O CANADA

Another ongoing post. Why I like Toronto/Canada!

1) They actually get mad about corruption.

Thieves enrage Canadians, and they really go to town when the thieves are in government. The big difference is that Canadians don't take thievery as proof that government doesn't work, just that it needs fixing.

I always found that people in the US take governmental inefficiency corruption as evidence that government control of things doesn't work—and yet never take private corruption as a sign that private companies need fixing. Enron can steal billions, and who cares? But let the Post Office ask for a two-cent upgrade every three or four years, and watch out! (Meanwhile, maybe FedEx has raised its rates by twenty-five cents? Oh, that's just inflation for you.) And so they become disaffected with government, turn more and more things over to private enterprise, and take private corruption in stride—and pay more for the "privilege." The government can't just be more efficient than private industry, it has to buy you a fucking unicorn and rainbow before an American thinks it's working.

Americans will endlessly flock back to private companies that have repeatedly dicked them over, and even feel sorry for the felons who ran them. A governmental agency fucks up, and not only must heads roll, but people lose all faith in the agency. Your car keeps breaking down? You find other ways to work five or six times a year. Transit goes on a two-day strike? Screw them, I'm buyin' a car! Then I'm gonna complain about the cost of gas, insurance, repairs, and parking! And don't get me started on the traffic! Why doesn't the city build more roads? Jesus H. CHRIST!

Canadians aren't like that. They don't like taxes, but they repeatedly have said in polls that they will pay more if the system works. They love their public healthcare, their low tuition, their parkland. And they get mad over small corruption. They don't see it as proof that the system doesn't work and that everything should be turned over to private industry. They see it as proof that it's time to kick and scream.

Good for Canada.

2) Torontonians, at least, love their gardens.

Seriously, this makes a huge difference.

Starting April 1, everyone starts buying bedding plants and shrubs and roses and seeds and dirt and other kinds of dirt and pots and fertilizer and gravel and iron or steel implements. Then they start to worry over their gardens.

About April 15 or May 1, the city furiously re-installs all the greenery it furiously uprooted back in early October. Bushes, bedding plants, the whole nine yards, boom, wickety-wack, city employees start digging holes and filling them with plants.

This includes the parks. There are a million parks here. There are many parks one house-lot wide and deep—it looks to me that when a house burns down the city sometimes buys the lot and makes a tiny park of it. If there's two lots butting back to back that make a kind of alley between streets, even better. So sometimes you'll be on a "Discovery Trail," a city-designated "green walk," and happen across a park one house lot wide. It will have a sign, maybe a swing set or slide, and lots of plants. All parks here have flowers and bushes, and pretty well-tended flowers and bushes too.

Private gardens? Everywhere. Any house, including rentals, will have a garden. It varies from the manicured to the wild, but there's something in front of every goldurn house. Many people go the whole nine yards and put bedding plants in along the walk and have a three-foot deep bed the whole length of the front of the house, plus climbing plants on trellises. Even condo- and apartment-dwellers: You look at a twenty-story building in the warm months, and one of five balconies will have some little attempt at plants.

Yeah, I know people have gardens in the States, but not four of every five houses, not maintained all summer, and not elaborate.