Higher Ground

I got out­side today, for the first time sev­eral days, since for a long while I was too weak even to get much fur­ther than the bath­room. The air was mild, and despite a good deal of clouds, there were what they call here ‘Sunny Breaks’, which are those (some­times brief) moments when the sun­beams break through and every­thing lights up. Today, they lit up the cro­cuses. Yes, March 1 and Spring has Sprung in the Lower Main­land. Despite some snow on the moun­tains (and I heard that some friends even went cross-country ski­ing on Cypress Moun­tain today), we are soon going to be back to ‘The Other Van­cou­ver’, which is just fine by me. The good weather also was appre­ci­ated by the Real­tors who were run­ning a cou­ple open houses on our street today.

We Were Lucky to Move Where and When We Did

When Pam and I moved to Canada, we said that it was because of Bush (who I often refer to as WPIUSH). I also wrote that it was because I looked ahead to a future that looked to be unpleas­ant, because of poor deci­sions by the US gov­ern­ment in the near term hav­ing an effect on our sit­u­a­tion as future retirees. While that dim future referred mainly to the US Fed­eral bud­get deficit, it also was due to the greed and cor­rup­tion that we saw, and I def­i­nitely could feel some sort of col­lapse com­ing. Mind you, I had pre­dicted that a great eco­nomic dis­in­te­gra­tion would be com­ing (cue Sarah Con­nor look­ing at the com­ing storm at the end of the first Ter­mi­na­tor movie), but my tim­ing put it roughly around 2015, so I was off by a few years, but it looks like I got pretty close. I’m not that thrilled that the chick­ens have come home to roost a half a decade or so ear­lier than I thought.
While I feel that we were smart to leave when we did (as we could now prob­a­bly not afford to), what I didn’t count on was the fact Canada was also the right place to go, in many ways.

This past week, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece for Newsweek, called The Cana­dian Solu­tion. Warn­ing: I’m going to get dan­ger­ously close to smug here, but will try to hold back if I do.
Accord­ing to Zakaria, our new home is in sur­pris­ingly good shape these days:

Guess which coun­try, alone in the indus­tri­al­ized world, has not faced a sin­gle bank fail­ure, calls for bailouts or gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion in the finan­cial or mort­gage sec­tors. Yup, it’s Canada. In 2008, the World Eco­nomic Forum ranked Canada’s bank­ing sys­tem the health­i­est in the world. America’s ranked 40^th, Britain’s 44^th.

Canada has done more than sur­vive this finan­cial cri­sis. The coun­try is pos­i­tively thriv­ing in it. Cana­dian banks are well cap­i­tal­ized and poised to take advan­tage of oppor­tu­ni­ties that Amer­i­can and Euro­pean banks can­not seize. The Toronto Domin­ion Bank, for exam­ple, was the 15^th-largest bank in North Amer­ica one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the oth­ers have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Cana­di­ans? Com­mon sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loos­ened reg­u­la­tions on their finan­cial indus­tries, the Cana­di­ans refused to fol­low suit, see­ing the old rules as use­ful shock absorbers. Cana­dian banks are typ­i­cally lever­aged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and Euro­pean banks at a fright­en­ing 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse busi­ness cul­ture, but it is also a prod­uct of old-fashioned rules on banking.

The arti­cle goes on to laud Canada’s bet­ter hous­ing mar­ket (and it doesn’t even have to note that there was no ‘Sub-Prime’ mess here, either). The other day we learned that Obama’s “Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act” deals with Health Care, because the num­ber 1 rea­son that an Amer­i­can goes bank­rupt is because of a major med­ical prob­lem. Not needed here, and as I found dur­ing my recent ill­ness, the sto­ries that some US politi­cians and oth­ers make that we have to wait for­ever to get to a doc­tor or get sub-standard health care are utterly false, in my expe­ri­ences. Just this past week, I walked (slowly) 3 blocks to our local clinic, waited about 20 min­utes to see a doc­tor the first time, and 15 min­utes on my return visit. My blood tests were done in 3 days, and didn’t cost me a penny.
Zakaria goes on to notice the other good news for those of us in Canada:

The gov­ern­ment has restruc­tured the national pen­sion sys­tem, plac­ing it on a firm fis­cal foot­ing, unlike our own insol­vent Social Secu­rity. Its health-care sys­tem is cheaper than America’s by far (account­ing for 9.7 per­cent of GDP, ver­sus 15.2 per­cent here), and yet does bet­ter on all major indexes. Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, ver­sus 78 in the United States; “healthy life expectancy” is 72 years, ver­sus 69. Amer­i­can car com­pa­nies have moved so many jobs to Canada to take advan­tage of lower health-care costs that since 2004, Ontario and not Michi­gan has been North America’s largest car-producing region.

Of course that last bit about Ontario pro­duc­ing most of North America’s cars is also not such good news, as the dire straits of the auto indus­try have hit that province at least as hard if not harder than Michigan.

Even the immi­gra­tion poli­cies that Pam is learn­ing in detail these days, as she stud­ies to become an Immi­gra­tion Con­sul­tant, get some atten­tion by Zakaria:

The U.S. cur­rently has a brain-dead immi­gra­tion sys­tem. We issue a small num­ber of work visas and green cards, turn­ing away from our shores thou­sands of tal­ented stu­dents who want to stay and work here. Canada, by con­trast, has no limit on the num­ber of skilled migrants who can move to the coun­try. They can apply on their own for a Cana­dian Skilled Worker Visa, which allows them to become per­fectly legal “per­ma­nent res­i­dents” in Canada—no need for a spon­sor­ing employer, or even a job. Visas are awarded based on edu­ca­tion level, work expe­ri­ence, age and lan­guage abil­i­ties. If a prospec­tive immi­grant earns 67 points out of 100 total (hold­ing a Ph.D. is worth 25 points, for instance), he or she can become a full-time, legal res­i­dent of Canada.

Zakaria notes that com­pa­nies have begun to notice, and that Microsoft sit­u­ated their lat­est research cen­ter here in Vancouver.

At any rate, I’m not try­ing to gloat or hold our good for­tune over the old friends and fam­ily we left behind in the States, but per­haps they can now under­stand why we don’t seem to have the same level of dread and panic when we talk about our eco­nomic prospects that they do. Cana­di­ans right now seem to be more con­fi­dent, and less likely to respond emo­tion­ally to the news (partly because our news is also less sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic). Given that we have bet­ter safety nets, includ­ing health care, a sta­ble bank­ing sys­tem, and even our food inspec­tion sys­tem, which caught the bad peanut but­ter when it came to the bor­der, that’s not all that sur­pris­ing. Pam and I find our­selves con­tin­u­ally shak­ing our heads as we watch the Evening News from the major US TV Net­works, some­times in relief, and some­times in bewil­der­ment that things in the coun­try we left have got­ten so bad.