"Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab.

Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis well, notably in British Columbia, where I live.

Vancouver is just three hours by road north of Seattle, where the U.S. outbreak began.

Half of Vancouver’s population is Asian, and typically dozens of flights arrive each day from China and East Asia.

Logically, it should have been hit very hard, but the health care system performed exceedingly well.

Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada have been consistently five times that of the U.S.

On a per capita basis, Canada has suffered half the morbidity and mortality.

For every person who has died in British Columbia, 44 have perished in Massachusetts,

a state with a comparable population that has reported more COVID cases than all of Canada.

As of July 30th, even as rates of COVID infection and death soared across much of the United States,

with 59,629 new cases reported on that day alone, hospitals in British Columbia registered a total of just five COVID patients.


When American friends ask for an explanation, I encourage them to reflect on the last time they bought groceries at their neighborhood Safeway.

In the U.S. there is almost always a racial, economic, cultural, and educational chasm between the consumer and the check-out staff that is difficult if not impossible to bridge.

In Canada, the experience is quite different. One interacts if not as peers, certainly as members of a wider community. The reason for this is very simple.

The checkout person may not share your level of affluence,

but they know that you know that they are getting a living wage because of the unions.

And they know that you know that their kids and yours most probably go to the same neighborhood public school.

Third, and most essential, they know that you know that if their children get sick, they will get exactly the same level of medical care not only of your children but of those of the prime minister.

These three strands woven together become the fabric of Canadian social democracy.


Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.”

Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy.

Canada performed well during the COVID crisis because of

our social contract, the bonds of community,

the trust for each other and our ins utions,

our health care system in particular,

with hospitals that cater to the medical needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not the private investor who views every hospital bed as if a rental property.

The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency ac ulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.


This has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do with the quality of life.

Finns live longer and are less likely to die in childhood or in giving birth than Americans.

Danes earn roughly the same after-tax income as Americans, while working 20 percent less.

They pay in taxes an extra 19 cents for every dollar earned. But in return

they get free health care,

free education from pre-school through university, and

the opportunity to prosper in a thriving free-market economy with dramatically lower levels of poverty, homelessness, crime, and inequality.

The average worker is paid better,

treated more respectfully, and

rewarded with life insurance, pension plans, maternity leave, and

six weeks of paid vacation a year.

All of these benefits only inspire Danes to work harder, with fully 80 percent of men and women aged 16 to 64 engaged in the labor force, a figure far higher than that of the United States.


American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States.

In truth,

social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society.

That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and

just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the

United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.


Evidence of such terminal decadence is the choice that so many Americans made in 2016 to prioritize their personal indignations, placing their own resentments above any concerns for the fate of the country and the world,

as they rushed to elect a man whose only credential for the job was his willingness to give
voice to their hatreds,
validate their anger, and
target their enemies, real or imagined.

One shudders to think of what it will mean to the world if Americans in November, knowing all that they do, elect to keep such a man in political power.

But

even should Trump be resoundingly defeated,

it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward.

For better or for worse, America has had its time."

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Defeating Trump won't end Trumpism, that preceded him, and will succeed him, perhaps violently