Land of lakes

Is Canada more American than America?

I just spent 16 days in Canada, including 8 in British Columbia and 8 more in Alberta. I generally like to do posts after completing a trip, but this time I’ve had trouble finding a theme. Canada seems too similar to America. So I guess that’s my theme.

Every American has a different vision of the US. For many MAGA voters, “America” (aka Murica) excludes its big cities. That is how America can be great despite (in their view) almost all its biggest cities being cesspools of crime, corruption and homelessness.

I grew up in Wisconsin, so that region is how I think about the “real America”. And western Canada seems more similar to Wisconsin than do many parts of the USA. The areas I visited in western Canada remind me more of my upper Midwest home than does LA, or New Orleans, or Detroit, or Miami, or New York City, or Las Vegas.

Many parts of Canada resemble the region of the US that is right across the border. Vancouver’s a lot like Seattle. Alberta’s like the Rocky Mountain states. Saskatchewan is like the Dakotas. Manitoba is like Minnesota. Ontario is like the Great Lakes states and the Maritime provinces are sort of like Maine. The Yukon is like Alaska.

Quebec is probably the most distinctive part of Canada, the least like America. For simplicity, my generalizations about Canada will focus on the English speaking provinces, especially the region that I visited.

1. Canada is big

Canada is either the 2nd, 3rd or 4th largest country in the world, depending on whether you include fresh water lakes in the size estimate. (The other two are the US and China, which are roughly the same size.) In a geological sense, Canada’s most distinctive feature is its 880,000 lakes (larger than 10 hectares.) That’s an astounding 62% of all the lakes in the entire world. (However, it has a much smaller percentage of the world’s fresh water, as many of its lakes are small and shallow.)

British Columbia seemed to have vast amounts of fresh water, as well as hydropower potential. I suppose environmental concerns prevent building more dams, or exporting water to the southwest US via pipelines.

Trump has talked about making Canada the 51st state, which is kind of weird. Not just the idea of Canada joining the US (which is very unlikely), but also the idea that it would become a single state. There are ten Canadian provinces, with an average population of 4.15 million. The US has 50 states with an average population of 6.8 million. If Canada joined the US, then there would presumably be 10 new states (or nine if Quebec opted out.)

I suspect that Trump understood that the possibility of 18 or 20 new senators—all of whom supported socialized medicine—would be terrifying to Republicans, so he described the takeover as if it would merely involve adding one more state. BTW, while Canada has only 1/8 of America’s population, it is growing faster than the US. Its population has risen from 38 million to 41.5 million in just the past 5 years.

Earlier, I suggested that British Columbia was sort of like Washington. But when you start to drive around you realize that it’s much bigger, indeed larger than Washington, Oregon and California combined. The driving distance along Highway 1 from St John’s, Newfoundland to Victoria, BC is 7700 kilometers. (It’s a 3760 kilometer drive from Jacksonville, Florida to San Diego, California.)

If you go from Jacksonville to San Diego, California, you’ve gone about 10% of the way around the world. From Goose Bay on the Atlantic to Prince Rupert on the Pacific coast of British Columbia is more than 21% of the way around the world. Canada is wider than the US, and the world gets skinner as you go north.

2. Canada is more Asian and more urban

Given Canada’s vast size and low population density, I was surprised to discover that the country feels more urban than the US, with far more skyscrapers per capita. In 2024, Vancouver had 128 high rises under construction, #3 in North America. (Toronto was #1 and NYC was #2.) Even smaller Canadian cities have more tall buildings under construction than similar size US cities. Here’s Vancouver:

Photo by Mike Benna on Unsplash

Metro Vancouver has 2.6 million people, not much more than Portland, Oregon. But it seems like a much bigger city, especially the municipality of Vancouver itself, which has fewer than 800,000 people. But from the taxi window I could also see clusters of skyscrapers in outlying suburbs like Surrey and Burnaby:

Taller towers have been approved elsewhere in Metro Vancouver, such as in Burnaby where Pinnacle International has the green light to proceed with two residential towers that will be among the tallest in Western Canada at 72 and 80 storeys.

I much prefer that set-up to what we have here in Orange County, which lacks a walkable urban district full of restaurants and entertainment. And yet Canada still has plenty of single-family homes for people that prefer that lifestyle.

Metro Vancouver is about 40% Asian. But that probably doesn’t mean what you think it means. If you are British, you picture South Asians. If you are American, you picture East Asians. Vancouver seems to have lots of both groups. But to Asian people, the term ‘Asian’ has no meaning. East Asians don’t view South Asians as being of the same race; rather they view them as more similar to Europeans. The term ‘Asian’ is just as silly as many of the other outdated ideas that scholars of “orientalism” complain about. But somehow it has become woke to use the term ‘Asian’.

Vancouver itself seems like a very pleasant city. It has a pocket of homeless people, but as with Seattle and San Francisco the complaints of conservatives are wildly exaggerated (albeit not completely incorrect.)

3. Canada is rich

One implication of being the place that most resembles the US is that Canada is obviously a very rich country. But that’s not what the IMF says. They estimate that the US will have an $89,100 per capita GDP in 2025. In PPP terms, they put Canada at $65,700 and Italy at $63,100. That seems crazy to me. When driving around Canada, you’ll often not even realize that you were not in the US, except for the speed limits being in kilometers/hour. (This observation doesn’t apply to Quebec.)

Don’t get me wrong; in purely material terms the US is the richer country. But Canada seems to resemble the US much more than it resembles Italy. What am I missing? Even if it’s true that there are regions of Canada that are a bit poorer than BC and Alberta, there are also many poor regions of Italy that most tourists don’t visit.

Conceptually, I prefer PPP data to nominal comparisons, at least when it comes to living standards. Unfortunately, even PPP data seems unreliable.

In terms of living standards, I’d guess that the bottom half of the Canadian population does as well as the bottom half of the US population (and perhaps even better if you include social indicators like drugs and crime and life expectancy.) The impression I got is that the top half of the US population is considerably richer than the top half of the Canadian population. Even so, I’d estimate that the US is perhaps 10% or at most 20% richer than Canada, not the 35.6% richer suggested by the IMF data.

Why is Canada poorer? I’m not sure. The US does have the advantage of economies of scale. But in Western Europe, smaller countries don’t seem poorer than bigger countries. Perhaps Canada is poorer because its economy is structurally similar to the European economic model. On the other hand, some of America’s richest regions (such as California and New York) have a fairly high level of taxes and regulation. So I’m puzzled.

4. Canada is woke

Or at least British Columbia is woke. In Canada, the wokeness is focused on what Americans call “Native Americans” but Canadians call “First Nation”. Traveling in Canada helped me to better understand the woke phenomenon in the US. Canada doesn’t have a history of slavery. But there is clearly a demand for wokeness. So the treatment of the First Nation people becomes the outlet for the desire to express woke ideas. The views of progressive Canadians toward the First Nation people reminds me far more of progressive American attitudes toward America’s black population than it does progressive American attitudes toward our Native American population.

Indigenous people comprise about 5% of Canada’s population, skewed heavily toward the northern areas:

In 2021, I did an Econlog post about a proposal to build a massive high-rise housing development on First Nation lands in central Vancouver. On my recent visit, I was pleased to see three skyscrapers (out of a planned eleven) already under construction.

It’s ironic that (due to Nimbyism) free market capitalism is now only possible on Native American land.

5. Canadian travel tips

You see lots of signs that Canadians are “rallying around the flag” in response to Trump’s provocations. But the service workers are extremely friendly to tourists from the US.

Vancouver is certainly worth visiting, but I’d suggest avoiding tourist traps like the Capilano suspension bridge. I enjoyed visiting Stanley Park and the University of British Columbia. We took a ferry to Vancouver Island to see Victoria, but it makes more sense to take a seaplane. Even fairly small cities like Victoria have impressive central areas, often with one of the famous Fairmont hotels. These grand hotels built in the early 1900s are more impressive that what you’d find in a similar size US city. Butchart Garden is also worth seeing. Here’s their Sunken Garden:

And their Japanese Garden:

We also visited Whistler, which is not that interesting unless you like skiing. Driving east in British Columbia we saw some big provincial parks such as Wells Grey (nice waterfalls) and Mt. Robson (which has the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies.)

It was a great time to visit Jasper National Park. At the entrance, we were told that Canada’s government had removed the admission fees from all of its national parks for the entire summer. Because 3% of Jasper burned last year in a fire, tourists were scared away. Spectacular places like Maligne Lake were uncrowded:

Banff has even more spectacular scenery, but seemed quite overcrowded. I had visited Banff and Jasper back in 1977, when I was much poorer. In those days, you’d drive rather than fly—it was a three-day drive from Wisconsin. Now we stay in nice hotels and eat in good restaurants, whereas back in 1977 we slept in flimsy pup tents and roasted hot dogs over a fire. Nonetheless, I was 48 years younger, and hence in the 1977 trip I was probably more comfortable. Age inequality is far worse than income inequality. In addition, the parks were vastly less crowded back in 1977. Now things are much more regimented—you need to reserve a seat on a shuttle bus just to visit Moraine Lake.

6. Nostalgia

During my 1977 trip, I asked a park ranger if there were any mountains over 10,000 feet that I could climb, given that I had no training in mountaineering. At first he said no, but then remarked that I could try Observation Peak, which is 10,400 feet. He called it “a big pile of gravel”. So I parked the car along the side of the road and walked through dense woods and right up the mountain—no trail. I It was the only 10,000-foot mountain I’ve ever climbed. (My poor girlfriend waited for me at the halfway point. I still feel guilty that I dragged her along on that foolish adventure.)

In the years since, I often think back on how stupid I was. At one point I turned around and suddenly realized that I’d been walking on snow overhanging a big drop-off. As years went by, I wondered if I’d just imagined this near miss. Memory plays tricks on us. So I googled Observation Peak and discovered a post put up just a few weeks ago, which confirmed the existence of the dangerous snow “cornice”. Here’s how the author Cameron describes it:

Pass the cornice hanging to the east. Do not stand on the cornice! We saw footprints here and couldn’t believe it. This thing could break, sending you on your way to certain death.

The post also includes a nice photo of the snow overhang.

I learned several things by climbing Observation Peak. First, mountains often have “false peaks”. Just when you assume that you are nearing the top, you crest a ridge and see another higher peak in the distance. A mountain looks doesn’t look the same when viewed from different perspectives. At the top, the world looks quite different from what you might expect. Most tourists stay in the valleys, where their view is blocked by nearby mountains. At the top, you see wave after wave of mountain ranges going off into the distance.

On this trip, Observation Peak had much less snow than in 1977. And the famous Athabasca Glacier has receded by about 1/4 mile since 1977. I recall the late 1970s and early 1980s as being a very cold period in North America.

It’s funny how the internet now allows us to rediscover things from our past that we had assumed were lost forever. I recall the coldest day of my life was when I drove from Madison, Wisconsin to upstate New York in January 1982. But which day? It turned out that Wikipedia has a special entry devoted to that day entitled “Cold Sunday”. It was January 17th, 1982. And that massive Chicago blizzard when I was at the UC? (Which pushed the Daley machine out of office.) It was January 13-14, 1979.

More broadly, science is beginning to discover information that I had assumed was lost forever. Genetics allows us to figure out the origin of various ancient civilizations. AI is allowing us to decipher ancient scrolls from Herculaneum.

PS. I feel like I should have a stronger take on Canada. What am I missing? What makes the country distinctive? My gut feeling is that Canada is “better” in the sense of being a nicer place, and the US is “better” in the sense of being a more interesting place.