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As a Canadian who has lived in the U.S. for the past 4.5 years, I wanted to echo Nicole's comments about Canada. One of the reasons I chose to come to the U.S. to do graduate work was the genuine nastiness of Canadian "progressives."
You see, in Canada, the nationalists tend to be on the left. So when I criticized the Canadian health care system, or gun control, I was given the "love it or leave it" line from leftists. "If you don't like it here, go to the U.S.," I was told. And that's just what I did.
Canadian leftists also have an antipathy to freedom of speech I haven't really encountered from the left here in the United States. Progressives here tend to be big believers in the 1st Amendment. Of course, as a future academic, freedom of speech is very high on my list of primary values.
While Canada may score high compared to the U.S. in terms of certain positive liberties -- the importance of which I recognize -- in my mind, the hostility among intellectuals toward unbridled, "American-style" freedom of speech places it quite a bit lower than the U.S. with regard to the freedoms that REALLY matter, at least to me.
And it's not even left in good ways - rather, it's suffused with cultural relativism, anti-Americanism, group rights, a shocking ignorance of Canadian history (there wasn't a lot of peacekeeping going on at Vimy), I could go on . . .
There are a few conservative-libertarian think tanks and a some enclaves in academia (for example at U of C), but otherwise it's pretty grim.
So, people have an incentive to exaggerate the problems with switching because that makes it easier to continue not taking the idea seriously themselves.
Hong Kong rates more highly on many libertarian measures than the US, and is definitely more of an alien culture. Not only is English a second language here, most HKers are statists, at least according to Bryan Caplan.
Anecdotally, I have met one American-born libertarian here. I have met a lot of New Englanders, though. Even Milton Friedman's love of this city never got him to live here. Most libertarians I've spoken to feel the same way, although they'd like to visit one day.
LOL, I imagine it is exactly like that. And sadly, I'd fit in.
Thankfully there's only a few more months left of the show. Good riddance.
Health care? Take a look at the 2005 Chaoulli Supreme Court ruling. Socialized medicine will soon be a part of Canada's past. At the moment, there are court cases in various stages in Ontario, Alberta, and, most recently, British Columbia to try and quash the restrictions on private insurance, and use of private clinics by regular folk, extending the ruling in Chaoulli. But de facto, Canadians have been going to private clinics for a long time in Quebec and in British Columbia. Soon, they'll be allowed to do it de jure.
Historically? It's as though Canada's history started with Pearson and Trudeau, and there was just a disjointed, confused, and incoherent mess beforehand. Canada didn't pop out of Trudeau's head, although he did manage to pull a big PR stunt and get everyone to think that Canada was somehow fundamentally different from the U.S. But do look into prime minister Wilfrid Laurier's tenure, and our founding debates. Our founders were just as libertarian or classical liberal as yours. And our history has as much love of liberty in its sinews as yours. But we don't teach that in our classrooms, and Americans can hardly be bothered to look into it (how many American non-Californians really give a damn about California's history and traditions? Phhhhtttt, no one. Canada is like California for non-Californians.)
I live in the U.S., like Terrence above. Terrence and I have had a back-and-forth about Canada for a long time. I'm with Will on this issue. Canada is at least as free as the U.S. and, in my judgment, a little bit freer, when you throw everything together.
And it's not possible to live in, say, Toronto, and say you don't like Canada just as surely as it's not possible to live in, say, Bowling Green Ohio and say you don't like the States. You want more conservatism, and a gun culture? Go to Alberta or move a little bit further north in Ontario, Quebec, or just about any province. Just don't live in Toronto or Montreal or Quebec City and you'll find it. I wouldn't live in Massachusetts and declare the United States an anti-gun and pro-socialized medicine country.
Canada's federal government has gone from roughly 24 to 29 per cent of GDP to 13 per cent over the last decade. Until the so-called "Conservative" party got into office, we haven't run a federal deficit in over a decade.
Oh, and you've got that great war on drugs and war on terror going on that is really helping the cause of liberty. Also, immigration is a dream come true for us non-Americans who want to spend more time in the U.S. For your safety and security, I was recently fingerprinted and had my face scanned at the border. I hope you feel safer.
All in all, comparisons between Canada and the U.S. with respect to individual liberty will get bogged down in minor, little differences here and there. And a lot of them will be regional, rather than national. There are some big exceptions (freedom of speech/expression, war on drugs, civil liberties, immigration, health care, and so on), but for every gross violation of liberty in Canada, there's something roughly similar in grossness in the U.S.
in short: Come to Canada. Let's do a Free Province Project for, say, Prince Edward Island. There's just over 100,000 people living on that island. 100 of us could probably change everything. And, if not, we'll just buy 600 acres, sneak in, and live under the radar. Also, we'll all get to read Anne of Green Gables. And, surely, that's worth something.
As you point out, Canada is a fairly culturally homogenous country - outside of the Quebec sepratists, that is. That probably has a net effect on their economic freedom, for the very points you mentions. Economic freedom - particularly the freedom correlated to having more money - is what most Americans live here for, and is what brought our ancestors here in the first place.
It's true that Canadian law doesn't recognize an absolute right to freedom of speech, but American law doesn't either. The differences would seem subtle to a Western European, let alone anyone else.
I would just try to emphasize that Americans seem to use them as a gotcha moment too much.
In the West the major urban centres (Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton) don't really have any dominant libertarian factions. Indeed you might argue they have a ignorant, backwater feel, but that's a different rant.
If you look at Saskatchewan the geographic and spiritual centre of "the West" then you'd really have trouble making the case. Saskatchewan is the location of the founding of the Canadian democratic socialist party the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, later the New Democratic Party. (This topic is where Seymour Martin Lipset cut his teeth writing his flawed but pioneering dissertation Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology.) And until recently Saskatchewan was an NDP stronghold both federally and provincially. The recent 'conversion' to the conservative parties has more to do with dissatisfaction with the Liberals than any conversion to libertarian principles.
Manitoba, politically is similar to Saskatchewan, at least when compared with Alberta. Alberta is certainly the best argument for a libertarian encalve, but even then it doesn't amount to much. There is more money in Alberta thanks to oil and it does have a rural population for the gun crowd. But once you get into Calgary or Edmonton it falls in line with most urban areas. The libertarian west, I think, is mostly elusive.
It is important to not confuse Canada with Toronto, because Toronto (along with Montreal and Vancouver) are the heart of this great country. It's pretty much heresy for me, a Western Canadian, to say so, but Toronto is the strength of Canada, not its weakness. This is why I plan to relocate.
Calgary and Edmonton don't have "dominant libertarian factions" if that requires someone who Murray Rothbard would accept as an ideological soulmate. But in a broader sense, there is something of a libertarian vibe about Alberta and, in a different way, B.C.
Toronto's a great city, no question about it.
I've spent a lot of my time arguing against the view that Canada and the United States are that different. Of course you can find specific things (healthcare, guns) that are different, but so many things are similar. Like the United States, opinions and attitudes vary significantly across our large geography. If one wants to see the (over stated) case for the differences between Canada and the United States they should consult Michael Adams' Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values.
I must also address Craig's assertion that Canada's intellectual life if sullied by its leftward tilt. It's certainly undeniable that academia in Canada is largely situated on the left of the spectrum, often quite left. But is this really all that different from the United States? Studies of political affliation of American academia show it is substantially Democratic. If one is to look at specific areas of study like, say, sociology, then you're going to find a bunch of leftists, if not outright Marxists. But this is true whether one looks at Canada or the United States. As a student in Canada I must disagree that the leftism of academia is somehow unique to Canada. (I should note that there was a significant influx of lefty American academics into Canada in the 1960s an beyond!)
The bigger issue here I think is the idea that if a university is prodominately left that it is a significant problem. My advice to anyone who thinks that intellectual life is stifled because of it should grow a pair. As much as professors have a reputation for bias, in my experience professors are quite willing to hear contrary ideas and debate them. Certainly this libertarian has never had any problem doing so. In general, however, I would say that Canadian intellectual life (academic, think thank and government) is essentially centrist or moderately liberal. Could Canada use some more libertarian voices? Sure. But we do have Jan Narveson after all!
I think all of the Charter challenges will be victorious. All of them. I'm not sure about the NAFTA challenge, but it won't matter once the Charter cases are settled.
Here's one more reason to be optimistic: The guy spearheading the challenge in British Columbia is Brian Day. Brian Day is the man who opened and operates the private Cambie Surgery Centre in B.C. He was elected the president of the Canadian Medical Association for 2008! He was an intervenor in Chaoulli. He is pure awesome (http://brianday.ca/ -- check out his final speech as pres of the CMA).
And I agree with you about everything else you wrote. Just you wait re: health care.
(And don't forget about David Schmidtz, libertarian philosopher at U. of Arizona and Canadian).
This rather makes it sound as though U.S. Libertarians are looking more for ideological conformity (other libertarians to hang with) rather than real freedom. Also, in regards to Canada's cultural homogeneity, we have six functioning national political parties and two official languages.
And, yes, I think the suggestion that many libertarians would rather hang out with other libertarians than live in a different country that may be freer is a central point and criticism of Will's post. But I don't think that makes libertarians in any way different than any other group of politically engaged individuals. Remember all that talk about Democrats moving to Canada after Bush won a second time?
Except that I thought Libertarians were supposed to be ideologically committed to maximum freedom. That was part of the definition of the term.
My guess is that many libertarians (esp. on the right) are going to be wary about talk of maximizing freedom. Actually, I see it as kind of a dilemma:
1. Accept the maximization of liberty as the goal, but define liberty such that it can only be reduced through the deliberate activities of other agents. Thus, you're less free after I punch you in the face, but not less free if you accidentally fall down a well and break both your legs, and now can't get out.
2. Accept a definition of liberty that is more robust, so that the person who falls down the well is indeed less free than he was before, but deny the maximization of liberty as a goal.
It's a dilemma because the thin conception of liberty in (1) seems deeply implausible to anyone who isn't already a libertarian. But (2), a robust conception of liberty -- maybe we should call it autonomy -- might obligate us to improve the autonomy of others, e.g. by helping the guy get out of the well, esp. if the overall goal is to maximize autonomy.
In my opinion, this is directly connected to the thick/thin libertarianism debate. If politics has to be detached from deeper moral issues, like the nature and value of autonomy, this could provide additional support for a thinner conception of liberty.
Each year, the Fraser Institute publishes an index of economic freedom in North America, which ranks all the states and Canadian provinces together. The 2008 version can be found here:
http://www.fraserinstitute.org/researchandpubli...
All of the Canadian provinces except Alberta are ranked at the very bottom of the list. Alberta, on the other hand, is ranked 2nd of all states and provinces when considering total government expenditure, and 8th when looking at local government expenditure.
After the new rules and regulations pushed by Obama come in, and the new stimulus bill passes, I suspect Alberta will rise to the top as being the most economically free region in North America. And it also has the strongest economy in North America, and perhaps even in the world at this moment.
Some of us don't mind a little human civilization and progress!
I'm much more concerned about the "classical liberal conception of freedom". Some "conceptions of positive liberty" are actually reductions of liberty.
As for "classical liberty" - Canada has higher taxes, more restrictions on guns, the "Canadian Human Rights Commission", and more socialized medicine, and other sorts of limitations on freedom.
What makes you think that people in the health care industry are only there for alutristic reasons? Why do so many Canadian doctors leave Canada? Why doesn't altruism reduce wait times for Canadian medical procedures?
In fact all people are about equally greedy and equally altruistic. The trouble with government programs is that they are monopolies. This means that no matter how bad the service, no matter how overpaid the employees, no matter how pathetically outdated or irrelevant their organization, the public are forced to support it anyways, and will be thrown in jail or even killed if they refuse to support it.
And who do these monopolies hurt more than anyone else? Poor people, of course. The rich can avoid crappy public schools and health care waiting lists by buying private services. The poor are forced to put their kids in lousy schools and wait for months to get treated for things like cancer and heart disease. And why is that? Because the "altruists" in the government decided that it's a lot more lucrative in the long run to build up fat, highly-paid and unresponsive bureaucracies than it is to offer lean and cost-effective services. And the really funny thing is, it is because of "the poor people" that all these expensive, ineffective monopolies were created in the first place.
The best way to fix health care, for example, is (1) do away with government funding, and (2) end the doctor licensing monopoly which is nothing but a cartel to give a small group of doctors sky-high salaries by severely limiting the number of practitioners. Health care is not inherently expensive. But monopolies ARE inherently expensive, wasteful and unfair.
"If I look at actual indices that attempt, however imperfectly, to measure various freedoms, the U.S. and Canada come out pretty much identical on a classical liberal conception of freedom. And Canada comes out ahead on contemporary capabilities conceptions of positve liberty."
Judging by the comments, and in my understanding as well, this is implausible.
Those are all reasons why I despised living in Canada. Mindless consumerism and profits are under-rated, especially when all those nice toys such as Kindles, PSP's, Palm Pilots, and iPods are placed out of your reach because you live in an economically and culturally stagnant backwater like Manitoba or Saskatchewan.
Let people spend time with their families of their own free will, and I will consume, of mine.
But I was a kid then, in my 20s, newly married. At that time, I *was* what I bought. My consumerism was my self-esteem. Thank goodness I grew up!
But with respect to people doing as they wish, I'd agree with you -- except for one thing. People who work as clerks and cashiers in stores are often the least able to decide whether they work on a Sunday. The owners, the board of directors, the executives, the upper management of the store might choose to stay home on a Sunday to spend quality time. But the people providing you customer service usually have two choices: work or lose your job.
It's not that Canadians aren't hardworking. I think they just used to be less brainwashed by the cult of consumerism than Americans were. When I first came here, Canadians were their families, their friends, their town.
Sadly, I think you'd be much more comfortable up here now. You can shop 'til you drop. Our loss.
Can you give specific examples of freedoms that exist in Canada and not the US, and vice-versa?
Read the rest here: http://www.fraserinstitute.org/newsandevents/ne...
If there's one thing I regret, it's that Canada is becoming much more Americanized with respect to things like consumerism and placing profits ahead of other values, such as family. When I first came here, we didn't have shopping on Sunday, let alone 24/7. And it was a huge hardship for me to bear. But after a while, I began to see just how ridiculous that was. Now we have Sunday shopping and lots of all night stores -- but I stay home with my family. I learned something so precious moving to Canada -- and maybe Canada lost something so precious as technology narrowed the gap between the two cultures.
(Except Alberta -- they always were crazy out there. Like Texans. Like a province full of George W. Bushes and Dick Cheneys. You have to stand and watch a bunch of rootin' tootin' Albertans go prairie dog hunting with handguns and fire crackers to know what I mean. Hilarious! Normally I'd object to this sort of animal cruelty, but I never actually saw them get a prairie dog and and it seems to amuse the prairie dogs.)