Global meltdown shock: get your surprised face ready

The Canadian province I used to live in is often referred to as the Texas of Canada. Its political stripe has been big business dressed as elected representative for a long time now, and it is the one province that has been held up as an example of US style free market success in a country with suspiciously socialist tendencies (like healthcare, creepy red bastards). It is the only province to have eliminated its provincial debt, due to massive profits from the oil sands in the north. Yee haw.

Alberta has been rolling in oil money for a long time now, handing out cheques for $400 to every resident once a year (is that right, lone Canadian reader?), which sure seems like a great Christmas present until you remember that the medical bill from your last doctors visit came to £200 for a five minute consultation and a pronouncement that you are not going to die even though you're coughing up neon green balls of gunk, no, you just have a virus which is treatable with orange juice and rest. Oh yes.

Did you think that just because Canada has universal healthcare it’s the same in every province? Provincial governments have a lot of say about how they ‘interpret’ the national standards. Some provinces have better basic healthcare, higher minimum wage, more social safety nets. Some scrape it as thin as it can go.

If you’re living in Alberta and you get your leg severed in a road accident then, yes, you will be able to get admitted to hospital and treated without having to sell your kidneys like poor Americans without private healthcare. But once you get away from anything that is classed as ‘emergency’, it starts to get a little fuzzier.

When you’re unemployed or making exactly minimum wage, then you usually get some kind of exemption from paying medical bills for doctors’ appointments and prescriptions. If you’ve got a good job then you’ve probably got a healthcare package as part of your contract that covers you for drugs, dental etc., topping up the basic. But if you make 50 cents an hour too much, bringing your income to just below the poverty line rather than waaay below, then start building up your immune system and eating lots of seretonin-encouraging bananas, sunshine, because you don't wanna get depressed, suicidal, and then put on addictive anti-depressants that cost $150 a month.

You’ve got a university degree, you say? Well, nobody’s really that interested in that any more, unless it’s in business studies. The student loan payments are non-negotiable and not related to your income, so get hustling. The bank won’t wait. They’ll just garnishee your wages. Cute.

I think this is what is referred to as laissez-faire economics. Or, in simpler terms, fuck the poor people.

//

I know why I left Canada. I left Canada because my heart and my gut told me to, and because a dear friend of mine said to me one day, ‘Listen. I make a stupid amount of money being an electrician for this oil company. I’ve lucked out and I cannot possibly use all this. You will never get to the UK on your wage, and if you don’t go you’ll regret it forever. I am buying you a one-way ticket. What happens next is up to you.’

That’s right. I had to swallow a lump of pride so big it had me choking for months (years actually) afterwards, cause he was right.

I still feel indebted to this guy. Still. And he was right. Just like my instinct. I have never once doubted my decision to move, and it’s been proven again and again to me. I was lucky.

There are things that I really really miss about where I used to live in Canada. Most of those are people. Some of it is also environmental – the river valley, the prairie, the fir forests and the mountains that wrench something from my chest and make me cry every time I leave them. I have golden memories from my time as a prairie girl.

I also have grim memories of working 60 hours a week for a wage that had me making decisions about toilet paper vs. bread. That’s the kind of decision that leaves you crying on the kitchen floor after arriving home and realising that there’s a spare roll in the bedroom and that you can’t eat paper. There were so so many who were so much worse off than me. Honestly, I don’t know how I did it, which leaves me wondering how the hell anyone else did. I think working a job where we had a barbecue for the hostel guests a few times a week really helped. So did a circle of friends who shared what they had when they had it.

Something about that, about the harsh ‘pull up your bootstraps or it’s your own damn fault’ attitude, about the line at the job centre that stretched all the way round the block, and the bigoted atmosphere of hatred that wafted the streets – something about all that also meant that likeminded people found each other and held on.

Like queers. Or the simply queer. Anyone not planning to forge out a career as a business tycoon. People with artistic or, don’t say it out loud, community-minded ambitions. We found each other in different little pockets and we got together and did things and made stuff and told each other again and again that just because we were not benefiting from the gross wealth of our province, that didn’t mean we were shitheads.

Some of us did have to clean up shit. And some of us washed dishes, some of us did other people’s laundry, made coffee for people who can’t call a coffee a fucking coffee, looked after children with sugar highs and scary drawings, worked in warehouses, shovelled mexi-fries, sold comics, stocked video store shelves, peeled potatoes for 12 hours straight and then came back at the end of the unsociably-timed shift to tell the tales.

Every rich person’s playground needs to have little people who keep the place running.

You were either in real estate, oil or their related industries, or you were fucking broke. Oh, or you had a job with the provincial government that didn't necessarily pay great but had good medical and dental - gold dust. Those are the choices in a place like Alberta.

So now, amidst the Albertan ‘$400 for everyone and lets leave someone else to clean up the spooge’ financial orgy – the one that happens right before the inevitable decline (Rome, anyone?) - the moments of genuine community and human connection can feel hard won and far too few. My experience of living in Alberta was to notice how incredibly polarised everything was – and that, that polarisation was NOTHING in comparison to what exits in other parts of the world…which was nothing, then, compared to what is to come now.

Things are going to get worse. Most people who live on this planet have known that for a long long time, but here, now, the newspapers scream their shock. Why? You really don’t have to visit the extreme end of this global system – a landfill in Haiti, worked over by seven-year-old fingers – to have seen this coming.

Anyone who’s ever lived somewhere like Alberta, working a minimum wage job and living on adrenaline, has known this for a long time already.

///

Bonus semi-relevant but not really rant:

Canada: great for calendars, a little more complex in real life.

Maybe I need to put that on a postcard to hand out to the endless stream of people who tell me I was stupid to leave Canada, cause when they went that one time on vacation to Niagara Falls/Vancouver/The Rocky Mountains it was So Much Better Than Here.

Yeah. Well, it’s easy to romanticise places you know nothing about on a day-to-day level. I know the big lawns and huge restaurant portions are confusing. I know.

I’ve done it too – thinking San Francisco would be a diverse and welcoming place. Assuming that Edinburgh was the cultural capital of Scotland. It’s easy to make these kind of narrow lens fuck ups. I get it.

I guess that constant refrain of ‘Canada! It’s so lovely! You’re mad to leave!’ is the natural counterpoint to the Royal Family Freaks that are rampant in the ex-colony that thinks it’s cute to have a queen. Really.

I spent years in Canada having to fend off hoards of the freaky Royal Family people – you know, the ones who have a collection of coffee table books about the British royal family that they pour over on rainy Sunday afternoons.

The ones who’d walk up to me in slow motion, misty eyed, saying ‘Tomato – I haven’t slept in three days. I can’t eat. All I can do is flick through the channels looking for more news coverage. Everyone else is laughing at me telling me I’m over-reacting about something that has no bearing on my life, but I know YOU’LL understand why Princess Diana’s death is devastating to me.’

The ones who, when I don’t cream myself over ‘my’ royal family – when I make a flippant comment about having to subsidise the cleanup of their every fart and nose dribble - tell me in icy response that ‘We have to pay for our politicians over here in Canada TOO, you know.’

The ones I often wanted to roll down a badly repaired road of fresh tar, dump into a vat of clipped raven feathers, hog tie with some union jack bunting, and send home with a well designed and informative pamphlet explaining that the royal family are

1. not harmless English eccentrics
2. not worth their staggering upkeep
3. not elected, and
4. not politicians for fucksake.

Sigh.

Fence. Grass. Greener....

I've got an idea. Let's stop fantasising about each other's lawns and see if that doesn't make our own gardens look a little more inviting.

I'm growing green tomatos on my balcony, and they make damn good salsa. I am now free of the shackles of Old El Paso. One step at a time.