Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> America thinks Canada is Europe

When I go to Montreal, I definitely feel this way. The rest of Canada feels pretty much like a clean America.

LOL, I liked to describe Montreal as 'France done the American way' when I was there once for a week couple years ago.

America without guns and racial violence, BLM, Trump. Although they did have the convoy protests, it didn't escalate into an attack on the Parliament like in the US.

Also with healthcare, a social safety net, people that care about each other and friendly , warm people. I was in the US for 5 months, then visited Canada for the first time after one hour I felt more at home there

And the convoy protests were funded by interests in the US. So it was a US political protest on Canadian soil.

Without racial violence?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/class-action-rcmp-abuse...

It depends on what one is referring to by "racial violence". The US has a long history of race riots, which have led to numerous deaths. While race riots have also happened in Canadian history, they have been far less frequent, and resulted in significantly less deaths. And the disparity remains even if you take into account the difference in size of the population.

If you physically segregate your underclass, they do tend not to "riot" in what I'm assuming you would consider a "race riot". Most deaths from "racial violence" aren't from "rioting" anyway, so focusing on that point is pretty silly, in my opinion.

> If you physically segregate your underclass, they do tend not to "riot" in what I'm assuming you would consider a "race riot"

Are you arguing that Canada "physically segregates" its underclass to a greater extent than the US does? I don't think that's actually true.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/41-20-0002/2023004/m-c/m...

In 1970 Detroit, the city was 30% black. What comparable city does Canada have?

According to the 2021 Canadian census, Vancouver is now a majority-minority city, 54% non-white. [0]

Also, keep in mind that in both Canada and the US, a plurality of the underclass are of European descent: in 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 37.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line, of whom 42.7% were non-Hispanic White, 28.0% Hispanic, 22.8% African American, 1.6% Native American, 4.8% Other. [1] (I don't have equivalent figures for Canada at hand, but I expect they will tell a broadly similar story, with European-descended people being the plurality of the Canadian poor.)

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/2021-census-...

[1] https://talkpoverty.org/basics/index.html

I said underclass was physically segregated. The US systematically discriminated against black people to form an underclass that shared a racial identity. Neither ethnic nor cultural Chinese in Vancouver are an underclass and have nothing to gain by executing a "race riot". The First Nations people you have so poorly treated are too small a fraction of the population and too dispersed for you to see a "race riot" on par with Los Angeles or Detroit, but the protests are there.

I was aware of the abuses agains indigenous Canadians, but it doesn't compare to the US. Maybe not without but certainly less.

"Higher numbers of hate crimes targeting a race or an ethnicity (+12% to 1,950 incidents) and a sexual orientation (+12% to 491 incidents) accounted for most of the increase in 2022. In 2022, hate crimes targeting a religion were down 15% from 2021 yet remained above the annual numbers recorded from 2018 to 2020."

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240313/dq240...

Compared to 6,567 in the US during the same year.

https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics

Per capita values are indeed higher for Canada due to the population difference.

These numbers can also go up if police do their job better and people trust them more and feel it worthwhile to report. Both are law-enforcement-provided, versus crime victim statistical surveys which are more accurate for the number of crimes committed (not just reported); though having their own drawbacks, of course.

No racial violence? Tell me... Does anyone even begin to acknowledge the atrocities done to the indigenous population over there?

It is a constant and omnipresent discussion.

A few years back Joni Mitchell was asked to participate in a project to create a tribute to her in downtown Saskatoon, and she suggested that it have a First Nations component.

It escalated pretty quickly. She got so frustrated that she comparted the flyover provinces to the Deep South in the US. The situation took five years to resolve.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/joni-mitchell-wants...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com