Some thoughts on our trip to Vancouver/Victoria:
First, Vancouver is the only major city we've ever visited where we felt like our values and priorities were reflected in the ethos of the city. (Our apologies to Asheville, Carrboro, and Berkeley - you're awesome, but much smaller than Vancouver.) Some examples:
- The city is intentionally walkable and bikeable to a degree I have never seen anywhere. Bike lanes and cyclists are everywhere, and the drivers are extraordinarily courteous to them.
- The city is as clean as a Swiss city (which is a high bar indeed), with bins for recycling and composting available everywhere. I have read that the citizens of BC are famous for their environmentalism, and that commitment was obvious everywhere we looked.
- Dogs are everywhere, and apparently Canadian good manners extends to them.
- The restaurants were fantastic, with a ton of vegetarian options everywhere.
- The people we met were from all over the world - locals and tourists alike. Many folks we met had visited on holiday and liked it so much they came back to live there. We found everyone to be uniformly friendly and welcoming. I've heard that Vancouverites are more reserved than we Southerners, but I didn't experience that. We made several new friends with whom we hope to stay in touch.
- The quality of the customer service, even outside of tourist areas, was far in excess of what I am used to, as was the level of education and the communication skills of the staff with whom we interacted.
- The climate is perfect for both of us: me because I like things cool to cold but without snow, and for my wife because she likes bundling up.
- The scenery is breathtakingly beautiful: on one side a stunning waterfront (which we toured on a rented boat), and on the other snow-capped mountains climbing to the sky. I think some people are wired for sunny, Florida beaches, and others are wired for the rocky coastline of the PNW. My wife and I are the latter, and we felt the most at home there that we have anywhere.
- Victoria has all of the above, on a much smaller scale. The parks, beaches, and scenery there are the nicest I've seen anywhere (and definitely the most dog-friendly).
Secondly, every other time I have traveled somewhere, by the time I got to the airport I was excited to head home - no matter how much I liked the city I had visited. This was the first time that was not the case. I love Atlanta dearly. It's my home and my native city. But on every single metric I could think of the people of Vancouver do things noticeably better than we do.
I did a little reading to try and figure out why that might be. Part of it, I think, is that Canada is a much smaller country population-wise. It has about 10% of the people we do. In addition, although income inequality is increasing there, historically the income disparity between the wealthy and the poor has not been nearly as great as here in the US. Free healthcare, cheap college tuition, and better wages make for a much more robust middle class in Canada compared to here.
In addition, their commitment to education isn't just reflected in cheap tuition. Primary and secondary teacher salaries in Canada are some of the highest in the world. To quote from one article I found, "Canadian teachers – and the data is the same for primary and second teachers – have a teacher compensation ratio of 1.05. Roughly translated, that means they get paid 5 per cent more than others with equivalent education. In contrast, most teachers in the OECD are indeed ‘underpaid’ – the OECD average is 0.82 for primary education and 0.90 for secondary teachers, and in the U.S., the equivalent figures are 0.67 and 0.72."
Canada is also the only nation in the world where more than half of its citizens have a college degree. Their voter turnout in national elections is also good, and noticeably better than in the States, but not exceptionally high.
Finally, I think the culture, particularly in BC, is generally more communitarian, environmentally-conscious, and measurably different from that of the States. I'm inferring this from the kinds of cities they have built and the people we met, as well as from some of the articles I have read, but I don't have enough concrete evidence to state it definitively. The fact that Vancouver refused to allow any freeways in the city is a good indicator, though.
All of this is to say, we could learn a LOT from Canada in general and Vancouver/Victoria in particular.
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