[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Canada vs. Europe to me is best described as "abundance". The US is even more extreme.

The lifestyle is increasingly fading to that one for the rich in Ontario, but for 2 generations the idea of middle class households was that they had enough money for a detached home AND a cottage or weekend getaway spot.

My Family has had a cottage in Haliburton since the 1950's - we've had European guests up over the years who sit on the dock and just marvel in the abundance of it all. Many Canadians own a 2,000sf home, 2-3 cars, a cottage, or a boat, or a sports car.. it goes on.

Middle class, even upper middle class, life in Europe is a decent apartment or rowhouse, and 1 car. Coming to Canada and seeing the sheer excess and abundance of the land, the lifestyles.. it's different.

And I feel it when I come home from a vacation in Europe or wherever. I toured the UK and Scotland for a few weeks in May, met some extended family, saw a good chunk of Scotland. As beautiful as it is, you see how more modest materially most people lives are. Land is scarce, and while nobody is really wanting for much, the level of abundance in the economy is just clearly so much less.

I enjoy that european lifestyle in many ways, as I'm sure many on this board do too - but there is something comforting about coming home to Canada, getting in your car at the airport and driving back to my detached home where you have a spare bedroom, 2 cars in the driveway, many having access to a summer vacation property... etc. It's obviously not the universal Canadian experience, but it's far more common here than elsewhere in the world.

The US can be even more extreme in this regard than Canada in many ways. Median lifestyles are even more "abundant" - but give up even more european style culture to achieve it as well.

Unfortunately I think this is where Canada's value proposition is starting to fall apart more recently for younger Canadians and new immigrants: now we get European-level material comforts, without the beautiful European cities, culture, or vacation time.

Originally Posted by hipster duck

The only other country I've lived in is the United States, for 2 years, for post-grad studies. During that time, I came home a lot, so there's not much of a culture shock there.

I can't really speak about Europe more than what I observed superficially as a tourist and through reading books. I can't really speak much about East Asian cultures, although I do know what it's like to be part of the Chinese diaspora visiting the 'mother country'. Needless to say, it's like that episode of the Sopranos where they go to Italy.

Anyway, at least in relation to the US, and to the old, larger countries of Europe (I guess), one thing I appreciate about Canada is that Canadian society isn't very "deep" and is easy to read. I grew up in an immigrant family in a small city that was 95% white and during my time, my parents moved from a predominantly working class neighbourhood to a middle class neighbourhood and finally to an upper middle class neighbourhood when they were at the peak of their careers. If I got dropped in most social situations in just about any class or location setting in English Canada, I think I'd be perceived as an outsider, but not someone who's completely out of touch, and I think I could say enough of "the right things" to at least build some trust by the end of the night.

Related to this, another thing I appreciate about Canada is that society isn't too hierarchical. We do have our elites, and it's true that not everyone is going to end up being the Prime Minister, or the CEO of RBC. But it's a lot flatter than the US, and I imagine a lot of European or Asian countries. Here's an example: a few years ago I worked on a project with a guy who would later do his MBA at Harvard. His boss went to Brock. In the US, there's no way that somebody who's Harvard MBA material reports to a guy who went to SUNY Potsdam. That's just not happening. I thought about this, and I realized that I'm two to three degrees of separation from the Prime Minister all the way down to a recovering addict who lives in a van. And we don't live in a small country like Lithuania or Luxembourg where this might also be true just because of small numbers. When you think about that, that's pretty amazing.

Well said, and this is also perhaps the thing that I most appreciate about Canada. For as much as we might bemoan our lack of a deep-rooted, shared culture & weighty history, it's really a double-edged sword - and this is the bright side of it.