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Need a Job? Emigrate to Canada!


At least that’s the advice the Huffington Post’s Ryan McCarthy had forreaders yesterday because while the United States is mired in the economic equivalent of the Biggest Loser, Canada put on a hefty 93,200 jobs last month.

And our housing prices do nothing but rise!

Plus we have free universal health care, gay people can legally marry and unicorns roam wild on the prairies.

Okay, maybe we don’t have unicorns.

Maybe.

But the rest? True. Except that health care is not really free when the tax rate is put under the microscope, Canadians could care less about marriage in general as the majority live in common-law relationships for the most part, housing prices are so outrageous that the average person can’t afford home ownership and all those jobs? Service sector. Think Wal-Mart greeters and working the drive thru at Timmie’s*

I emigrated to Canada just a tad over three years ago. I met a Canadian on the Internet. We fell in love. The U.S. had way more archaic immigration rules and he had the better paying job anyway, so I moved north.

Since then, I have heard nothing from my liberal left-behind friends but how lucky I am to have escaped the imploding American Dream for Canadian Utopia.

And Canada is great. Don’t misunderstand me. I love it here. But in many ways, it’s no different from the U.S.

The government is conservative and more interested in business interests than people. Money is the driving factor behind public policy. Education is being savaged when it’s not just overlooked or neglected. Health care hangs on by its teeth but only because the average Canadian would riot in the streets if the provincial governments did away with it, so they nickel and dime it to death in the hopes that people aren’t really paying attention (they aren’t). Our housing is ridiculously over-priced and long overdue for a sharp correction.

Even though some Canadians like to promote the idea that Canada is the anti-America, the reality is that Canada is much more like America than it realizes.

It’s just lucky. For now.

Luck. That’s all that separates us from being you.

People here in Alberta, where I am, live dangerously on the idea that the oil in the sands will last forever and that the damage done by the foreign companies exploiting our resources won’t leave us with polluted fields and undrinkable water.

The spice oil must flow, eh?

My husband just rolled his eyes at the thought of Americans sneaking across the thousands of miles of largely unprotected border like Mexicans in Arizona.

Canada has a points system immigration system which basically has no use for anyone over the age of 42 who can’t speak English and/or French and isn’t skilled and/or a college graduate.

I actually squeaked under the wire on the points thing but fortunately marrying a Canadian meant I was able to get into a completely different immigration line – one that was no less tedious, incomprehensible and arbitrarily humiliating – but it was faster.

But I still can’t find work in my field – education – because the government has slashed funding and there are no teaching jobs to be found just about anywhere a person would want to live and work or anywhere they would die first before considering.

So I write for a blog that pays me peanuts and is, ironically, based out of California, and I teach yoga – not exactly Fortune 500 paying gigs.

Yes, there are jobs. Canadian Tire (think Kmart) is perpetually hiring as is the local Wal-Mart. You can wait tables just about anywhere and the 7-11 in town can never keep night managers. Hotels need housekeepers and if you are really a go-getter, you can probably hobble together two or three part time jobs which will just about pay the outrageous rents with enough left over to eat, pay utilities and cloth yourself. Just yourself. Try not to marry and especially don’t breed because daycare is scarce to non-existent and quite expensive.

But … you love Canada … right?

Yep, I do. But I am not average. I wasn’t an average American either. I live in the upper edges of the middle class. I am skilled and have two university degrees. My husband is an engineer in a field where more of them are retiring than entering.

And I didn’t come here for any reason other than being in love and wanting to spend my life with a guy who happened to be Canadian.

I know some people would regard that as something akin to winning the lottery, but life can be livable anywhere as long as your expectations are aligned with your reality and you don’t make the mistake of believing that salvation lies outside yourself.

*Tim Horton’s. Think fast food but waaaaay better than anything in the States. Seriously.

To Beard or Not to Beard. This isn’t a Question.


Beatrice – Lord, I could not endure a husband with a
beard on his face: I had rather lie in the woollen.


Leonato – You may light on a husband that hath no beard.


Beatrice – What should I do with him? dress him in my apparel
and make him my waiting-gentlewoman? He that hath a
beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no
beard is less than a man: and he that is more than
a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a
man, I am not for him

My favorite Shakespearean exchange. Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing is explaining her singular state, which in reality has less to do with hair than her being still rather hung up on Benedick, the plays “hero” and is all woolen.

I have been partial to men with facial hair ever since I outgrew Tiger Beat magazine. I went from Shaun Cassidy to Barry Gibb faster than I could get from zero to sixty in my Dad’s 1972 Dodge Dart – and I was no slouch on the accelerator. Ask anyone who ever bummed a ride off me.

Or maybe don’t.

My late husband grew a thick wooly cover every fall and shaved it down to a goatee just before Valentine’s Day every year. His goat was thick and long enough that I could twirl the ends around my fingers.

His mother hated it and he took no end in delight about the fact that he could use me as his excuse for ignoring her incessant nagging to shave it off.

“Can’t shave, Ma,” he would tell her. “The wife loves it.”

The truth was more complicated. He had a round baby face and the whiskers made him look older. I imagine he would have kept it until it turned grey at least with or without my encouragement.

My husband Rob has lived the gamut of facial hair. Bare-faced through mustaches of varying thickness and length to goatees to full beards.

Working in a chemical plant means that at various times he was hair-lip only due to safety regulations, but when we met, he was back to a very close cropped beard. Quite the sexy, exotic Canadian.

This last week, however, he learned that the drilling rig he is overseeing has a strict “no beard” policy.

“I have bad news,” he told me over the phone and I braced myself for a transfer to Texas*, “I have to shave.”

“Oh,” I was relieved. Hair grows back but Texas could leave marks.

“It’s just until the well is dug,” he assured me.

Although there is a mound of photographic evidence attesting to the fact that Rob is handsome regardless, seeing him without a beard in the flesh for the first time was like coming home to find your furniture just slightly askew in every room. It’s right yet not at all the same.

Fortunately the whole Samson effect is just biblical mythology because Rob’s sex appeal didn’t disappear down the bathroom drain with his face fur, and though he does look younger and it’s slightly erotic to snuggle up to a man who is your husband but looks like someone you don’t quite know, I will be glad to run my fingers over his grizzle again.

Young Americans Don’t Know Their U.S. History


Twenty-five per cent of Americans don’t know that the United States won its independence from Great Britain according to a poll conducted by Marist University this last Independence Day weekend.

The Marist poll asked just one question: “On July 4th we celebrate Independence Day.  From which country did the United States win its independence?”

And though 74 per cent of Americans were able to give the correct answer, a disappointing 26 per cent didn’t know with the majority of them saying they were “unsure” of the correct answer.

And those who guessed incorrectly? From whom did they believe Americans liberated themselves?

China. Spain. France. Japan. Mexico.

It gets a bit worse.

Those folks who knew the correct answer were mainly white, earning over $50,000 a year and male. People in the northeast knew their American history better than those in the south (no surprise as they have always been revisionists), and people under 29 would probably benefit from a Wii version of the American Revolution because they were most likely to not know that the United States fought against Great Britain in the epic revolution that led to the holiday we so love to celebrate every July.

Another public education failure?

Maybe.

I don’t really buy into the idea that America was ever a nation of Rhodes Scholars who’ve been dumbed down over recent decades thanks to a fiendish conspiracy of elementary school teachers and a steady diet of insipid television programming.

We were all quite dumb to begin with.

Over the last decade, the study of civics and history of any kind has taken a back seat to those subject areas that are most heavily tested like math and reading. Because only a few subject areas count in the standardized testing game, those that aren’t get shorted. Civics and American history aren’t make or break tests in determining whether a school is a success or failure. When your school’s reading or math scores can push you into a turnaround, that’s where the time and effort goes.

It could also be a byproduct of our television and movies that “re-imagine” historical events with more attention to the entertainment aspect than the facts, and the sad reality that we are a culture of now. If it happened yesterday or last week, it’s old news. In a world were everything is tweeted and updated within seconds, how can anything that happened over 230 years ago matter?

Our public school system came to be not just as a way to warehouse children once they were no longer put to hard labor the moment they could fetch and carry. It existed with the intent of producing a literate citizenry able to participate as members of a democracy. Our nation’s history and the rights and duties of its population were as important to the curriculum as the 3 R’s.

When I was in middle school, I learned some of my American history watching cartoons on Saturday morning. Schoolhouse Rock cartoons ran in between shows and regaled me and my peers with ditties designed to teach us about the American Revolution, The Constitution and how bills became laws. Simple? Yes.  Effective? Very. Over thirty years later, I can still sing along with most of the tunes.

Schoolhouse Rock should remind us that it takes a village to teach our children well, but the first step towards ensuring that future generations are less ignorant about America’s roots might be the unshackling of public education from mindless testing and allowing teachers to get back to all the basics.