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Comment by gdevenyi | Hacker News Reader

The Canada the author refers to is gone.

It was a time of post WWII boom and unrivalled economic prosperity. For the vast majority of human existence wealth like that was never offered to regular commoners.

Canada today might be expensive to rent in and buy in, but the quality of life in terms of safety, culture, political stability, nature, and medicine (minus the temporary shortage in health professionals) is still unmatched globally. Canadians who complain about Canada haven’t faced or lived life outside of Canada

I’m Canadian, have lived in 4 different continents, and there’s plenty of countries that are just as good or better than Canada out there.

Case in point, I live in Japan. Some things are worse than Canada, but the things that are better line up with my priorities in life.

Don’t fall for the americanism of being blind to the rest of the world and thinking we’re the best. There’s plenty of areas for Canada to improve on.

If I may ask, how did you end up in Japan?

I liked it well enough when I was travelling that I decided to try and live here, so I got a job and a work visa. That was almost 4 years ago now.

> Don’t fall for the americanism of being blind to the rest of the world and thinking we’re the best.

That's not what the person was saying, though. They never implied that Canada is the best, they only said that Canada is a good place to live in, and that people who try to say otherwise (like the parent of this thread) lack perspective. Any Canadian that lived in other first-world countries (except maybe the US) will probably say that in many ways, the other countries can be better than us. We've got plenty of issues, but Canada's still up there. There's some things that are good here, some that need a lot of work - but on average, it's still really good by world standards. There's nothing wrong with saying that we need to improve in many critical areas, but there is in posting ragebait talking about 'true Canada' being long gone, Canada being a failed state and so on, like what you see above and across many parts of the internet.

I think that’s up to interpretation. They said Canada is “unmatched globally”, which I interpreted as a belief that Canada is the best country in the world.

Agreed on the second half though.

Some of the HN community have lived in multiple places - look where they end up not where they go at the start of their career. Such people don't have to sweat families, health, ...

I find it very amusing the number of 'Canadians' in this thread saying how great a place it is after prefacing the comment explaining they now live in the USA.

Hard to know what accounts to bother responding to these days. This is likely one of them as it fails to offer any worthy substance beyond a barely whined grievance. But I have first hand experience that the things described in this post are absolutely not gone.

I suspect there are agents of lesser minds at work hoping to stir instability. We aren’t swindled as easily as other peoples.

This is not a greivence this is a lamentation.

Quite the statement there bud. Care to back it up?

Every province except Alberta is in dire financial states(Venezuela events will finish them off) . We have no gold reserves. In the next 5 years there will be a mortgage cliff for those who bought at the peak. Major Universities are about to be bankrupt.

Canada is going to get very poor soon. These social goods will be gone, and we will be worse for it.

They still have power, they still have food, they still have minerals and other stuff dug out of the ground. They still have water. Unless you think the world will cease being a consumer economy, they'll do ok. And Toronto and Vancouver can take all of the refugees from Silicon Valley when it implodes financially.

Is this the new "We're going to turn into Greece" scaremongering the Conservatives were slinging 15 years ago.

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