Canada is not “the most European of non-European countries”.
I lived in the European Union for 15 years and traveled to all but three of its nation states, most of them multiple times.
I’ll never forget my first visit in 2003. I loved the cafe culture and history. Everyone I met had an opinion about literature and film, even the guy wiping the tables, and everyone seemed so well travelled.
As soon as I could save up the cash, I moved to a Mediterranean island to write a book. Southern Europe is very different from northern Europe, but I lived there too: six years in Malta and nine in Berlin. I’ve got some basis for comparison.
Living in a place isn’t the same as taking a vacation there. You’re earning money, navigating the bureaucracy, and learning things about the culture that you’d never pick up on a two week vacation.
I love European history, food, literature and film. But the first thing I learned while living in Europe is just how Canadian I am.
This is what I observed in my travels and the two countries I lived in.
Abundance vs Scarcity
The quality of life I experienced in Europe is surprisingly shabby but people there look askance at anyone who feels they should be able to claim more.
My desire to live in a larger flat, to improve my life and maybe own a house one day was seen as materialistic by the people around me, and wanting to keep more of the money I earned marked me as a greedy capitalist.
Canadians have a different sense of space. I grew up in a large house with a beautiful back yard full of trees. My father worked in a factory, and my mother only went back to work part-time when my sister and I were older. I never felt that we lacked for anything. Pick that up and drop it in Berlin and we’d be living in a villa in the Grunewald with the elites.
I believe I should be free to live in whatever sized apartment I want, provided I’m willing to pay for it. According to my European acquaintances, that ‘excess money’ should be taken by the government to contribute to a bloated, inefficient social program for the good of somebody else. ‘Social justice’ means letting a bureaucrat decide how much of your own hard earned pay you should be permitted to keep.
In Berlin, doctors and lawyers lived in the same sort of apartments I inhabited, though I’m pretty sure mine were bigger — excessively large, according to acquaintances who looked down their noses at our excess. Two people should have no more than a one-bedroom apartment and you should be happy with that. Sit around in the overcrowded public park if you want space.
Going from low or medium income to $100K/year is incredibly difficult in Germany because the system is designed to prevent it. The marginal 42% rate kicks in at around €70K of taxable income. Add in a laundry list of mandatory social contributions and there’s not much left when everyone else has had a go at your pockets.
Want to start a side business to increase your income?
In Canada, you can do that right now. Just report what you earn as ‘extra income’ on your annual tax return, and incorporate your business down the road if it works out.
Don’t try that in Germany. First, you must apply for a separate tax number, even just to write freelance articles for a pittance. If your business idea falls into certain categories, you’ll also have to register the business — that includes getting a trade license for those who drop-ship or sell physical goods on eBay. The tax authorities can also require you to make quarterly advance payments based on your expected tax liability, so you can end up paying tax in advance on income you haven’t even earned.
Wages are low in Germany, too. Salaries for skilled professionals like doctors, lawyers and software engineers are a fraction of what they are in the US, and Germany also has higher taxes and mandatory social contributions.
That being said, life can be tolerable at the bottom of the scale as long as you don’t earn too much. The social safety net ensures that you can scrape by with a minimal effort provided you have low expectations.
The end result is that most people settle for less, working just enough to stay afloat. Why bother trying harder? They’ll just take it all anyway.
In my experience, those with innovative ideas or a desire to work hard and make a better life for themselves leave Europe at the first opportunity — usually to the United States.
Get ‘er done vs That’s impossible
I grew up in a country that was less entrepreneurial than our American neighbours, with a lower appetite for risk, but we look like startup titans compared to Europeans.
In Germany I saw endless discussion, endless bureaucracy, and ironclad reasons why something can’t be done — not because it’s physically impossible but because it’s impossible on paper.
When Canadians want something done we do it ourselves, with help from a neighbour or a hired contractor. We have a pioneer spirit that the Europeans I lived among lack.
Like our neighbours to the south, old stock Canadians had the daring and determination to endure an awful sea voyage to carve out a life in the New World. Europeans of that era descended from those who stayed behind.
In the Europe I saw in my fifteen years on the continent, the government was responsible for the fabric of daily life and if they didn’t fund or approve of something then it wasn’t going to happen. Sure, a percentage of frustrated people clustered in the centre of Berlin every weekend to shake paper on sticks and make demands, but they wanted someone else to do something or to change a regulation to give them permission – after absolutely everyone was consulted, of course. It was a way of venting their anger, and very little changed.
The result is stagnation and passivity. I found the old saying to be true: the US innovates, China replicates, and Europe regulates.
Endless strikes
Speaking of shaking paper on sticks at people, you’d better get used to cancelling your plans because half the place is on strike a lot of the time.
I couldn’t rely on trains in Germany, or airlines and airports in Germany and France, because they went on strike so often. After being stranded half a dozen times, I learned to completely avoid certain airlines and airports.
I can’t count how many times the following services went on strike in Berlin, but it was more than once a year: all public transit, garbage collection, schools and kindergartens, airline pilots, air traffic controllers, airport ground staff, airport baggage handlers, and civil servants.
In Canada, a strike is a tactic of last resort. In Germany, it’s the first. This is called a ‘Warnstreik’ (warning strike), and it takes place just to show them you’re serious. To a Canadian like me that seemed like walking into a meeting and drilling the other guy straight in the face before saying hello or sitting down to lay out my position.
Critical services shut down over and over as union bosses demanded blood from a stone that had been drained of every drop years ago. Everyone is expected to tolerate this because ‘it’s their right’.
Customer service and its absence
Being expected to tolerate the substandard is something you’ll get used to in much of Europe. That was true in the places I lived as well as the places I traveled. The present can be shockingly mediocre but you’re compensated by access to great food, and marvellous relics from the continent’s distant past.
Customer service will come as a shock in Germany, unless you go to a small shop. That cashier at the grocery store isn’t paid to be friendly. They’re paid to fling your groceries past the scanner as quickly as possible, and they’ll tell you off if you can’t keep up. You’d think competition would make this better but Germany has unions rather than customers. Workers are at the top of the hierarchy, business owners are somewhere near the bottom, and the customer isn’t even on the chart.
Grocery stores in Berlin were always stripped bare after a holiday and it could take days to restock the shelves. Certain goods also ran out inexplicably but crap no one bought was overstocked and left there — even half rotten — until some poor bastard finally took it. If the shop closed at 9pm, workers would start sweeping the floors at 8:20pm, leaving one cashier to deal with the enormous queue while glaring at anyone who dared to shop that late. They left at 9pm on the dot, and left the shelves empty until they got around to stocking them.
Allow me to offer a comparison. I pumped gas part time in high school. We were open until 9pm. I didn’t start cleaning up or counting the cash until closing time. If a regular customer showed up while I was still in the building, I switched the pumps back on and served that customer, even if it was already 9:10pm and I had to do the books all over again.
One of my best friends worked night crew at the local grocery store. He was up all night stocking shelves so customers would find everything available in the morning. They also ordered products customers actually bought rather than force them to choose from the mediocre crap they were given.
I realize I haven’t mentioned my time in Malta. Customer service on the island came in two forms. You’d either stand at the cash watching the employee chat on the phone while completely ignoring you, or they’d promise you the moon, telling you everything they thought you wanted to hear so they could get their hands on your money and get you out of there. You’d only find out it was a lie after you got home. There was one exception, my favourite wine shop, but in my experience it was far from the norm. That’s because Southern Europe operates by a different set of rules.
High Trust vs Low Trust
Canada was always a high trust society. We assume that officials and our neighbours will act honestly unless we have some reason to believe otherwise. We make handshake deals, and no one steals from the charity box next to the cash register or swipes the smartphone you set down beside your coffee simply because it’s there and they can get away with it.
Malta is a low trust society. If you’ve read my book A Sunny Place for Shady People, you’ll be familiar with the concept of amoral familism, where any action undertaken to benefit one’s family or oneself is justifiable, and everyone expects everyone else to do whatever benefits their family or themselves regardless of whether it is legal or ethical. Because you can’t trust strangers or institutions, you have to rely on networks of patronage, personal favours and corruption.
Germany was a high trust society that relied on institutions to regulate absolutely every aspect of its citizen’s lives, but I saw that trust collapsing at light speed thanks to massive uncontrolled migration from low trust societies.
Petty crime
I was shocked at the way Europeans tolerate pickpockets and other petty crime.
I’ve had my pocket picked in Barcelona (I followed the three guys into an abandoned subway station and took my wallet back), and my wife had an entire backpack stolen on a brief train ride in Belgium.
I’ve also seen thieves operating with total impunity in Rome, Brussels, Dublin and Athens. London is known for phone snatching, and the business hotel we stayed at in Brussels — the capital of the European Union — had little cards on the lobby tables warning customers not to leave items on them because it will be stolen and the hotel is not responsible.
Don’t expect anyone to help if you’re robbed. They’ll watch it happen while doing nothing, but someone might come over to you afterwards to wave their arms in the air and say, “Oh no!”
If anyone saw a pickpocket or purse snatcher in action in Canada, I’m pretty sure the nearest two or three guys would chase that thief down and beat the piss out of him. We don’t put up with shit like sneak thieves.
You might be thinking we have more in common with Britain, and that’s true as far as having a British parliamentary and legal system, an extra ‘u’ in some of our words, and HP sauce on the kitchen table. But there are more fundamental things we don’t share, such as…
Class snobbery
It took me a while to realize just how deeply class consciousness and accent-based snobbery are still a part of life in Britain, and I still don’t understand why they put up with it. I treat people the way they treat me. I couldn’t be less impressed by your outdated title or prissy accent.
I am impressed by personal accomplishment, and I love the British penchant for becoming experts in some obscure subject. That eccentricity is tremendously appealing to me, as were the writers and publishers I got to know.
What was less appealing was seeing Brits look condescendingly at their hick former colonies. And I can’t count how many times I heard Brits and Europeans disparage Americans as uncultured materialistic boors while secretly envying their far greater material prosperity and quality of life.
Our worldviews are very different. Canada was built by pioneers who took responsibility for themselves and helped out their neighbours to survive the harsh winters. Europeans fought for class rights and structures to protect them from predatory nobles, instilling a deeply rooted sense of institutional collectivism rather than individual responsibility.
Which brings me to the present moment and the silly claim that we started out with.
Sorry but… Canadians are North Americans (even though we’re not Americans)
Prime Minister Carney claimed that Canadians and Europeans share the same set of values. That wasn’t true in my experience, beyond a couple pet issues that the Laurentian elite loves to mention: socialized healthcare and liberal values. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Both Germany and Malta have government-funded health care and private health care, and public health care in Germany is far from free. It was the most expensive bill I paid each month next to German income tax, and because I was self-employed I also had to pay the employer’s portion.
As for liberal values, I suppose it depends on how you define them. Are you talking about the values of the Liberal Party of Canada and the Laurentian elite, or classical liberalism, or the globalist ‘values’ Mr. Carney touts in his book of the same name?
The Liberal Party won less than half of the popular vote in both of the last two federal elections. What about the other half? While a significant percentage of people clearly subscribe to leftist values, they can’t be described as Canadian values. The same is true of Europe, where voters are turning to far right parties in larger numbers. I didn’t see Germany turning fascist or far right. I saw voters who are frustrated by decades of failed leftist policies and by a political spectrum that offers them a choice between left, more left, and far left. So which European values are Canadian values exactly?
We aren’t the same as our nearest neighbour either, but we do have a lot more in common with them despite the bullying assholery of the current American president.
We watch the same television shows and movies, listen to the same music, enjoy the same sports, live in the same suburban houses with yards, enjoy a similar style of customer service, and drive the same big cars on the same broad roads.
We’ve also got very different attitudes to gun ownership, healthcare, crime and punishment and foreign policy, and we don’t share America’s history of rebellion or its troubled legacy of slavery and race relations. Those are major differences.
We have our own history, culture, sense of humour and set of values, and Canadians intend to keep them. They’re a world away from the stagnant settle-for-less collectivist values of Europe.
Mark Carney’s EU Pipe Dream
The European Union is a sinking ship: economically stagnant, strangled by sclerotic bureaucracy, riven by infighting, and flooded with an unending stream of illegal migrants. The latest random knife or car rampage by an Islamic terrorist in Germany or France was so common it barely made the news anymore; it’s just a statistic.
No one in their right mind would want to join that mess, whatever arrangement Mark Carney is negotiating behind closed doors, the details of which might be leaked to Canadians via a foreign news outlet. Parliament will be told in due course what they’re expected to rubber stamp.
Canadian integration would be a great deal for Ursula von der Leyen, though. A place to strip of natural resources and a dumping ground for Europe’s illegal migrants. Remember: in the EU freedom of movement goes both ways.
Canada can sell the EU whatever it wants without any form of membership. Our existing trade agreement (CETA) already addresses this.
I loved exploring the history, culture, foods and landscapes of Europe, and I value the friends I made there, but I came away with a very different opinion of the European Union as an institution.
Joining up is a terrible idea, and that’s a shame. Think of all the jobs it would create in Ottawa! You’d need armies of bureaucrats to transpose Brussels’ Byzantine laws and regulations into Canadian English and Quebecois so Canadians can be forced to follow them. Taxpayer-funded jobs don’t create wealth of course, but they will keep the unemployment rate down on paper while you stagnate.
Oh well. I’m sure it’ll all work out fine if you just flap your elbows and obey Technocrat Daddy.
