Tags
150, Canada., prosperity, USA
By virtually every measure, Canada has surpassed the United States as the shining city on the hill, where everyone is safe to reach their potential.
It is often noted that in the early 20th century, Canadian prime minister Sir Wilfred Laurier declared, “Canada shall be the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come.”
The American Dream promised equality, a level playing field where everyone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but that too is more a Canadian thing. Canada’s “Gini coefficient”, a measurement of economic inequality, is significantly better than America’s and has been for 80 years now. In Canada, you are twice as likely to move from the poorest quintile of the population to the wealthiest.
Compared to Canada, America isn’t even the “land of the free”, anymore. The Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index considers Canadians to be the sixth freest people in the world, while Americans limp in at 23rd, behind Poland. The conservative Heritage Foundation, based in Washington, ranks Canada 7th and the U.S. 17th respectively for economic freedom. Free speech? Reporters Without Borders scores Canada 18th for press freedom; in spite of its much vaunted First Amendment, America only manages 41st.
Whether it was due to geography or history or maybe even policy, we have arrived. Everything America once aspired to be, we now are. Not only have we achieved the fabled American Dream, we are arguably among the safest, healthiest, happiest human beings to have ever existed.
1867-2017
Larry Muffin At Home 
Hear, hear!
(And so shriveled is my confidence these days, I checked: not ‘here’ x2 )
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The United States is on a rocket ship headed to hell.
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I saw this graph yesterday in the news and was not at all surprised. It makes one wonder about the value of that original American Revolution.
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I think that originally the idea was good but 240 years later things have changed and now is a turbulent period.
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Yet the Yanks have the arrogance to dismiss Canada as a quaint thing if they think of it at all.
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Fascinating facts and figures. ‘The American dream has moved north’ – I like that. Was speaking to a genius director the other day who liked Canada because he found it ‘boring and quiet – the perfect place to get on with creative work’. Can’t comment because I’ve never been…
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One has to remember that Canada has 5 time zones and a variety of climate, from region to region, people are very different and if some regions are remote and isolated it is up to the individual to make a life and find interests. To say it’s boring and quiet, that comment to me has been used many times in the past and comes from people who have not made the effort to look around and see what is going on. An example PEI where we live now. Many in Central Canada dismiss it as boring, but have not been to the Island, so how do they know? The director who said it is boring and quiet, I would ask him where does he go in Canada? Does he visit a park or a remote area? I would not think he living in a big city in Canada.
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you guys are like a nice apt built over a slum area.
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Recent news about the FBI doesn’t bode well for us. We’ve got a few fatal flaws in our national character (not shared by all Americans, by the way), and one of them is arrogance. Now we’ve elected the ultimate example of personal arrogance as if he were a hero instead of an ignorant bully. We’re already paying for our blindness…I saw a cartoon a while back about Canada building a wall to keep Americans out. You might want to get that project started now.
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Yes I am afraid that the latest scandal about the removal of FBI Dir Comey is a blow to the administration of Justice in the USA. A dangerous slide towards dictatorship enabled by the GOP. Hopefully this can be stopped, Nixon was.
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