Why did a patriotic American family with solid careers and happy, healthy kids decide to pull up roots, sell their dream house and permanently relocate to another country?
I get asked this a lot, and it’s sometimes difficult to have a succinct answer ready, but if you’re interested I’ll try and sum up:
Many years ago, I initially visited Canada (well, that’s up for debate) on business and had an opportunity to spend a week in Ottawa and Gatineau with some of my colleagues. From the grandeur of Parliament Hill to the sugary Beaver Tails we ate along the Rideau Canal, every detail of that first adventure made me more curious about Canadian life. I vowed to return as soon as possible, with my significant other, to show her everything I’d discovered.
While that turned out to be almost a decade later, a lot happened in the meantime. She decided to pursue a career in health care, and since medical training can involve a lot of travel and moving around, we decided to use the ensuing years as an opportunity to explore America and choose a place to raise a family. We researched and visited more than a dozen cities, and spent time living and working in every major region of the country (even the Pacific islands) before falling deeply in love with the Pacific Northwest, where our children were born.
We built a home and started to “put down roots.” At last, we really felt like we were part of a community which shared our values, enabled our goals, and should have been ideal for so many reasons, but no matter how well things seemed to be going we always had nagging concerns that had less to do with where we’d settled and more to do with…well the national zeitgeist as a whole. Of course there are pros and cons to living anywhere, but generally the same four major issues, which extend beyond city limits and over state lines, kept topping our list with increasing urgency.
First and perhaps foremost, was health care from the perspective of a “provider.” We’d seen attempts at comprehensive reform in America rise and fall repeatedly over the years as political winds blew back and forth, and the country just didn’t seem to have any inertia toward implementing universal coverage. Helping people, however noble a pursuit, loses much of its altruistic luster when you go to bed at night wondering which of their families you may have inadvertently plunged into bankruptcy.
Second, while blessed with good health, we were concerned about someday becoming one of those families ourselves. We saw our own health care costs skyrocketing year over year. We’re fairly fiscally conservative folks, and we try to live responsibly and sustainably, but more and more often when we did our long term forecasting the puzzle pieces just weren’t fitting together. How can you plan for the worst of times, so you can live for the best of times, when you have little to no faith in the stability (or motives) of the institutions supposedly “insuring” you against risk? Canada has a lot of its own systemic struggles where health care is concerned, but there exist fundamental differences between the two countries as to how things are, and how they should be.
Third, we believe in public schools. This topic alone could (and does) merit exhaustive study and whole shelves of discourse so I will try to stick to some core ideas here. We want our kids to attend public schools, not private ones, or corporate ones. We want our kids to attend schools that are accessible to everyone in our community, not just the fortunate. We also feel strongly that public education can only function when teaching is fundamentally and apolitically respected, so that education workers can consistently feel secure in their roles and rewarded for their efforts. The erosion of public education in the United States is, in our opinion, past a dangerous tipping point and was simply beginning to feel more and more like a losing bet as our munchkins’ entry into K-12 loomed (to say nothing of secondary or post-secondary options down the road).
Finally, and most frustratedly, we had become burned out with American politics…at least for quite a while. I may expand on this eventually in another post, but to be clear this isn’t just about the current era (which began after we’d started to research our move) but rather the narrowing pendulum sweep between a centre-right and far-right concept of status quo which made current events even possible, if inevitable. To be clear, the American progressive-left’s voice will still have our vote whenever possible, and of course to some degree the USA will always receive some of our taxable income in case you were wondering, but apart from those contributions we decided it was time to check out and look for…let’s call it “a more winnable game of chess.”
I honestly forget exactly how the conversation (re)started a couple years back, but late one night after the kids had fallen asleep, our frequent references to a memorable quote from the movie War Games stopped being just a joke and we started seriously considering how we might live, somewhere else, as ex-pats. What would that actually mean for us, for our kids, or for our friends and extended family?
When applying the same preferences by which we’d compared potential domestic destinations, Canada quickly topped the short list of places outside the United States in which an anglophone family, with our background and prospects, could expect to put together a dual-nationality existence without too much trouble and retain close connections with loved ones while exploring a different way of life.
There are, of course, dozens of “little” reasons as well, which add up to a lot when you put them together, but the bottom line we always came down to was our own innate curiosity driving us to explore. Our new adventure, and this attempt of mine to chronicle it, are not intended to be some argument against the way that anyone else lives, or the paths that others may choose. We’re just trying something new, and hoping to learn a great deal along the way (and share whatever we can). If you like, follow along and see what happens.
Still reading? Still interested? Click here to find out more about how the immigration process went, or click here to learn more about where exactly we eventually ended up in “the Great White North.”
This Ontarian Life 