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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">[WS wrote:] I disagree. I know a bit about Canada and I would still put it in the<br>"loved" category. You need to understand that this is not the function of
<br>ignorance, but rather the lack of dirt. Canada does not have much dirt in<br>its history - no wars of aggression, no colonies, no genocide, no slavery,<br>no conquest, no hegemony. The worst thing that happened was probably
<br>outlawing potlatch - small potatoes vis a vis concentration camps, slavery,<br>or A bomb.<br><br>Canada also has a few nice features: open government nicely collaborating<br>with all kinds of social groups, liberal immigration policy, relatively
<br>generous _civilian_ foreign aid, good education system, universal health<br>care, one of the best statistical agencies in the world.<br><br>In sum, there are many reasons to love Canada and not that many to hate it.<br>
It is the latter that plays the pivotal role in lovability - as evidenced by<br>the counter-example of the US. The US is unloved not because there are no<br>reasons to love it (in fact there are a few), but because there are many
<br>good reasons to hate it.<br><br>Wojtek</blockquote>
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<div>WS. You so have not been to Canada lately. So, here is some of the dirt you have been missing. </div>
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<div>I hope someone by now has mentioned native folks. They have been about as shamefully dealt with here as any rotten place in the world. And continue to be. Canada is a recipient of international AID to help northern indigenous and (non-indigenous) Canadians are happy to go along with it. So, colonization, slavery, wars of aggression, etc., well, depends on when you got here.
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<div>And, as for the rest of your list, oh man, are you baiting me or what? Really? Canada, the Canadian state, and governments you are talking about right? Well, let's see. They just let a couple of guys out of jail held without trial for six years, for apparent, unproven and unsubstantiated links to terrorism. I mean, happily, these guys are getting out (house arrest), but we tore up habeus corpus just as quick as the neighbours to the south for some freaky non-reason that gripped the entire political class and a few others too. Immigration policy is nearly tantamount to racial profiling, has been for a decade or more, probably more. It has not been "generous" since the late 1970s, and its history is riddles with racist laws. They just got around to apologizing for the infamous "head tax" that effectively separated Chinese labourers from their families. Collaboration with social groups ended, if it ever existed, somewhere between 1984 and 1995, when the federal government declared war on program spending. We just shut down the directorate on the status of women -- apparently, no equality issues exist anymore -- and the law commission of canada, which had the radical madate of identifying and updating laws that didn't work anymore, both with a combined annual budget of a week's interest on the national debt. And hell, social statistics? Loved for our social statistics? Oh man, that is making me laugh. Not only because it is nearly impossible to get Statistics Cant-ada to work with you, but also because they're just as politicized as anyone's. Stats Can stopped measuring wealth in the early 80s when it got too embarrasing. The peace-keeping image once built by Pearson was explicitly ended and replaced with a combat mandate the last government under the happy prodding of a newly re-financed military. They seem to have forgotton the torturing of Somali prisoners by Canadian elite forces in the early 90s during that campaign -- so yeah, wars of invasion -- and Hillier, the head of the armed forces, was quoted a few weeks ago as saying Afghanis are "scumbags". We''ve had neocon provincial governments that'd make some southern politicians feel right at home.
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<div>Health care. It works, yeah. We have a single payer system (well, actually, its a mixed system) since the 60s, because of a particular political moment, and it has been under assault one way or another since then. The current goverment, and some before and no doubt after, are pretty committed to dismantling it. The university system is being increasingly modelled on the US system, vouchers and tax programs are being introduced for non-public schools.
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<div>If we got onto the influence in the world, well, I'd say that with the exception of one or two misses (we missed joining the second gulf war while a political dynasty under Chretien went a little sane in its dying days -- but they got in belatedly under his successor) the best summary is one from an old ESL student I had, when asked why she came to Canada from South Korea: "why, because its an economic colony of the
U.S., but cheaper". So, yeah, price competitive, and if you don't look under the hood, well, caveat emptor.</div><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">-- <br><a href="mailto:simon.archer@gmail.com">simon.archer@gmail.com</a><br>647.406.2724 </blockquote></div>