Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowboy89
Being Canadian who now lives in the US, this is very accurate. Living in Canada is a lot like living in a hotel suite with a giant one-way mirror looking into a large ballroom. Canadians can see and understand most of what goes on in American society, but Americans see little and understand less of what goes on in Canada.
It leads to a few things:
1) Canadians massively conflate US cultural and social issues as also being 'Canadian' issues. A few examples:
- Whenever there's a notable shooting in the US, most Federal Liberal government's response is to ban a new list of long guns that are almost entirely used for hunting to capitalize on the mood of Canadians reacting to the US shooting. Canada point blank doesn't have a gun problem, but yet we're made to pretend we do whenever something in the US happens. As a Canadian in the US, once you start talking to your neighbors you quickly learn that literally everyone has a cache of guns in their house/car. Whereas in Canada it's exceedingly rare for anyone in an urban setting to have any kind of a gun.
-When I visited YYC at Christmas I noticed the giant graffiti along the bow pathway into downtown that said "Deny, Defend, Depose." As someone who currently has US health insurance and has a grasp on how it's a huge issue here but yet grew up in Alberta, it's absolutely comical that in Calgary there's people picking that up as some sort of relevant rallying cry. The issue Luigi was fighting against doesn't even exist in Canada.
2) Canadians presume that Americans know and follow Canadian issues the same as they follow out of state issues elsewhere in the US. They simply do not. I live in a state that's an hour from the border. Ask most locals and outside of a booze fueled gambling trip to Caesar's in Windsor when they were aged 19-20, they have no idea what lurks across the lake / river let alone be attuned to any news happenings there.
3) On issues of mutual interest, American's have a giant blind spot to any other perspective. Only specialists whose literal job it is to understand Canadian issues in US government would even know the most basic of facts, even when it comes to trade between the two countries. That's why it's probably a good idea to get as much face time as possible to demonstrate the many ways tariffs can backfire on Americans. The US experts know, but the more generalist decision makers need to be educated on it. Any facetime in Mar-A-Largo, Washington, etc. can be constructive to illustrate the facts.
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Just gonna call you out on this, as it does happen here, and I've had it happen to me several times. I'm not going to get into the details, but suffice to say, you are incorrect to say we don't suffer some of the same things from insurance companies, and yes, it has absolutely coloured my views of what Luigi did. Because you don't know how distressing it is until it starts happening to you. Consider yourself fortunate.