Can Canada Teach the Rest of Us to Be Nicer? | Hacker News Reader

Can Canada Teach the Rest of Us to Be Nicer?

bbc.com

23 pointsanishkothari8 comments

I moved to Vancouver in 2008, spent 5 years there (I'm originally from Paris) and I have to say that Canadian niceness, originally a culture shock for me, has been a very positive influence in my life. The only problem was coming back to France and noticing how rude and chaotic life in Paris can be, making me long for Canadian Paradise Lost.

Move to Montreal :P You'll get a weird combo of the Canadian niceness and the French rudeness.

I found Parisians to be surprisingly friendly.

Of course this is a story filled mostly with anecdotes, but as a Canadian I would like to believe that generally we are a "nice" people as a whole and take pride in it. However, I would not say we are necessarily passive like the movie theatre anecdote suggests in the article, except when it comes to our politics.

As there was no mention of it in the article, I would love to suggest that people check out Atlantic Canada. Full disclaimer, I am an ex-pat from Nova Scotia, but I still love the place and miss the feeling of community and hospitality. Things seen to happen much slower, then the hustle and bustle of Ontario. Although, as Canada is such a spread out nation I have so much more to see!

Having been all over our great country I've always thought all Canadians are nice and polite, but in the maritimes people are friendly. In most of Canada people are perfectly pleasant and apologize if they bump into you, but wouldn't dream of starting an interaction unless forced to. In the maritimes people will walk up, introduce themselves and start talking.

Whenever I travel to the US I'm always reminded apologizing there carries an admission of guilt. If I bump into someone on the sidewalk and we apologize to each other, neither person is admitting fault; we're both simply acknowledging an unfortunate situation and moving on with our lives.

I do always laugh when I see a news article or blog post about how nice everyone was in Toronto, when the rest of Canada views them as total jerks. It's a whole different scale I suppose.

For those in the UK:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.b...

Canadians are the largest bunch of back-biting snakes you will ever see. They'll hug you close and call you friend, whilst doing everything they can to stab you in the back.

If you ever get a chance, watch a bunch of them together. The closer they are, the more mean and vicious they will be. Politeness is saved for strangers.

Keep this in mind whenever you deal with a Canadian. They aren't your friends, despite all appearances.

I'm not sure about nicer, but we are certainly more apologetic and prone to queue up in orderly lines.

The tendency to reflexively apologize when people bump into me is a quirk that has caused a lot of confusion in other countries.

And while I haven't apologized to a tree yet but I once greeted a neighbourhood dog with an automatic "good morning, how're you doing?"

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