John(Blackmercedes) this is no attack on you, but I spent the last two summers in Canada. I was surprised at how similar Canada and the USA are and I was shocked with how similar they are.

I talked to many black and east indian people(or visible minorities as a lot of Canadians call them) who told me they would never live in Alberta because Alberta was redneck. Indeed most of the reports of synogogue burnings and teenage stabbings I read about were from Alberta. I have been to Edmonton and Calgary and to me they were quite different places. Edmonton seemed layed back and Calgary seemed a little hostle. One thing that shocked me about western Canada was that while there wasn't a lot of USA style crime, there seemed to be a lot of vandalism in small towns. Another thing about western Canada I noticed was how native Indians lived in like ghettos. They lived isolated on the edge of town, unable to find work and resorting to drugs. The native Americans I have visited in the USA seemed to be more part of the community.

As far as poverty, I saw people in Newfoundland and NOva Scotia living in rundown housing that would not have been out of place in Mississippi. As I was told in Newfoundland, many people in whats called the outports only have work for six months of the year.

I even saw black ghettos(although small by US standards) in Nova Scotia, blacks who went to Nova Scotia during our revolutionary war and stayed there even though they now are facing discrimination that they claim is far worse than what they would face in the USA as there are really few laws to counter their plight which goes largely unnoticed(I , for one, was real surprised to see blacks in Nova Scotia)


No place is perfect. An executive making $20millon a year may not be the Canadian way, but it is the way of the world. There are a lot of doctors in the neighborhood where I grew up and many of them are Canadians who came to the USA for better pay, and lower taxes. At my college many of the science profs are Canadians who came here for the same reason. HIgh-salaried execs may not be the Canadian way, but it seems it will have to become the Canadian way in order to keep the Canadian way you know.

I'm glad I had two summer exchanges in Canada. I learned a lot. All I had really known about Canada before I went there was what I heard from Canadian immigrants---taxes were too high. We read about Pierre Trudeau in high school and I just imagined every Canadian was like him, I really learned a lot. If you were alive in the 1970s you must have been very proud of him.
Again, this is just my two cents. I like your comment that communities that are polarized (rich or poor) tend to suffer from crime and "other social disorders"