Is a North American Identity Emerging?

[Rollerstud98]

Originally Posted by jmt18325

In 2007, Forbes found that Vancouver was tied with Boston and Montreal for 10th cleanest city in the world (Calgary was #1, Ottawa #4, Toronto #21). Seattle didn't even make the list.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/16/wor..._slide_13.html

In 2010, the tyee named Vancouver the greenest city in Cascadia (no contest, they said) with the lowest poverty rate.

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2010/01/0...sGreenestCity/

Unless you can show me some big changes since then....

Ask her how many times shes visited down there? Just seeing things on tv might be all she's going off of.

[Aylmer]

Originally Posted by Stryker

Meh I donno I think were hitting the rock star era.

With truddeau as our leader etc, our posh liberal tendencies have become far more of a contrast to trump.

I dunno. To me, it's just a return to the same quiet smugness from the Bush-era, nothing new. Unlike during Bush, however, I think that there is growing concern vis-à-vis the stability south of the border and the repercussions that could have on us.

I think that Canadians are increasingly aware that the fuckup down there may well becoming our problem too. But for what it's worth, at least we can have the satisfaction of knowing that we didn't cause it. Depending on how it does end up affecting us, it may be small comfort.

[Mister F]

Originally Posted by Rollerstud98

Haha you're spelling mistake here is pretty funny!

So is yours.

[Rollerstud98]

Originally Posted by Mister F

So is yours.

You are correct haha

[Stryker]

Originally Posted by Aylmer

I dunno. To me, it's just a return to the same quiet smugness from the Bush-era, nothing new. Unlike during Bush, however, I think that there is growing concern vis-à-vis the stability south of the border and the repercussions that could have on us.

I think that Canadians are increasingly aware that the fuckup down there may well becoming our problem too. But for what it's worth, at least we can have the satisfaction of knowing that we didn't cause it. Depending on how it does end up affecting us, it may be small comfort.

Honestly I think the smugness from the oil era was worst/justified.

I think it all builds up to something.

I'd bet my life the mystique of the bush years directly helped canada get attention when the oil boom made it all that more attractive.

Before the 2000s canada was much like a more boring part of what is now Minnesota. Cold, suburban dull etc. Canada believe it or not has made some serious ground(in reality large portions of the US has sunk/become rapped up in something) in the last 20 years.

[wave46]

Originally Posted by Stryker

The existence of america as a single nation is dead forever come better or worst.

I don't think so. The United States has survived far more divisive events - the Civil War, the Depression and the late 1960s come to mind. It emerged from those times united and I think it will make it past the presidency of one man, however odious he is.

[Stryker]

Originally Posted by wave46

I don't think so. The United States has survived far more divisive events - the Civil War, the Depression and the late 1960s come to mind. It emerged from those times united and I think it will make it past the presidency of one man, however odious he is.

I don't think you appreciate what I mean.

I.e. For example america was directly directly split north and south post civil war.

The fact that they even reunified I'd testify to the balancing effect of the west, and the power of california based media.

I'm not talking about the political structure.

Technology unified the US, I don't assume it may not help divide it to.

Part of my premise is that the voting patterns show that there is a real segmentation of the american demographic.

[Acajack]

After seeing the results of the last American election, I am not sure at all that the U.S. is really that fragmented culturally or geographically.

First of all, I am pretty positive Trump and his gang aren't exactly NASCAR and Duck Dynasty fans... And even if they were, in spite of the stuff that is often evoked about alleged cultural differences between Americans and Democrats, they're all still Americans to me. Democrats in Alabama don't snub college football, for example. NYC Republicans don't eat a different type of Thanksgiving dinner than Democrats.

Also, in recent years, there was a lot of talk about how the U.S. was split into Jesusland and non-Jesusland. Well, if you compare the election results map from Nov. 2016 to the Jesuslands map, you can see that the non-Jesusland took a really big hit territory-wise last year! There is less and less non-Jesusland left in the U.S.

[mistercorporate]

America's whole structure, settlement distribution and culture have been heavily shaped by their large slave descendant population and increasingly by the effects of large scale illegal immigration from Mexico. They still haven't adequately addressed these issues, preferring a laissez-faire approach that's holding them back relative to other countries that don't have the same baggage (Canada, UK, Australia). Those factors have enriched their majority community (White, or rather, German Americans) while simultaneously turning them into uneducated, disconnected from reality, and very provincial people.

While this one step forward one step back process has been going on, as Stryker mentioned, Canada and the rest of the world have been seriously upping their game for the past 15-20 years. Now, visiting the US from Canada, it feels surreal how shabby and intellectually backward that country has become save for a couple states here and there.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by mistercorporate

America's whole structure, settlement distribution and culture have been heavily shaped by their large slave descendant population and increasingly by the effects of large scale illegal immigration from Mexico. They still haven't adequately addressed these issues, preferring a laissez-faire approach that's holding them back relative to other countries that don't have the same baggage (Canada, UK, Australia). Those factors have enriched their majority community (White, or rather, German Americans) while simultaneously turning them into uneducated, disconnected from reality, and very provincial people.

While this one step forward one step back process has been going on, as Stryker mentioned, Canada and the rest of the world have been seriously upping their game for the past 15-20 years. Now, visiting the US from Canada, it feels surreal how shabby and intellectually backward that country has become save for a couple states here and there.

That's interesting. I go to the U.S. quite a bit and don't find that it's generally "shabby" at all compared to Canada. In fact, the "shiny" parts of the U.S. are "shinier" than the shiny parts of Canada, and there are oodles of them down there.

Of course, the shabby parts of the U.S. are there too, and are often a bit jarring to Canadians in their scale. But they've always been there. I don't necessarily get the sense that they are growing in proportion relative to "shiny", so much as there is occasional shifting between shiny and shabby (places and people) taking place.

The idea that the U.S. is starting to resemble countries like Brazil in terms of socio-economic polarization is popular in some circles. I'll reserve judgement for now on that one, but at the moment it's still far from that scenario.

[Pinus]

Originally Posted by jigglysquishy

I feel no brotherhood with Americans. Every time I venture south of the border I'm reminded how weird I find the whole country.

I feel far more brotherhood with the Brits or Aussies than the Yanks.

100% Agreed. Our mentalities, ethics, political and legal systems, commonwealth heritage bring us closer to Brits, Aussies and Kiwis than it does with the gun-toting crazies to the south. And after spending more than a year in Australia, I am 1000% convinced of this. I am hoping that with Brexit having occurred and Trump threatening to revamp or tear up NAFTA, that CANZUK with become a reality in the next decade or so to further bring us closer to our commonwealth brethren.

I've always said Canada's biggest downfall is our physical attachment to the US. And whilst there will always be some form of American influence on us, we as a country can provide measures to limit this as much as we possibly can, both through each of us as individuals (proper spelling of words, the way in which we choose to speak, etc.) and through government policies that can limit the amount of America media influence on our country. And with CANZUK bringing in more Brits, Aussies and Kiwis into the country (and there are PLENTY that would give anything to move to Canada), this would become a living enactment of my philosophy: The solution to (American) pollution is dilution

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Acajack

That's interesting. I go to the U.S. quite a bit and don't find that it's generally "shabby" at all compared to Canada. In fact, the "shiny" parts of the U.S. are "shinier" than the shiny parts of Canada, and there are oodles of them down there.

I don't find that the US is shabbier on the whole but I think it used to be far ahead of Canada and that that advantage has mostly evaporated over the past few decades.

If you look at infrastructure, to take one example, the US started to develop urban metro systems around 1900. Montreal was Canada's biggest city and didn't get a metro until the 1960's! But today it doesn't feel like Montreal or Toronto are behind New York or Boston in infrastructure, or Vancouver is behind San Francisco. New York has antique infrastructure now and most of their new projects get cancelled or turn into financial disasters (over $2B USD per mile for the Second Ave subway, $1B or more spent on a tunnel to NJ that never opened). I could see American cities having significantly worse infrastructure than Canadian cities in 20 years if trends aren't reversed.

Maybe it's just my flawed perception but I feel like Canada circa 1995 was kind of like living in East Germany. But it's not like that anymore.

[OutOfTowner]

Change the name of this thread to "A North AMERICAN monoculture has emerged " and I will wholeheartedly agree. Same everything, everywhere.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by someone123

I don't find that the US is shabbier on the whole but I think it used to be far ahead of Canada and that that advantage has mostly evaporated over the past few decades.

If you look at infrastructure, to take one example, the US started to develop urban metro systems around 1900. Montreal was Canada's biggest city and didn't get a metro until the 1960's! But today it doesn't feel like Montreal or Toronto are behind New York or Boston in infrastructure, or Vancouver is behind San Francisco. New York has antique infrastructure now and most of their new projects get cancelled or turn into financial disasters (over $2B USD per mile for the Second Ave subway, $1B or more spent on a tunnel to NJ that never opened). I could see American cities having significantly worse infrastructure than Canadian cities in 20 years if trends aren't reversed.

Maybe it's just my flawed perception but I feel like Canada circa 1995 was kind of like living in East Germany. But it's not like that anymore.

That's interesting. I was in my 20s then and didn't really have the impression Canada was behind the U.S. in those days. In fact, during most of my youth and early adulthood most of the larger U.S. cities in particular were rather forbidding, blighted places. I went on a high school trip to NYC in the late 80s and while NYC is always NYC, I definitely would not have called it a "nicer" city than, say, Toronto. I wrote a rather scathing article about this for my school newspaper when I got back...

My sense is that Canada really started to catch up to the U.S. in the 1960s. This continued in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Towards the end of the 90s, American cities in particular (well, many of them) began a spectacular urban resurgence that made up for some of the lost ground, in some cases jetting ahead of Canadian cities as of the 2000s.

[jmt18325]

I still wouldn't say that New York is nicer than Toronto.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by jmt18325

I still wouldn't say that New York is nicer than Toronto.

At this point, I think I probably would.

[jmt18325]

That's certainly not the impression I got when I was there. Toronto is very modern and clean. New York is...New York.

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by jmt18325

I still wouldn't say that New York is nicer than Toronto.

It's a very broad brush to paint with. Depends on how you want to quantify nicer. For transit and ease of movement around the city i'd take NYC over Toronto.

[jmt18325]

I think of nicer as a more aesthetic quality. New York is ahead of Toronto in transit (one of the few NA cities that is).

[Bcasey25raptor]

Originally Posted by jmt18325

In 2007, Forbes found that Vancouver was tied with Boston and Montreal for 10th cleanest city in the world (Calgary was #1, Ottawa #4, Toronto #21). Seattle didn't even make the list.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/16/wor..._slide_13.html

In 2010, the tyee named Vancouver the greenest city in Cascadia (no contest, they said) with the lowest poverty rate:

It's not so much Vancouver's new rail transit line under downtown that goes to the airport (which Seattle now boasts too). It's not the city's progressive green mayor, who ran an exceptional, grassroots campaign against a candidate with the support of the business community. (Portland and Seattle have similar mayors, similarly elected.) It's that Vancouver has, among large Northwest cities, the highest urban density, the most cycling, the most walking, the most transit ridership, the fewest cars -- and the least driving -- per person, the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per capita by far (thanks to its car-lite ways and to its carbon-free electricity), the lowest teen birth rate and family size, the highest life expectancy, and the lowest poverty rate. There's hardly a category of the Cascadia Scorecard in which the soon-to-be Olympic city doesn't take gold.

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2010/01/0...sGreenestCity/

Unless you can show me some big changes since then....

I'm basing it off of my personal experiences in both, seattle streets are far cleaner and I saw far less poverty there, far less homelessness and far less urban decay.

Furthermore the city has changed massively in 6 years, prices of housing for example have doubled meaning what poverty was 6 years ago is arguably much worse today.

1 in 4 metro vancouverites are in poverty.