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.

2.5 Million People are Worth a Picture

I hope the world still wants them back.

The Final Hours of the Disaster and The Second Great Emancipator

I’ve been com­plain­ing that lately it’s taken me a long time to write these entries, and I’m not sure why. Per­haps I’m try­ing to cram too much into them, or I’m fuss­ing too much with the word­ing or details, or per­haps I’m get­ting dis­tracted more often (by Twit­ter, Face­book, or per­haps some task I should actu­ally be doing). In any case, I think that I’ll work on this until I don’t want to any more, and then just hit the Pub­lish but­ton, whether it’s a pol­ished epis­tle or not. Call it blog­ging Ker­ouac Style.

First, impres­sions of this spe­cial week in the con­text of his­tory: So much of the past cou­ple of days and com­ing hours is a reminder of how our life changed, how it took a dif­fer­ent turn mainly because of a change in gov­ern­ment. Some friends and fam­ily were sur­prised that we did it: “You’re leav­ing because some guy got elected? What does that have to do with you?” I think that per­haps those who were skep­ti­cal that any admin­is­tra­tion in Wash­ing­ton D.C. could have any direct influ­ence on the way their lives went may now be recon­sid­er­ing that assump­tion. The wrong peo­ple at the top, and you can poten­tially lose every­thing. While I’m not sure that the par­tic­u­lar peo­ple who ques­tioned our emi­gra­tion from the United States actu­ally lost their homes or sav­ings, I’ll bet that they have shaken their heads in the won­der of just how much dam­age a few key peo­ple — Pres­i­dent, Vice Pres­i­dent, Attor­ney Gen­eral, Sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury— can actu­ally do.

Back to the images on the TV and the com­men­ta­tors on the radio and Inter­net: It seems as though now, the US is at last let­ting out it’s col­lec­tive breath. With the peo­ple around the Mall in Wash­ing­ton (and also the throngs of peo­ple con­gre­gat­ing by the rail­road tracks between Philadel­phia and Wash­ing­ton D.C. ear­lier in the week), I think I see some­thing more than fan wor­ship, or even, as some cor­re­spon­dents seem to be char­ac­ter­iz­ing it, pride mainly on behalf of the black com­mu­nity. There is an irony that US Pres­i­dent Elect Barack Obama took the same train route to the White House as Abra­ham Lin­coln did, and it’s not the irony that you might think I mean (that it’s because he is black). No, it’s because Lin­coln was called The Great Eman­ci­pa­tor’, for his act of sign­ing the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion, which freed the slaves and ush­ered in the War between the States. Obama’s tremen­dous pop­u­lar­ity is also because he is act­ing essen­tially as The Sec­ond Great Eman­ci­pa­tor. He’s not free­ing the slaves; he’s free­ing the Amer­i­can cit­i­zenry from eight years of sub­ju­ga­tion.  There have been the begin­nings of reck­on­ings, includ­ing this page, which attempts to tally the score of all the wrong Bush and his hench­men have car­ried out or let hap­pen on his watch. And also the spokesman for the out­rage that Bush has pro­voked, Keith Olber­mann, who almost suc­ceeds in com­press­ing the eight years of Bush into 8 min­utes (it really is more like 9), and ends up sound­ing curi­ously like the 1989 Billy Joel song, We Didn’t Start the Fire, which lists his­tor­i­cal events in the same rapid-fire style. The effect for the past 8 years, is more nau­se­at­ing then enlight­en­ing, but here it is:

With all of these reminders of how bad things got, I’m all the more con­vinced that this is not the time for us to return to the US. Our move to Canada was not an extended vaca­tion from the US, no mat­ter how much Pres­i­dent Obama renounces and attempts to reverse the deci­sions and screw-ups of the past eight years. For one thing, as I’ve told some, it would be a bad time to be look­ing for work in the US, no mat­ter where we moved. Rats don’t jump on to sink­ing ships. The econ­omy here in BC, while not immune to the global down­turn, is prob­a­bly about as good as it gets in the world these days. Sec­ondly, we pre­fer our life here, for rea­sons I’ve often laid out in this blog. We like the energy and vital­ity of a young city that is grow­ing, rather than Boston, which was actu­ally decreas­ing in pop­u­la­tion. (I haven’t checked if this is still the case). We have new friends, new places to explore, Pam is embark­ing on a new career in Immi­gra­tion Con­sult­ing, and I’m hop­ing that my new posi­tion (which I admit I’ve not writ­ten about much, partly because it still hasn’t paid me a cent) will finally result in our get­ting some money com­ing in. There have been other improve­ments that I know I’d miss if I returned to liv­ing in the US:  a cou­ple of weeks ago I got my first colonoscopy, which is some­thing that men are encour­aged to have when you get to my age. My doc­tor was thor­ough, the pro­ce­dure was as quick and pain­less as pos­si­ble, and the most expen­sive part of the whole event was park­ing at the UBC Hos­pi­tal park­ing lot. ($9). Uni­ver­sal Health Care, the new holy grail of speeches and dis­cus­sions by pun­dits is a real thing here, and it works pretty well by me. I also don’t have to hold my tongue in my sup­port of same-sex mar­riage, or my antipa­thy toward reli­gion as I would be forced to do in the States.

In the final reck­on­ing, the dread­ful train wreck (as chron­i­cled above) that was the Bush Era may have been the force that pro­pelled us here to Van­cou­ver, but in the end, what has us stay­ing is a bet­ter life no mat­ter how much the US crawls back to the coun­try it once was, at least in our life­times. We are still stay­ing put, and I’ll be happy to write that here, on Face­book, in the LA Times (as I did the last time some­one asked me to write about it), or any­where else. The ques­tion is often posed almost jok­ingly (as if the ques­tioner knew that the answer would be no even before I said or wrote it).

Oh, one last part­ing image of schaden­freude for Bush and Cheney: I just learned that Dick Cheney pulled a mus­cle in his back mov­ing boxes out of Blair House, the Vice President’s res­i­dence, and will have to appear at the Inau­gu­ra­tion and other final pub­lic appear­ances glow­er­ing in a wheel­chair, like Old Man Pot­ter of It’s a Won­der­ful Life, (which I wrote about a cou­ple of weeks ago), hated and feared. Life imi­tates Art.

Happy New Year! What if 2008 was a Hoax?

I’m going to start the new year with some thoughts about 2009, which I like more than last year for one triv­ial rea­son already: it’s far eas­ier to type. But before that, one final reflec­tion on 2008: On the evening news, a reporter asked some peo­ple on the street this ques­tion: If you had to describe 2008 in a word, what would that word be? Most (but not all) gave words with neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions. I remem­ber some responses, includ­ing ‘chal­leng­ing’, ‘dif­fi­cult’, and ‘unfor­tu­nate’. I’m not sure what my answer would have been. On the one hand, lots of bad stuff hap­pened last year, but on the other, the US elected the first African-American Pres­i­dent and it was not all bad for me, per­son­ally. Matt Hard­ing, the guy who was behind the Inter­net viral video Where in the Hell is Matt claims that his beau­ti­ful danc­ing trip and Inter­net video was actu­ally an elab­o­rate hoax. I’d like to join with him, and actu­ally sug­gest that all of last year was just a hoax, too.

All except for the bit about Obama get­ting elected and a bunch of other things, that is.

A Follow-Up to the Obama-is-Spock Meme

I wrote about this a month and a half ago. My fears were actu­ally drawn per­fectly (almost as if I had dic­tated the imagery to him!) by car­toon­ist Mike Luck­ovich (who appears to be only a few months older than I am, hence the same cul­tural references):