O, Canada!
I’m in Canada this week.
It’s my fourth visit in recent years, and by the end of my second day in the country, a familiar question all but smothered me.
Even after allowing for the “change” factor – that sense of excitement just at being in a foreign land – the question lingered, the lack of a good answer driving me straight to melancholy laced with (what else?) malcontent:
Why doesn’t life feel this good in the States?
The question has confronted me all my life; I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. For family fishing trips, for the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal, and for one glorious summer week as a 12-year-old, for hockey camp. On each of those trips, like each of these recent ones, the question grabbed me – and refused to let go.
From my first childhood visit, it was obvious something was different here. People seem to lead their lives, as opposed being led by life. Recreational opportunities abound, and not just for tourists at vacation spots.
I needed a library this week for business. I dutifully followed my GPS to the one listed as nearest my hotel.
I arrived here.
City built, city maintained, city staffed – and, as the name suggests, soooo much more than a municipal library. Does your library branch offer babysitting? With a playschool? A cafeteria? Weight room and fitness center? A freakin’ water park? With a WAVE POOL? TWO ICE RINKS??
My god. And we wonder why our communities don’t feel like communities at all.
Canadian communities do, and that’s been true in very locale I’ve visited. The sense that life is for living – and that government exists in no small measure to help people lead a balanced life – pervades Canada.
Canadian capitalism – hearty as ours – is different, too. Starbucks? Hah! Tim Horton’s is a nationwide – yet simultaneously local – tradition. And everything Starbucks wishes to be.
Then, of course, there’s the hockey.
Until tonight, I’d never been to an NHL game in Canada. That’s saying something for someone who’s been here as much as me and loves the game as I do.
I did see the Kelowna Rockets play the Everett Silvertips (great name, eh?) last year, and it was a revelation. Minor league hockey in Canada is maybe the best hockey there is. Like the MLB has ruined big-time baseball, the NHL is well down the path to ripping the heart from major league hockey. The thing is, Canadians know it. They resent it. And they wonder – in books asking as much – how to save “their” game.
(In case you’re curious, the general consensus up here is that the answer is not by putting more teams in places like Phoenix, L.A., Florida, Nashville, and Carolina. And nobody hesitates saying as much to an American who happens to ask.)
Canada argues with itself just as we do, but not at full volume. There is a civility and decency to the discourse that we’d do well to emulate. A big issue here in Alberta, for example, is the ongoing rape of land some 500 miles above Edmonton, in what’s colloquially known as “the Oil Patch.” But even as provincial government officials with vested interests in protecting the status quo decry a recent report advocating huge reforms, they acknowledge the plain fact of climate change and the need for containing carbon emissions.
The best our advocates for the status quo can muster is “Drill, baby, drill!” – questioning all the while whether global warming is real.
Why doesn’t life feel this good in the States?
I’ve come a bit closer to the answer with each visit, and this time it became clear: If we allowed ourselves this kind of contentment, we’d wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.
But these folks do.
They do only what they need to. They know when to quit, and they’re not ashamed to. They live in the moment. They know what they like, and don’t worry about what others like – or do.
In short, Canadians live, let live, and celebrate life.
Something we Americans seem to have forgotten how to do, long ago.