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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> nearly identical culture to the United States.

Lol. Maybe a similar culture to some parts of California or Washington, and that is a stretch, but Vancouver is very very different than "the United States". Live in both for a while and all the little difference (the guns, health care, government, police, civil-military relations, the environment, land use, education etc) add up to markedly different approaches to life.

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I think anyone who had spent time living outside of North America will recognize that the cultures of Canada and the US are indeed nearly identical. Especially in the context of this thread, which is about the workplace.

Whoa definitely can't agree. For example, Canadians are much less likely to be rah rah about something they know doesn't work. And they don't have anywhere near the level of 'just world' philosophy. As a foreigner to both, I see massive differences.

Strongly disagree. The difference between somewhere like Vancouver and Seattle is much smaller than the difference between somewhere like San Francisco and Tulsa. Statement is plenty accurate.

I'm an American living in Canada and I'd agree with this.

San Diego was far more different than Austin, TX, and considerably different than Ithaca, NY.

I'm still legally a WA resident, and having done a lot of time around Seattle, Everett, Bellingham, and Vancouver, I can tell you there are a lot of similarities. Seattle doesn't have the Aberdeen Mall, but in terms of attitude there isn't anything you can't find in Seattle.

Once you get out of the city, guns, religion, and skepticism of the urbanites is just as common as in the US -- standard Urban-Rural divide. Hell, even the "fly-over" provinces are conservative, just like in the US.

Have you been to Alberta? Vancouver is not representative of canada.

Maybe its Alberta that's not representative of Canada ;)

Yes. I have lived/worked in Alberta many years, and am scheduled to go back soon. But i didnt say Canada /= the united states. I said Vancouver /= the United states.

It seems you're insinuating that Alberta is somehow more (U.S.) 'American' than the rest of Canada.

I have lived in Alberta for over ten years, and though culturally distinct from the rest of Canada (as is every other province I've spent time in) Alberta's brand of rugged individualist / conservatism is still very Canadian.

And though we may look very different to the urbanites of GVRD (Vancouver and surrounding) and the GTA (Toronto and surrounding), you'll find many more similarities between us and those living in rural Canada with resource-based economies, like the people living in B.C.'s forestry-dependent areas, the northern prairies or NorthWest Ontario. The difference for us is that we have very vocal, oil-industry-controlled politicians and a population that is immediately suspicious of any time an easterner tries to tell us what to do.

Sometimes the easiest way to see our distinctiveness is by contrast - immediately evident when crossing over to even the closest border states.

I love Montana and its people, but boy do you know you're not in Canada anymore - roadways lined with advertisements; cops everywhere you look; huge rich/poor divides; razor wire, visible drug problems and ghettos in even the smallest cities; and a love of all things military.

All that to say, there's far more to being Albertan than oil, guns and god, and those three things don't make us a 'murican.

No I'm insinuating that the values the commenter encountered in vancouver vis a vis guns, police, armed conflict, etc are not representative of canada as a whole and change from province to province and even between say vancouver and the surrounding rural areas.

Vancouver is especially different from the rest of canada than most canadian cities. Its like using Portland to characterize the entirety of America.

Agreed. I lived in the us for five years, it was a shock. The big thing for me was the guns, the constant militarism. Albertans might own lots of guns but they don't take them to pizza hut. And cops everywhere. I was in seattle recently and counted 8 different TYPES of police car on a quick 4-block walk between buildings. Not car paint jobs, different types of police. ICE, fed, state, local, atf... America seems to have more police than not. Canada, all of canada, doesn't feel like that.

I, too, would accept "similar culture," but it is far from "nearly identical." I say this as a Canadian who lived in the United States for several years.

It's very, very similar north-south. Vancouver has more in common with Seattle than Halifax.

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