Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

I spent a decent part of my adult life in Canada and I can’t believe what in God’s name is happening to that place.

Canada is experiencing a severe housing bubble at the backdrop of Chinese snow washing, wage stagnation is real and middle class is slowly getting wiped out. The only thing keeping the GDP at the level it is is high level of immigration which favours the wealthy in the name of a “point based immigration system”. The ruling liberal party is genuinely out of touch and the PM knows nothing but virtue signaling. The conservatives are also facing a leadership crisis since they lack largely a coordination and single thread holding the party. NDP is a joke and virtually does nothing and the electoral system is almost broken thanks to this three party system (oh and then there is Bloc which I don’t even want to get started on). Trudeau was elected prime minister with less than 33% votes. The whole COVID crisis was used by Trudeau to call a snap election and then they don’t seem to have a plan to embrace the endemic outlook. This whole vax mandates for truckers was such a distraction at the backdrop of inflation and struggling service sector. I keep thinking what are these people thinking? Any decent policy advisors would say now is not the time to do things out of spite against the people who are critical to supply chain.

As a Canadian, it's been utterly shocking to watch our country crumble in the last few years. This summer I'll be moving away for good.

In the last decade I've seen most of my family leave for the US due to the higher incomes. I always kept hope that maybe Canada would get better. It hasn't, it's gotten very bad. The insane level of immigration has eroded away any leverage the working class has. Now you see all that frustration coming out, on both sides of the political spectrum, with each side blaming the other.

Housing and necessities are un-affordable for everyone, the divisive rhetoric has turned society against each other. Simply being in Canada is depressing now. I just got back from 2 months in Europe, the difference is shocking.

I've been looking to move to Canada (vs moving to US due to more sane social services like healthcare and pension system), is what you are describing present all over Canada or just in some parts of it?

I would answer that it's centered in a few major cities. The big problem with Canada is that political power is so concentrated in Montreal, Toronto, and to a lesser extent Ottawa and Vancouver that the views of the rest of the country are ignored, so there is not really an escape. It would be like if all US government policy was set by the Bay Area and NYC

Everywhere, albeit to varying levels. Canada's healthcare is a joke; it's 'free', but it's a joke. And the highest possible pension payout wouldn't pay half my rent today.

If you have the opportunity to move the US and have your employer pay for your healthcare, your quality of life and income will be much, much higher than you could ever expect in Canada. The main thing is that incomes in the US, especially for tech, are much, much higher while cost of living is lower.

While I can understand the healthcare part, what about US public pensions (Social Security) is not sane? The US public pension is quite generous compared to the rest of the developed world, including Canada.

The US can be accused of many things, but having a poor public pension isn't one of them.

Canada on the whole has been poisoned by high property values. Instead of investing in making things, everyone is all in on housing speculation.

My experience has been essentially the opposite of the person you're replying to.

Health care where I am is great, I can see my primary care doctor mostly same day or next day and the odd tests I've needed have never been any kind of wait longer than 3 weeks (for non-urgent tests). Immediate care for actual emergencies, I've been seen right away. It's a triage system, so if you go to the emergency department at the hospital with the sniffles you could wait a bunch of hours.

Yes, there's a huge housing crisis and yes it's an area of concern. There's some issues here in that the real difference-makers are controlled by cities. There's a LOT of NIMBYism.

I haven't really seen evidence of Canada "crumbling"; just a lot of people pushing that narrative whenever they're despairing over their own fortunes. Could it be better? Absolutely.

> Health care where I am is great, I can see my primary care doctor mostly same day or next day and the odd tests I've needed have never been any kind of wait longer than 3 weeks (for non-urgent tests).

Try living outside Canada. I used to think healthcare was great as a young male... (men typically don't interact with the healthcare system as often as women for biological reasons)

My girlfriend is pregnant. She's from the Czech Republic. We were just in the Czech Republic for 2 months. 3 weeks for non-urgent tests? Try a day. As in phone the clinic, get a test for the NEXT day. During the Omicron wave. She had bloodwork done, an ultrasound, x-ray for a foot injury, treatment for said injury, dental work done, etc... No wait times for anything. No wait times at the clinic. No need for a primary care doctor (something which many Canadians don't have because of a shortage of doctors).

Canadians take the sad state of affairs as normal and actually believe our government's propaganda that the rest of the world works the same way. It doesn't.

> I haven't really seen evidence of Canada "crumbling"

Go to another developed country. Live for awhile. The only people who think Canada's doing OK are the ones who never left.

And on an individual level; any country is great if you have enough money. Doesn't mean society is OK.

I am sure Czech healthcare system has been subjectively better in your experience. But I hesitate to call it objectively better than Canada's, given that life expectancy at birth is 3 years shorter in Czechia compared to Canada. Something must be causing the disparity, and usually that tends to be the healthcare.

I can tell you why the disparity: many Czechs who are still alive were born and raised under communism and carry all the generational trauma caused by growing up under poverty and dictatorships. As a country it wasn't really 'developed' until quite recently. And, well, old people are the most likely to die, for obvious reasons. Funny enough, Czech life expectancy at 60 is exactly 3 years less than Canada's. Meanwhile there's no way to truly measure the life expectancy of someone born today.

But if you go check metrics like doctors per capita, beds per capita, how many clinics there are, insurance coverage, etc..., it's shocking. Twice as many doctors per capita as Canada, for example.

Edit - for example, under 5 year old mortality rate for Czech Republic is 3.2 per 1000 while for Canada it's 4.9...

> My girlfriend is pregnant. She's from the Czech Republic. We were just in the Czech Republic for 2 months. 3 weeks for non-urgent tests? Try a day. As in phone the clinic, get a test for the NEXT day. During the Omicron wave. She had bloodwork done, an ultrasound, x-ray for a foot injury, treatment for said injury, dental work done, etc... No wait times for anything. No wait times at the clinic. No need for a primary care doctor (something which many Canadians don't have because of a shortage of doctors).

My partner had a similar experience when she went through her pregnancy during the first wave of covid (when everything was less certain). A pregnant woman is going to always have things like soft tissue ultrasounds before a guy with a light sports injury (my example of having to wait 3 weeks).

Your pregnant partner and I with a light sports injury are, in no good healthcare system, going to be given equal priority.

For an actual important scan like an X-Ray of a broken bone, it's always been immediate.

> Go to another developed country. Live for awhile. The only people who think Canada's doing OK are the ones who never left.

This is an awful assumption to make of anyone, especially anyone in a tech forum online IME. We're one of the most mobile workforces. I've absolutely lived and worked for lengthy stretches in other countries and experienced life there. I've obviously not lived everywhere but I suspect almost every country has its own pain points.

It's clear from your various posts though that you're stumping for the Czech Republic, and that's great, I'm glad you found a spot to make you happy.

I agree with everything you're saying. I'm hoping the current protests are going to be a catalyst for Canadians who for the most part are apathetic and apolitical to wake up and notice what has happened to our country and finally push back. We're so far gone though I don't know how we can actually reestablish ourselves though: in particular, our political parties are so hollowed out of anyone remotely competent and interested in the future of the country that regardless of the will of the people, I don't see how it can be represented.

We've also literally created millions of crazy people with all the covid fear propaganda, and I don't know how we reintegrate them into society.

I could go on, we're in a lot of trouble.

Where are you moving to?

Prague, Czech Republic. SO is Czech so we're moving mainly for the lifestyle, culture, plus now with a kid on the way we're concerned about access to education, healthcare, etc... Where we live in Canada it's literally $1 million to purchase any kind of housing whatsoever... We could make it work but I have no family here anyway and for the same money we can live much better there, plus be close to her family...

Canada's birth-rate is bellow what is necessary to sustain or grow the population. Without immigration Canada's population would be shrinking.

If you think it is bad now, imagine how bad would it be if the majority of the population was in retirement. Sustaining a pension scheme (or a healthy economy for pension funds) becomes very hard, plus all of the services required to keep the society running would be greatly reduced.

Canada's immigration system seems one of the better I've looked into, skills, language, education and job offer all have to be accounted to get in.

>The only thing keeping the GDP at the level it is is high level of immigration which favours the wealthy in the name of a “point based immigration system”.

Is that supposed to be bad? The main factors that contribute to your points are language skills, education, work experience, age, and job offer. It's true that those requirements favor the wealthy, but would canada be better served by immigrants that don't speak english, are inexperienced, old, and don't have a job lined up?

I think what they are trying to say is that a country can always increase its GDP by increasing population. Of course, if 2x the amount of people that are eating a pie that is 1.1x bigger, the quality of life has dramatically decreased. For the people immigrating, Canada is obviously appealing just simply from a security point of view. All things equal, they don't really care if their quality of life is the same as long as they won't randomly be killed.

Of course, this all needs to be substantiated with facts to actually show the cause of the issue. I honestly don't know if Canada's immigration levels are too high and causing problems for the middle class or if the OP is just angry that an Indian family now operates their local Husky.

I think it promotes skilled Canadians emigrating, along with keeping poor places poor. Instead of having competitive compensation, Canadian companies hire cheaper skilled labour from abroad.

If we got more cheap unskilled labour, we could expand our whole economy to be rich enough to pay for the expensive skilled Canadians. Making a ton of poor people richer ads a lot more total value than adding a couple of rich people

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