Canada as a whole is a badly managed failing country with the worst conditions out of all other developed nations. They hang on to a thin thread of "we are not like the US" but fail to understand that having real estate and mining resources cannot sustain a country forever. You need entrepreneurship, competition and risk taking.
As a Canadian I agree. I lived in a popular area a few hours from Vancouver for 20 years, we had power outages all the time, this year there was 2 in a row that lasted long enough that everything in my freezer went bad. This area is also on boil water advisory 5-8 months a year. We also have plenty of native reservations with undrinkable water. None of that feels 1st world to me.
> You need entrepreneurship, competition and risk taking.
Canada has had this in the past and IMO has faltered more recently.
RIM/Blackberry (ie pioneering elliptical curve crypto), Smart boards, Canada ARM for space, Candu reactors. We've had some pretty high tech inventions in the past. Waterloo was(/ is?) a pretty great tech school.
This isn't remotely true on any measure, but I'm definitely interested in seeing anything that led you to this conclusion. And I love tweaking Canada! I grew up in Buffalo!
Just as an example, we had a 4 day power outage here in Quebec last year in Montreal with a million people out of electricity. The only redeeming factor was that it wasnt during the very cold periods and that it was late in the winter, but still a 4 day outage in the second biggest city in Canada (2nd time it happened in the past 20 years though last time it lasted more than a week lol) is pretty dysfunctional but we Canadians have normalized said disfunction.
Compare that to how the Texas outages were covered and put under the spotlight even in our local media and it shows a good example of the "we are not the US!!" Mentality where we completely ignore our own issues even when they are worse than our neighbors.
In this case it's even worse since we should be more prepared and have a better infrastructure to handle freezing rain since it happens every year! While the Texas situation was an outlier. Yet, it was all about patting ourselves in the back about how we are so good at recovering from the power outage lol
Gonna call bullshit on this, and saying this as someone who was without power for nearly a week in both 2021 and 2023 in Texas due to cold weather.
After looking it up online, it looks like the April 2023 outage in Montreal was caused by an ice storm, which is what the issue was in the 2023 outage in Texas. Bad ice storms are going to cause power outage mayhem in pretty much any location where lines aren't buried. I actually started to get annoyed by people complaining about the authorities during Texas' 2023 outage: I have never seen that level of tree carnage everywhere, with many roads impassable due to downed trees and lots of folks with multi-thousand dollar cleanup bills for tree damage in their yards. I don't know if this was the same situation as in Montreal, but the fact is that ice storms are just brutal to electrical infrastructure pretty much everywhere.
This is in stark contrast to Winter Storm Uri in 2021 where the whole Texas grid nearly failed because of perverse economic incentives that discouraged investment in weatherization of power plants (the problem then was brutal cold, not ice). That definitely was poor management/governance, but at least it sparked some badly needed improvements to power generator regulations. Given we're currently getting an Arctic blast, we'll see how it holds up.
My point is that we have had multiple ice storms, and we have had the exact same problem happen before. We mitigated some of it, but still have had multiple trees and debris that fell right onto critical junctions. This is just as bad imo, remember that in 1998 we also had a month long outage that was due to the exact same reasons. I wouldn't expect Texas to be ready for a cold snap but I sure would expect our infra to be ready for an ice rain storm. To assume that it just isn't possible is again, very Canadian. Again, I would understand if it was a network wide failure that led to a grid collapse or something, but this is not the case.
In any case, if the same had happened in the US the media coverage and the mentality there would've led to a lot more introspection and self critique. And I know it sounds weird because Americans aren't exactly known for that, but compared to Canada? Yes they sure seem to be nowadays.
Another example that comes to mind was that here in Quebec we had one of the worse mortality rates in the world in the early days of COVID (something like triple our neighbors in Ontario and worse than new York) but we were still obsessed with covering how the US was going to soon be on the brink or something. Just as we had to send the army to nursing homes because patients were literally left to die. And you know what's the e overall conclusion about how COVID was dealt here in Quebec?
That we did pretty good lol. We even reelected the same exact government all while that was happening with a stronger majority. That's the mentality I'm talking about here, of complete lack of introspection and a weird inferiority complex with the Americans.
> power outage mayhem in pretty much any location where lines aren't buried.
at least in austin a big part of it was a failure of the power companies to respond to tree/line interactions long before the storm. People reported trees across the lines. The branches got super heavy with ice and took out the lines. Proper maintenance / arborcare would have meant far fewer issues.
And $500 a month health insurance, otherwise you are milking the States' investment in developing new medicine, essentially making Americans pay for the world's research.
It's more likely that it's the company making weird regional pricing. And the price in Canada likely is lower due to the Government negotiating for the lower price.
And yet objective studies of things like quality of life [1], access to medicare [2], and other metrics, always seem completely at odds with claims like yours. We may not be the top in all metrics, but we are far from the "the worst of all developed nations." Data sure is inconvenient when we're spreading hyperbole and misinformation on the internet!
Here's what the "Quality of Life" metric is based on and Canada's scores:
* A good job market - 98.4
* Affordable - 15.1
* Economically stable - 98.2.
* Family-friendly - 98.5.
* Income equality - 61.2.
* Politically stable - 91.8.
* Safe - 93.2.
* Well-developed public education system - 88.7.
* Well-developed public health system - 91.2.
Anecdotally, affordability and wealth equality (not income equality) are much better indicators of QoL. "Good job market" must be availability of jobs (which has certainly lagged since 2022, when this data is from), not pay relative to cost of living.
Myself and most working-class Canadians could do with a bit of political instability right now.
If by political instability you mean voting for the part with a big C that will only worsen your position and increase hate and discord among Canadians, then please find your "political instability" elsewhere. Ditto if you think "protesting" means harassing and attacking your fellow Canadians.
If you think "political instability" means voting for people who will actually fight for the poor, like the NDP, well, that's not going to cause much instability I'm afraid. But it will help you.
Political instability ideally takes the form of holding the government accountable for serving their corporate overlords rather than regular Canadians.
I don't think there's a party that represents my interests, but the NDP or Communist party (is this the big C you're referring to?) probably are the closest.
NDP is the only one likely to have any influence, but they aren't willing to put forth a serious critique of capitalism in their fight for social equity. Even if they won a majority, I don't think they'd make a dent in the housing crisis.
