Disclaimer: I only ever go to BC (and I have lived in the PNW most of my life), so this might be a very biased hot take. I bet Quebec is a little bit different, as well as the other provinces & territories.
Disclaimer: I only ever go to BC (and I have lived in the PNW most of my life), so this might be a very biased hot take. I bet Quebec is a little bit different, as well as the other provinces & territories.
Those are the West (everything west of Upper Canada), Upper Canada (triangle formed by Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal), Lower Canada (Quebec), and the Maritimes.
If you're going more granular, you have Newfoundland, which is very different from the rest of the Maritime provinces (they have their own dialect of English), the North (sparsely populated but the kind of Canadian that lives there is different), and to a point Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
Of those, the West is functionally the Midwest (Vancouver and Island are not meaningfully distinct from Seattle/Portland/Bay cities in terms of politics) where each province is flavored towards the State to its immediate south, Upper Canada is culturally NYC-DC North (and for that reason is as hostile to the rest of the country as NYC/DC are to the US in general), Lower Canada is French (obviously), and the Maritimes are the Rust Belt.
The reason for Upper Canada's insularity (and to a point, Lower Canada's) is its age and geography: as the US found out in 1812 it's very difficult to reinforce across the Great Lakes. As for the West, there might as well be no border at all, so commerce and culture move freely (it also helps that, because plentiful natural resources and space causes a freedom-focused outlook on human rights, most people who live in the West will naturally have that in common with their southern counterparts).
Definetly need to split this further:
Prairies - Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta
Mountains - Everything inside the Rockies
BC - Its it's own thing
Just a heads up, Newfoundland isn't a part of the Maritimes at all, and those from Newfoundland will certainly remind you of that if you lump them in :)
The cultural division between BC and the 'west' (AB, SK, MB) is pretty strong.
Southern Ontario is a lot closer to upstate ny / the midwest than NYC, I'd say.
The Maritimes is much more like New England than the rust belt. Newfoundland isn't even part of the Maritime provinces - it's part of the Atlantic provinces.
I will say though, weighing in on a neighbouring nation while only having visited one of its provinces strikes me as a little bit conceited. A visit to BC is not going to give you much of a perspective of the diversity of this country.
Also: our health care is amongst the worst of the western nations at this stage. Subsequent governments have carved it away to be a shell of its former self.
That's a little harsh, I admitted as much in my post. I figured that my disclaimer would clarify that what I really think is "The PNW is very similar no matter which side of the 49th parallel you find yourself on."
I withhold any opinion on your health care; I've heard negatives, sure, but I've got no skin in the game. Philosophically I like it better than what we're doing in the US, even if the results have been lackluster so far.
The state has a monopoly on the purchasing of healthcare services, it is illegal in most provinces to buy any healthcare for your family. The official marketing is that services are given out in priority order. In practice, it's rationed according to a lottery, your connections, whether you can afford to live near medical center, your ability to advocate for yourself, ability to show up an hour before a facility opens and wait in line for 5 hours, push through constant gaslighting by doctors whose goal is to dissuade you from receiving care (they'd rather you just give up and go home, here take this antibiotic and get out of my face), willingness to embellish symptoms to get higher priority placement, etc.
When the system utterly fails you, you have zero recourse. You just accept that you won't get to see a specialist for 6 months (if you're lucky, often a year). There is no escape hatch. Only if you're lucky enough to afford paying out of pocket and be able to get out of the country to get medical attention.
Millions of Canadians have no access to a family doctor (25-60% of British Columbians, for example). With increasing frequency, Emergency Rooms themselves are closing their doors (can't operate a whole 24/7 rotation).
On a philosophical level, I think it plainly evil that, even after I've paid such high taxes to fund everyone else's treatment, and then after the government refuses to provide me with adequate healthcare, after already paying for services not received, they then make it illegal to use whatever money I have left to provide basic healthcare to myself and my family.
The evil part seems to be where they bilk you out of your tax dollars a few steps up the chain.
Why is it illegal to purchase healthcare privately? When I lived in the UK, I skipped the NHS and used my private insurance all the time to avoid all the issues you listed. Why not make it available to those that can afford the option?
It’s, of course, a both/and situation. Try to improve things at home while searching for options if needed.
I do believe there is a bit of absurdity going on where parts of the Canadian system are trying to save money though by offering suicide.
We don't really have "universal healthcare" at all anymore, I don't know what you'd call such a dysfunctional system.
Canadians have known more what is going on in America than Americans for at least the last 35 years.
I love Canadians but never in my adult life have Canadians not been just salivating to have a conversation about American news with an American.
And much lower wages and opportunities, but the same (or higher) housing prices. There's a reason you don't live there.
If you are from BC, you are more likely to travel to or move to California than you are Nova Scotia or Florida.
Likewise, if you are from Montana, you probably feel more comfortable in Alberta or Saskatchewan than you would in New York or Alabama.
While our governments function very differently, NAFTA has removed most of the institutional barriers preventing the natural movement of money, people and culture between the two places.
I once heard, in the early 2000s, that more than 1/2 the languages spoken 150 years ago are gone.