There are advantages sometimes travelling on a Canadian passport so your husband and kids might benefit even if they don’t move to Canada. Marriage to a Canadian does not automatically confer citizenship to the spouse so you would have to go through the normal channels. My wife was American and eventually decided to do that after living in Canada for 20 years.
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Since this is a thread dedicated to Canada <> US, this seems appropriate:
And, since I live in the US, I find the results very disturbing.
(Note that on a number of specific items, the US and Canada are very close)
I am not sure what to conclude from the survey? That the American people are more divided than their Canadian counterparts?
I think it’s a trust issue. The majority of Americans have a dim view of their fellow citizens (not sure why). Hence you get a lot of gated communities, people are reluctant to use public transportation or go into “unsafe” neighborhoods (virtually non-existent in Australia) and many people are armed.
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An average Canadian would have little trouble asking another Canadian they didn’t know for help if the situation warranted it.
I don’t think that is true for Americans.
Some of it might have to do with the higher crime rate, etc., but I think that highlighting that concern also requires highlighting how many people have an exaggerated view of such concerns due to the nature of American mass and social media.
I also think that there is an element of the increasing polarization impacting our views of one another even outside the political arena. Periodically I have to remind my wife that our family members, who are mostly MAGA, are (with one exception) fundamentally good people despite some of the atrocious decisions they have made.
(And before someone asks – the one exception is my wife’s father-in-law. He really does put the “evil” in “step-evil”.)
I concur on the trust part. A lot of Americans seem to ‘need’ guns to protect themselves against other Americans. It’s a valid question to ask if someone breaks into my house, how do I protect my family without a gun?
I dunno? I’ve never given any thought to having to protect my family, nor any thought to worrying about people around me having guns.
I know a cop who’s pretty paranoid about security. He keeps a baseball bat under his bed, like as if he’s going to get robbed lol. I asked him if he keeps his service pistol at home when he’s not at work. Nope, the regulations are too onerous, not worth the bother.
America was founded on slavery and fear of black people has been stoked by racists since foundation.
Canada doesn’t have that historical baggage. We have a lot of baggage in how Natives have been treated, but it doesn’t lead to the same degree of fear based otherism.
It’s a question.
A better question would be how can you protect your family from the gun once you bring it into your home? Just about any theft deterrent significantly lowers the risk of someone breaking into your home, and they won’t kill a family member.
Having lived in Canada, the US and Australia, it feels like US media pushes the neighbours suck narrative much more heavily than it does in Canada or Australia.
Even back in 2000, all the banks I went to the US had off duty police officers, as did Walmart, Target, and the grocery stores. I think Baton Rouge had like 9 or 11 different police forces. I wonder if the issue is that so much of the way the US operates is fear based.
In most developed countries, there’s no need to bring a semi-automatic weapon with you to go buy shoes or some toilet and home decor items. In the US, it’s mandatory for a significant fraction of the population.
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Yeah, I saw an offduty cop in a Kroger’s in Dallas in the late 90s. He was not there shopping for groceries.
A few months later, I’m walking in Manhattan when 2 Brinks guys come out of a bank and one had his hand right on his gun in case 
went down.
It’s not so much mandatory as it is a security blanket.
I should disclose that I do have first-hand experience with that phenomenon. When I was emptying out my childhood home after my mom passed…that neighborhood could be politely described as a “transitional neighborhood” in a southern city with problems, where there was a bit more gunfire audible than I remembered from growing up.
(Actually, the last image I saw of my mom alive was streaming a local newscast where she was being interviewed about a shooting / suicide-by-cop down the street.)
Since I was camping at the house, and doing cleanup work at night…I carried. I knew that my SiG was functioning as a security blanket rather than real protection…but that didn’t stop me from feeling less uncomfortable.
Oh snap, another floor crosser, another seat closer to a Carney majority
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/idlout-crossing-floor-liberals-9.7123443
It’s crazy how many floor crossers the liberals are getting, I don’t think anything like that has ever happened before.
I like it, but suspect it’s a bit of a subversion of democracy. I maintain that individual voters are idiots, but collectively they are always right. Even when I don’t like the result. And they were handed a minority government not a majority.
- American “competitive” capitalism is based on selfishness, tritely put as the competitive selfish individuals create the best economy for everyone.
- Conservative America does not believe in a bare minimum for all members of society. They project the message that having more equates to being a better person. Also as people are below or approach bare minimum they become desperate. Desperate people tend towards violence.
- The economy is driven by marketing. Marketing is based on creating want, unmet desire. In short marketing increases stress and America is the most marketed to society.
- In most discussions of society we come back to the primary conflict between the haves and the havenots. Keeping the havenots from uniting against the haves is a tale as old as time.
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I don’t have a huge issue with floor crossing. It’s allowed and has been going on since confederation.
I think forcing people to stay with their party is a bad thing, particularly with the way party discipline works these days. If your only option is to resign entirely, I think it forces people to support a bad leader or party longer than they should (e.g. you lose your income standing up to bad leadership while they get to keep theirs).
I’d also argue that floor crossing is actually in lines with the general message that voters gave where we weren’t entirely supportive of anyone party, but we did want a center left government based on vote distribution. Going off seat count doesn’t make sense in this case due to the stupidity of our election system which penalizes diversity of options.
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To the degree that an election places an individual in an office, and not assigning the office to a party, I think floor-switching is perfectly in alignment with voters’ choices. Those voters who selected the individual primarily based on party affiliation will be disappointed, however.
I think many people don’t give this the attention it warrants.
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