Quick Short Topic: Canada

[travis]

famousringo said:

thranx said:

Runa216 said:
Canada is like America without the religious right. So we're the relatively mellow, well behaved offspring of the good parts of the US and Great britan.

And we don't love guns nearly as much as the US, at least not to the point of Fetishism.

I think its more that Canada is like america with out the racial and gang problems. the religous right dont really make any violent headlines.

Oh, we have race issues. We also have gang issues. I'd say there are three main reasons we don't seem to have as many violent crime problems:

1. Less guns. We still have about as many guns as any developed country besides the US and Switzerland, but that works out to about 1/3 the number of guns as the average American (coincidentally, we also have 1/3 the murders per capita). We also have tighter gun control laws on guns designed to kill humans (automatic weapons, semi-auto pistols) than long guns designed for hunting, so those guns are more likely to be used to shoot animals than people. 

2. More relaxed drug laws. We're a little ahead of the US in decriminalizing marijuana. Throwing people in prison for minor drug offences risks socializing them as criminals and leading to more serious offences down the road. Every lucrative black market is life blood to organized crime.

3. More equality. This is the big one. Better social safety net, universal health care, better public education, more accessible post-secondary education. Our rich are less rich, but our poor are also less poor. Poverty breeds crime. 

This. And it's not true that canada does not has a religious right. The wester part got infected by that as well.  Our torries can be quite retarded as well sometimes. Some are just conservatives on the economic point of view which I still respect and believe might brings some valid points, but the the socially retarded one that keep making claims about creationism and that global warming does not exist really annoys me personally. People doesn't hear about it, but anybody paying attention to canadian's politics will be able to tell thatCanada has changed  a lot recently. This country used to have a very good reputation in international politics but it is less and less true. I'm less and less pround to be canadian actually.

The thing with this country is that there a lot of differences in cultures among the differents provinces. Sometines splitting the continent on an east to west perspective would make more sense than on a south to north one. For instance, eastern canada is more similar to the eastern (north) coast of the US with state like Vermont while the west coast look a lot like California. The central western part of Canada is more similar to the more conservative central part of the Us.