Not too long ago, a young friend asked me why I came to Canada, after leaving communist Hungary. Why did I choose it over the US or Australia, why did I not stay in Europe in general or France in particular. And considering how much I am bitching about Canadian politics these days, why wouldn’t I move back to Hungary, or to some warm place in the South.
The question turned into a conversation about cultures and our affinities to them. My short answer was that I saw Canada as a toned-down version of the USA. I always saw the Americans as too loud, too boisterous, too nationalist. When I compared them to my young friend, I pointed out the difference in their frontier spirit. The Americans conquer; the Canadians endure. Canadians were the loyalist who took the long, legal way to independence. I respected that.
I grew up reading the books of James Fenimore Cooper (I read all five, several times), the book of Grey Owl and the exquisite humor of Stephen Leacock (yes, I visited his grave a couple of times).
I listened to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchel. The point is that my choice was conscious. I knew very little about Canada, but I found pretty much what I expected.
I got the vibes right.
As for the rest, I found the French too shallow and flaky, the British too stiff and formal, the Germans too boring, the Italians endearing, but not serious. All of them far too status and class conscious. I wanted the new world. My choice was clear, and I never regrated it. I AM CANADIAN. I spent more than half of my life here. Naturally, as any immigrant, I am between two cultures. I will never fit in completely. I am still too blunt for Canadians and already too measured for Hungarians.
I could write a whole post about why I left and why I would not want to go back, as many of my acquaintances did. I believe that the deciding factor is culture. We end up where we feel the most comfortable.
I left before History ended (sorry, but I still cannot get over the Fukuyama idiocy).
Shortly after, a joke started to circulate in the form of a cartoon, one guy saying to the other:
“It was better under the communists. We had somewhere to go.”
That is the point of this post. My young friend is not the only one asking me what I am still doing here, in this avant-garde of Western decline. My answer is simple: I have nowhere to go, I have no meaningful options. I am too old to acculturate to something new that I can also find appealing. I could go to many places, but not one where I can picture myself as feeling at home. Ex-pat communities are not for me.
I am stuck here, even if I consider it worse than the communist world I tried to escape.
Politics is indeed downstream from culture.
When I was 19, I got arrested, charged, sentenced and locked up for sedition. I was a ‘political prisoner’. You can read about it here, if you care. I did not think of myself as a victim or a hero, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time saying the wrong thing to the wrong people under the wrong circumstances. There were some heroes taking risk conscientiously, the samizdat writers, the saboteurs, the priests, I was just not one of them. I was just a nobody who got caught up in and swept away in history. Just like my father, his father, grand-father and his mother’s grand-father. We were all just casualties of history. My father could have escaped the consequences. He chose not to. I thought I can escape it, but today, I find myself in a world that is far worse than the one I left behind decades ago. Watch this short summary of proposed Canadian laws:
These laws would go far beyond even the scariest of dystopian science fictions. The Gulag archipelago meeting 1984 and the Minority report in globalized totalitarianism.
The Canadian laws mirror the EU’s Digital Services Act which aims to globalize censorship to suffocate the freedom of speech by compelling social media companies to act as their enforcers. Canada’s current prime minister, in harmony with the British PM are also advocating digital IDs, with powers that goes beyond even the Chinese social credit system.
Most of the Canadian electorate don’t seem to care. They elected Trudeau three times!!! … and when he became a little too embarrassing even for them, they elected the retarded puppet’s sleazy handler. WHY? Because they couldn’t take a joke from the Americans and are too stupid to understand the stakes. We already have the framework of totalitarianism in place and with the new laws, that framework will be more oppressive than Stalinist Russia.
Of course, the laws have not been passed yet, but our fearless globalist leader is working on it. Just as he is working on taking away the fiscal independence of the provinces under the guise of ‘modernizing’ the tax system.
When I was writing my post about our changing times, I mentioned to my neighbour, a French-Canadian truck driver from Northern Ontario, the zero tolerance statement I was talking about in it.
I have to watch what I am saying, I said, because they can even lock me up if they don’t like it. “This cannot happen here”, he said, “this is Canada.”
Tell this to Tamara Leach, I said. “Who is that?”, he asked.
The woman who organized the trucker’s convoy, I replied. “Oh, that woman!” he said. “I have no patience for her; she deserves everything she gets.”
What an impeccably Canadian formulation! Canadians have ‘no patience’ for freedom of speech and peaceful assembly. Across several polls, a supermajority supported the invocation of the Emergencies Act.
Just as there is a majority supporting the atrocious institutions called Human Rights Tribunals. The Adjudicators of these tribunals do not need legal training and there is an expressed preference for DEI hires. They are kangaroo courts with the support of the full force of the law behind them. The applicants (plaintiffs) have no cost when filing an application. In the past few years this institution got so overloaded that it now takes 5-10 years to get a hearing. But the idea sounds good and righteous, so it is supported. Canadians like the ideas of their institutions, not their realities. The ideas of free healthcare, the welfare state, equality, progressive taxation. and the benevolent caring state. If it sounds good, they are all for it.
Contrary to Trudeau’s promise, the budget did not balance itself.
Not for a single day. The national debt doubled under Trudeau.
Sustainability and net zero goals are going nowhere at great expense. We are not any closer than we were when those goals were set. When Trudeau got into power, the Canadian dollar was close to par with the USD. Now it is 0.7 to it.
Canada is so badly overregulated and dysfunctional that there is a major capital outflow from the country. One trillion dollars’ worth of business left Canada in the past ten years.
Living standards are going down, mid-size Canadian cities are dying.
The doubling/tripling of immigration coupled with artificially low interest rates created the biggest real-estate bubble in Canadian history. Prices are already going down, but the real crash is still ahead of us.
The insane amount of immigration destroyed Real GDP per capita growth:
No Canadian politician in history did as much damage to this country as Justin Trudeau, but hey, he has such a great hair and looks so earnest! And he is just as much of a master of empty, meaningless logorrhea as his daddy. (no, not Pierre)
Renegade democrats in the US like to say that they did not leave the party, the party left them. That is how I feel about Canada. It is unlikely that I will leave, but the Canada of merit and self-reliance that I came to in 1980 left me a long time ago.
I do not blame the politicians (Trudeau, Carney and the rest).
I blame the electorate that kept them in power for over ten years despite their incessant failures and corruption. I blame all Canadians who have no patience for Tamara Leach and free speech but have an apparently infinite amount for the destroyers of their country.
I could say that I have no patience for them.
Maybe the McKenzie brothers are the truest representatives of the Canadian electorate.
I feel betrayed by Canada.
Can it be saved? Can the damage be repaired?
I am seriously thinking about moving to Alberta, just in case they succeed with their secession plans. Am I alone with such thoughts?
If the West and Quebec separate, what will happen to the rest?
Let me know in the comments and please, share this post. I want to find out how much patience Canada has left for the liberals.
More from this stack
My thought about causes and responsibilities.
References
Ranked: Real GDP Per Capita Growth by Country (2014-2024)
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Interesting since I feel similar to where i escaped 20 years ago...Germany. I don't recognize even my closest friends anymore let alone the country and the entire EU which is marching everyone into the next Totalitarism.
I found my plan B location which survived similar horrors of what we get video life streamed into our living rooms from Gaza but managed to become a truly sovereign country where people are geniously happy and thriving. I will never tell anyone where this place is because the few expats, gap year volunteers and foreign funded NGO staffers are already causing enough damage here.
You are absolutely right Zork. If I was 40 or so I would be already gone from Canada. I came from communistic regime and yes, today Canada is even worst.
Jiri