Canada can do it because Canada is not the US. In the US, we have too much emphasis on the individual. In other societies, there is more emphasis on the collective. This opinion may not be entirely accurate, but it's worth stating this basic difference.
I'm neither Canadian nor American, but I have been a permanent resident of Canada, and now live in US. The day-to-day differences are relatively minor in comparable geographic regions, but mainstream American and Canadian politics and political philosophy is fairly different.
It's not really saying anything to me that would make me think that the people in Canada on average value the collective over the individual in terms of how they personally behave and more importantly how they tell others to behave.
A phrase we often hear a lot is 'It's a free country'. Sometimes we say it as a justification that 'this is my preference / choice and regardless of what you think I do believe I have some justification in making it' and sometimes others use it to come to our defense to tell someone to back off and just let us be. That's individualism.
In contrast I've had thousands of conversations with Japanese people where they use the opposite kind of justification 'because I'm Japanese I must behave this way because this is how Japanese people behave' or someone instructing you to act/not act in a certain way because your behavior is expected to (roughly) line up with cultural norms and there is constant and heavy emphasis on this.
I can appreciate Canadian politics being different to that of the US. Indeed NZ and Australian politics differ both from each other and from that of Canada and the US. But I think we would all sooner blurt out 'it's a free country' than admonish ourselves for not behaving how everyone else behaves. That is to say there are some core philosophies that are held by all of us and then there are a bunch that differ.
I don't think anybody would disagree that Canada, and really all Western countries, are more on the individualist side of of the global spectrum - that's our shared Enlightenment culture at play. But OP was talking comparatively, US versus Canada. In that context, I think it's quite true that Canada (and, again, most other Western countries) are not quite as individualist as US. When you compare both versus Japan, yeah, it's a very minor difference.
Judging by the temperature of sibling HN comments and the degree of Canada-bashing from US-based individuals, it does indeed seem like there is a difference in degree of individualist mindset.
Sibling countries bashing each other is common the world over. Is the nature of the bashing such that it is making claims of some sort of collectivist nature? And to what degree does a claim made during some kind of rivalry make something accurate or true?
Australians often like to claim New Zealanders have sexual relations with sheep when they engage in good old fashioned country bashing. I would hazard a guess that stunningly few New Zealanders have ever fucked a sheep, though I would assume a handful have and what's more I'd assume the same to be true of Australia too. But it's clearly not like the claim has any sort of merit as it applies to the general population.
I don't have deep experience with Canada, so I would be interested to be pointed in the direction of anything that would indicate that collectivism was more prevalent in Canada than Individualism.
I have a hard time buying it. I'm from NZ and I've always felt we are much closer to Canada than the US. I've also lived in Australia for a couple of years. Aus and NZ are completely similar along certain dimensions and really different along other ones. But I would venture to say that they're both heavy into Individualism. As is the States and from what I have seen of Canada I assumed I would feel quite at home there.
Comparing my experience with Japan over the last 10 years, which is heavily collectivist, I just can't bring myself to the conclusion that personality wise and the types of things that come out of Canadians mouths about how one should conduct oneself in society is closer to that of the Japanese than it is to that of Americans.
"So, what about consciousness? As defined above, it is in fact the most certain knowledge there is. Pure awareness is not even possible to deny, since the very act of denial takes place in and as an activity of awareness. You can not escape or avoid it. Thoughts can of course imagine a brain that existed in the past without awareness, but that itself is a thought in awareness. One can doubt whether the thought refers to something true or real, but the awareness is unavoidable. This suggests that consciousness, not matter, is fundamentally real." -- Tom McFarlane, B.S. Physics, Stanford University
You have an agency like the NSA with scores of genius mathematicians and hackers and a black budget. There's nothing beyond their means, spying wise.
I suspect that one day our internal thoughts and feelings will be under constant mass surveillance, Minority Report style, but it won't look like sci-fi when it happens.
