The mental shift from expat to emigrant

I have given up on Canada. 

We’re leaving Berlin next year for Japan, and I’ve accepted that it’s probably permanent. 

I never gave my future much conscious thought. I went abroad for curiosity — to see the world beyond the 4,500 person town I grew up in — and to find my subject as a writer.

If I thought about it at all, I guess I thought of myself as an expat. Someone living outside their native country — ex patria — for my work. 

I’ve lived in 16 different apartments in 8 cities and 4 countries. I never thought of any of them as ‘home’ or tried to put down roots. I didn’t even fix them up beyond assembling bookshelves in my work space. Each rented dwelling was temporary and I was passing through. 

Somewhere in the back of my mind, the concept of ‘home’ was attached to the place I came from, alongside the unconscious assumption that I would grow old with my closest friends — those lifelong friends who have always been my family.

This week’s Canadian election made me realize that the move I made in 2011 was permanent, though I didn’t intend it to be at the time.

The mental shift from expat to emigrant is a disorienting one. In order to make a life somewhere, you have to let your old life go. Perhaps it’s how my Irish grandparents felt when they boarded a one-way boat to Canada in 1929?

I’m 52 now. Like the younger generations who came after me, I will never be able to afford a house in Canada. The door of that future closed and it isn’t opening again in my lifetime.

When I left Canada, Stephen Harper was prime minister. I never voted for Justin Trudeau. He only really impacted my life as a source of international embarrassment. 

As a Canadian living abroad, I didn’t experience the boiling frog phenomenon of the gradual erosion in living standards that sank the country during Trudeau’s decade in power. For me, the change was much more dramatic because I visited at intervals. 

Each year, I was shocked by what I saw: a steady decline in living standards, an increasingly unaffordable housing market, distressingly high prices driven in large part by a self-imposed Carbon Tax that claimed to change the weather while impoverishing the population, and a country bitterly divided between those who remembered the proud heritage we grew up with and a grovelling mob insisting our country is a white supremacist ‘genocidal settler colonial state’ (whatever the hell that means).

It takes a staggering level of incompetence to create a housing crisis in a place with near-infinite available land, but that’s just one colossal problem among many.

I registered to vote against Justin Trudeau in 2021, and against his successor Mark Carney in 2025, not because the precipitous economic and social decline of the past decade impacted my day to day life, but because I felt I had a stake in voting for a future I could eventually return to.

I hoped the 2025 election might change things. That people were finally sick of decline inversely matched by a precipitous increase in debt. 

I was mildly optimistic that a change in government might begin to reverse some of the damage. I wasn’t hopeful, but I thought, “Give it ten years to see if things improve.” It will take more than a generation to fix the housing crisis, but a decade should show whether it’s moving in the right direction.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. 

The older we get, the wider the range of things we will never do. Possibilities narrow, life becomes more limiting, and the many people we could have become drop away. 

I’ve only got two or thee decades left at best, and I no longer see a future for me back there. I’m trying to get used to the idea that I’m an emigrant rather than an expat. It isn’t an easy mental shift.

What happened to the country my generation grew up in? I never imagined it would end up like this.