Why I'm planning to leave Canada

Something I never thought I'd say.

I loved Canada. I moved here in 1999, and for me, it represented freedom from a dysfunctional family, a new set of friends, a vast array of experiences and opportunities not available in my small US town, friends from literally all over the world, the exciting, all-day-all-night fast pace and bright lights of a big city, Toronto. Most importantly, it’s where I met Jesus.

I never thought I’d leave Canada. I never even imagined wanting to leave. Yet here I am, actively making plans to move back to the States.

Why?

I was once proud to call myself Canadian and to count Canada as my home. No longer.

Unsurprisingly, this feeling is rooted in the tyranny that sprang up around the covid fraud. Previously, I believed that the Canadian government was mostly benevolent and basically interested in its citizens’ well-being. That illusion was stripped away. For the first time in my life, I was genuinely afraid of the government as I watched it lurch from one atrocity to another, going from bad to worse with seemingly no stopping point.

Until the truckers rescued us.

Thank God for them. But Canada still hasn’t recovered from its malaise. The Liberal government under Justin Trudeau seems determined to destroy this once-great country by stripping it of everything that made it so.

What, specifically, are the issues?

The justice system is heavily biased and when ruling on cases related to covid tyranny, has almost uniformly found in favour of the government. We learned that our Charter of Rights and Freedoms is worth almost nothing, and there’s no remedy in the courts. No precedent has been set legally that would prevent a similar tyrannical power grab from happening again. The government hasn’t been punished in any way for what it did.

The economy is in the tank. Everything costs far more than it used to, and no one is earning more.

It’s impossible to buy a house. That’s been the case for a long time, at least in the major cities, but now is true even in smaller cities and rural areas.

Rent has become increasingly unaffordable. Cities like Toronto have always been expensive, but rent has skyrocketed everywhere. In early 2021, we moved from Toronto to a smaller city. Unfortunately, the place we rented ended up having serious noise issues, but by the time our lease was up a year later, rents had also risen to unaffordable heights in our new city. This year, I decided to take what turned out to be the foolish decision to move anyway.

What I wanted was an entire house, where I wouldn’t have to worry about noise from other tenants. That proved impossible. There are few full houses for rent, as most owners have taken advantage of the hot rental market by converting basements into separate units. The few that were available, I didn’t get. We ended up renting the main floor of a house with tenants in the basement, and the noise problem is actually worse, as not only do we hear impact noise but also voices. When the downstairs neighbours cook, the smell comes up through the shared heating system. Controls for the central heating and air are in our unit, so one or the other has to suffer or make a non-ideal compromise, if temperature preferences are different. Water pressure is poor, and plumbing isn’t properly separated, so if someone in the basement flushes the toilet while we’re in the shower, we get scalding hot water. The property management company is atrocious, ignoring maintenance requests or only completing them after many reminders, and then often poorly.

And we’re paying $500 a month more for the privilege.

Not only housing, but everything is more expensive. Food items now cost dollars more than they used to. I’m sure there are many causes, but the Liberal-imposed carbon tax is one. Shutting down the economy for a couple of years and printing money to give away is another. The excessively high rate of immigration is another.

I used to be in favour of basically unlimited immigration, or at least, I didn’t see a problem with it. The last few years have changed my mind. The huge influx of new immigrants without adequate infrastructure to support them is a major reason for the unavailability of housing and soaring rental costs.

People are pouring in and getting housing, financial aid, medical care, etc. entirely covered by the Canadian government, while native-born and long-settled immigrant citizens can barely make ends meet.

Many newcomers have legitimate asylum claims. I know some of them. Others, even some who are my friends, I cannot honestly say do. Mostly, they want to move to Canada for a better quality of life, greater security, and a better future for their children. And who can blame them? Everyone wants those things.

The problem is, when too many are coming for the resources that are available, they aren’t likely to achieve them. Already-overstretched taxpayers are on the hook for financially supporting newcomers until the point where they hopefully become independent and productive.

For many, that is a long road, if they ever arrive. Canada paradoxically invites hundreds of thousands of newcomers, but makes it impossible for skilled workers to work in their field without retaking, at much expense and often for many years, their training. We are short of healthcare workers, but I know doctors and dentists who can’t practice unless they study all over again, even though they are licensed in their home countries and may have practiced for decades. Many, understandably, never do. They work low-skilled jobs and hope their children will eventually succeed.

I am certainly not anti-immigration. I’m an immigrant myself. But there must be a wise use of resources. If your children don’t have enough to eat or anywhere to sleep, it’s simply not feasible to invite twenty more kids to live in your house, however needy they might be.

There are other factors. As someone who decided not to take the experimental covid shot, I would be denied an organ transplant in Canada should I ever need one. It’s close to impossible to get a family doctor, and even when you do, it’s impossible to trust them knowing that they will push a failed, harmful experimental gene therapy injection on you, or at least not tell you the truth about it, because otherwise they risk being viciously persecuted and stripped of their license by the malevolent Colleges that regulate their profession.

My husband now deals with health issues resulting from the one covid shot he took, as well as prior ones, and is forced to go to a walk-in clinic to get care. This is now the default for many people.

If you have a serious health condition, you risk not getting the treatment you need and being offered assisted suicide instead. MAID, or “medical assistance in dying”, the grim euphemism for a doctor killing you, was the 6th leading cause of death in Canada in 2022, although Statistics Canada covers this up by assigning the cause of death to the condition that caused the person to seek it.

The ills of the Canadian healthcare system have long been greatly exaggerated by those who are against centralized healthcare. But it really does feel like it has devolved in the past few years. Firing thousands of healthcare workers for refusing the covid shot certainly didn’t help.

And on and on it goes. Everything feels like it’s falling apart, nothing seems to work the way it should. Government processes that previously took reasonable amounts of time now stretch on for months or years.

Then there’s the grim Canadian winter. Previously, it was just the price you paid for living in a pretty good country. Now, with all the downsides, there’s not much reason to put up with six months of cold, snow, and gloom.

So we’re planning a move to the southern US. I’m not under any illusions that the States is perfect; I know that it hasn’t escaped the ills that have spread like a malignant cloud over the Western world. But it seems that, at least for now, it’s in a better place than Canada. Federalism means that you can pick a state that is better aligned with your political views and is friendlier to freedom. And at least we can escape winter.

We’ll see how it goes. All I know is I’m done with Canada, and more than ready to head out of here. That’s sad and not sad at the same time. For me, Canada’s a bit like the abusive boyfriend that you finally decide to leave. Maybe you mourn for the death of your hopes for the relationship, but mostly there’s relief at putting an end to the suffering and excitement for new possibilities.