Where do you live ? In the city or in the 'sticks' ?
On paper it looks pretty good, but from the ground it really shocked me how bad it is. Especially the older generation that depends on their pensions, man do those people have it hard. Worse than eastern Poland in places and that is saying something. And the climate is even harsher...
Drug use is indeed quite a problem and one that will come back big time in 15 years or so when the presently growing up generation will be the one to earn the bulk of the income.
Unemployment is sky high in places, people move all across the country just to improve the chance of getting a job. $6.50 per hour or whatever it is right now to work a 12 hour day to bring home just enough for two people to survive is not a walk in the park. 70 year olds working physical labor to augment their pension so they can pay their heating bills. I could go on for days, but really it depresses me, no point in reviewing all the stuff I've witnessed in my time in Canada.
The one thing that I did notice is that almost without exception Canadians are very friendly and would drop anything they're doing to help out someone else.
The cities are well above average, the countryside is well below, at least in my experience.
I've lived in:
Victoria, BC
Winnipeg, MB
Georgetown, ON (rural portion, my neighbors were apple farmers. I raised chickens/goats, planted tomatoes, grapes, & other stuff on my family's land and picked berries for a local farm for about $3/hr - I was 10)
Norval, ON (rural as you can be, surrounded by grain farms, streams and forest)
Currently:
Brampton, ON (almost urban)
The thing about the countryside folk (remember, I was one of them) is that we didn't need new trucks or huge houses or new shiny tools. We fixed our own stuff, planted vegetable gardens, worked long, hard, fun days in the summer and read and learned in the winter.
We had gravel driveways and, some of us, blue painted houses, but we had fresh food awesome neighbors, excellent schools. I knew some farmers that had it real bad, mostly because they got injured so they couldn't work and had to mortgage out the farm for cash, but most of them loved life and their families and felt very blessed.
Things aren't what they seem from the outside. Our run down mechanic shops all had snap-on tools (for those that don't know, snap-on are very expensive unlimited warranty tools) our old broken cobble main streets had farmers markets on Saturdays, it was awesome.
Where I live now is more glitzy, but most people I talk to are lonely, or drugged up on either legal or illegal drugs. It's starting to be a real problem, and this is coming from a libertarian. Friends of mine from high school and university that used to be active with side projects/exercise now just sit and watch TV and spend all their money on getting high. It messes up their relationships too. But even those people aren't in that much debt.
One thing I will say is that the Native Canadian Peoples are in really, really bad shape. I was exposed to that in Winnipeg, and ya. It is bad. Also, Windsor, ON is horrrrrible. They are the Detroit of Canada.
I supposed, statistically speaking, it is possible that you and I fell on different sides of the bell curve to what we were exposed to, and that the truth may be somewhere in the middle, but I love it here and I'm looking forward to moving back to the sticks when I have enough money to build up some acreage.
As I said, fantastic people, especially in the rural areas.
I've lived on St. Josephs Island ON for two and a half years and in Toronto for two and a half years, I clocked well over 200,000 km while in Canada on roadtrips taking me from the far east (Cap Chat in Quebec, and Halifax) all the way to Vancouver BC, and I spent quite a bit of time just talking to people and getting to know the country.
I think you would find that if you drive through the US, you will find the same change from city to town.
I've lived in both cities and towns in the US and Canada, and if you end up making a left turn instead of a right, similar differences exist.
What you might be missing (and what Zakaria's article was pionting out) is that Canadians aren't putting themselves into debt at the same rate as Americans, so while the Americans may 'look' better off, that doesn't mean they are.
On paper it looks pretty good, but from the ground it really shocked me how bad it is. Especially the older generation that depends on their pensions, man do those people have it hard. Worse than eastern Poland in places and that is saying something. And the climate is even harsher...
Drug use is indeed quite a problem and one that will come back big time in 15 years or so when the presently growing up generation will be the one to earn the bulk of the income.
Unemployment is sky high in places, people move all across the country just to improve the chance of getting a job. $6.50 per hour or whatever it is right now to work a 12 hour day to bring home just enough for two people to survive is not a walk in the park. 70 year olds working physical labor to augment their pension so they can pay their heating bills. I could go on for days, but really it depresses me, no point in reviewing all the stuff I've witnessed in my time in Canada.
The one thing that I did notice is that almost without exception Canadians are very friendly and would drop anything they're doing to help out someone else.
The cities are well above average, the countryside is well below, at least in my experience.