMBER and say it’s the same pay. You do realize wages and stuff are different too?

I know this is widely misunderstood in Canada, but having relatively deflated CURRENCY does not mean you have less MONEY. Currency =! money. If having cheaper money made you poorer, the Japanese would be living hand to mouth, because the yen is a tiny fraction of a Canadian dollar. Yet, the Japanese are wealthy. You don’t really think having super-cheap yen makes a Japanese unable to afford a car, do you? And are the British, with the pound being more valuable than the US dollar, actually richer than Americans?

If the American made $40K US and the Canadian made $40K CDN, they did not make the same amount of money, and anyone who says they do is a frickin’ idiot.

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And if they were located near to each other and shared many common characteristics and it was economically feasible, why not?
Why duplicate government services and increase overhead?

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The US and the UK are far apart physically. It made sense not to have them governed from one location. That is not the same considering the similarities in economies between the US and Canada and how closely they are tied together because of it.
But, why be separate? I can see not wanting to join the former USSR, but why are Canada and the US separate? Just because we want it that way? Why would we want it that way? What benefit do we gain by having it that way? No need to get bent out of shape about it, I’m just asking.

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From what I understand it costs a lot to own a car in Japan, too. What’s your point?

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If you choose to live in East LA then I’d expect you to have some quality of life issues. Move. It is nice to sit on the lakeshore and fish in the tranquility of nature, but it doesn’t put any food on the table other than fish.

From a site that argues both our points. But then they seem to think the Union rate has something to do with quality of life. Go figure.
http://www.ccsd.ca/pubs/2002/olympic/indicators.htm

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Hey, Dangerosa, great jaerb. Minnesotans’ accents are so sweet!

Why did the Canadians draw a picture of a leaf on their flag? Because they didn’t know how to draw a moose!! Oh man that’s so funny.

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Uzi… uhhh, why don’t you read the thread? Sheesh.

Canada and the United States are different countries because they want to be. They want to be because they have fundamentally, irreconcilably different opinions on how a nation-state should be run. It’s not a good or a bad thing, it’s just the forces of geography and history. I don’t see any pressing reason why they SHOULDN’T be separate nations, so it seems to me the respective will of the two states is a valid reason to keep it that way.

166

Quite telling me to read the thread. I can read quite well. Too bad you don’t seem to have the same ability to read what I have written. Seems like a rather silly reason to have a separate country.
I can see some real good reasons for us to drop barriers. Soft wood lumber being one of them. Access to capital and markets currently unavailable to us. Free movement for employment. Just a few reasons. All I can see are benefits, not drawbacks.

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Which reasons do you see as being silly? Examples, please.

I admit I’m not personally a fan of having the state execute mentally retarded children (or anyone else) and I see that as a drawback. The terribly destructive influence of religious zealots in American politics is a big, big drawback. Ridiculous laws against homosexuality, that’s a drawback, IMHO. Even less variety in political parties is a drawback. Awful crime problems with homicide rates many times higher strike me as being a big drawback. I’m glad Canada is decriminalizing pot, even though I don’t smoke it. I’m quite convinced small Canadian provinces would get even more shafted by Washington than they do by Canada, and the French portion of the country - you may have noticed some of your fellow Canadians don’t speak English - would really get screwed big time. I like our flag and our money better, too.

I’m not an objective source, of course, but that’s the POINT. I don’t LIKE the way the U.S. is run as compared to Canada, so I choose to live here, and choose to keep the two countries separate. I would prefer to live in a country with more irritating taxation, a slightly weaker economy, a wimpy foreign policy and colder weather than in a country with rampant crime, religious crazies with the ear of the politicians, and laws I find immoral and distasteful. I’m not waving the flag and saying “Canada rocks! USA sucks!,” it’s just that I prefer THIS system.

That’s not to say the USA’s a bad place to live - I’d rather live there than in about 195 other countries, and believe or not I’m usually the only Canadian in a crowd DEFENDING America and Americans - but Canada’s run differently, and I prefer it this way. You can’t just chalk up things like death and crime as being insignificant matters. You can’t pretend taxation is important but universal medical insurance isn’t. Those differences DO matter.

168

HEAR HEAR!!!

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Most of those laws you refer to are determined at the State level. If Ontario was a state then they could determine what they wanted to do. Have public health care? Sure. Allow same sex marriage? Why not? Put in gun control? Yeppers.
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We only have one political party in Canada anyway that is ever in power. At least in the States they change between them once in a while.
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Are all the murderers and criminals going to move north all of a sudden?
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So, am I and I don’t smoke it either. Not a good enough reason for a separate country IMHO.
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Yet, they’d have equal seats in the Senate now wouldn’t they? 2 seats each whether they are the size of PEI, or the size of California. What more could they want?
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Nothing stopping the State of Quebec to make French the official language. But the language police wouldn’t last long in the US for sure. I don’t see that as bad.
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I’d prefer to be paid in greenbacks, dollar for dollar, but that is just me. I find it hard to exchange Can$ when I am in Dubai. They seem to fall all over themselves to exchange US$, though.
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I don’t have a problem with that. I was asking why is all. Something more than feelings.

170

Becasue the US gov’t is a bully and I dont like what they stand for. Give me our golf club scandals anyday over the war for oil interests and the new Homeland Security.

Frankly, the US of A scares me. I don’t understand why it doesnt scare those actually there.

I like the people. But their gov’t is as bad as those it is trying to stop. Even more so for being so hypocritical while doing it.

Give me my taxes, and my chance at being happy in a system that actually recognises that gov’t is for the people, not the corporations, lobby groups, and religious zealots.

I always feel safe walking the streets here. I don’t always when I am there.

171

I believe it is incorrect for one to state that sovereign nation states exist just because their people want them to. They are perhaps perpetuated for this reason though.
There are any number of historical, circumstantial reasons why nations do or do not exist. The Kurds want an independent Kurdistan but just because millions of people want it to be the so doesn’t make it so. IMHO Canada and the United States exist as two separate entities for reasons of history and because they have been defined as separate, the citizens reasonably enough wish to reinforce their own particular national, cultural identity etc.
Begob I drone on don’t i?

Mogiaw

172

And those countries aren’t hypocritical about it? Its not like they go around telling people how sinister they are, you just haven’t been paying much attention to them. Sure the US has many bad policies but you don’t seriously see the US as being on the same moral level as North Korea and Iraq, do you ? Say all you want about the US unfairly throwing its weight around (which it often does), but the US government is like a gazillion times better than North Korea. If you think the US is worse, then I recomend spending some time in both the US and North Korea and reporting back to me if you still hold that view. And over all I’d have to say its general impact is good. I personally think we should retreat from everywhere. Then sit back and watch all the chaos unfold from our brand new 30 inch flat panal HTDVS, that we bought with all the money we saved on national defense.

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I didn’t mention gun control.

It’s comical to suppose the differences lie entirely at the level of state/provincial government. For one thing, you’d be changing the nature of what powers the provincial government possesses, quite enormously.

You have an amazingly short memory, considering the current governing party hasn’t even been in power for ten years. You’re also apparently unaware of the phenomenon of provincial politics.

I’ve provided you with a number of specific examples. I’m not sure how specific examples of government policy is “feelings.” I don’t think the United States is as good a place to live as Canada is, and my belief is based on real, tangible evidence… a long list of reasons concerning the manner in which the two countries are run, their respective sociological dynamics, and the nature of living there. If Canada became a part of the United States I believe Canada, as part of the USA, would become a worse place to live as a result.

That’s not a shot at Americans; I am sure most Americans would not want the United States to become like Canada, and that’s fine by me. They want their country run a certain way, we want ours run a certain way. And we get to run our respective counties in different ways. Really, things are quite admirably arranged.

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Yes, but my point was that is a former province could do what it liked. It could have health care (which was one of your points about the problems with the US), it could have pretty much all the things that it does now. Except the power base would shift from Ontario telling everyone else what to do. Now you can say that we’d have even less say in the federal government, but at least everyone would be equal.

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You mean like independants running for state governments? Would the NDP be outlawed in BC if they joined the US. Why? There is no reason that would happen.

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And each one I’ve answered with how any former province could enact all the things you have stated if they became a state if they wished.
What we are left with is your feelings that Canada is a better place to live than the US. If Canada and the US joined together would that then make the US a better place, too?

175

This kind of irrational prejudice against the U.S. is distressingly common in Canada.

The notion that the U.S government is ‘as bad’ as the government of Iraq or North Korea is outrageous. Guess what? Here in Alberta we have HUGE oil reserves, and we are totally undefended. Yet, we can live in freedom and without even the slightest fear that the U.S. military might come here and occupy us for our oil.

Go park our oil fields next to Saddam’s place, and see how long you would survive without the U.S. protecting you. Or you could just ask Kuwait.

God, I hate over-the-top criticism of the U.S. It’s just so incredibly wrong-headed.

In any event, I absolutely SHUDDER to think what Chretien would do with the kind of power George Bush has. Frankly, I think the U.S. political system is far better suited to keeping its immense power in check. It is a much more open and responsive government than Canada’s. Canada’s parliamentary system is too closed, our Senate has too little power, and our politicians are controlled too tightly by their parties (far more than any other commonwealth country). The potential for abuse of power in Canada is far greater than in the U.S. Our politicians routinely get away with things that would get you cashiered in the U.S.

People complain about how ‘secretive’ the Bush administration is, but man they can’t hold a candle to the Chretien government. Our own auditor general issues scathing reports almost weekly about how billions of dollars are unaccounted-for, about information that has gone missing on the gun registry program, about procedures that are sidestepped (like when Chretien sidestepped government procurement processes and ordered a 100 million dollar personal jet for himself by phoning his friend, the head of Bombardier, and just placing an order).

When Britain, the model for our government, had ‘superpower’ status in the world, the result was colonialism. Same with the French, our other influence.

If there has to be a world superpower, thank God it’s the United States.