It's a good question. Hungary (which has a lot of things wrong with it) also has its detractors. But there's a lot of stuff going on here and since its democracy is new there's a lot to figure out and the issues are sometimes grander. The up side is that the collapse of the Evil Empire resulted in a lot of firings, so young people got jobs. Of course the down side is that a lot of the people you see living in cardboard boxes are old people. University tuition is also free for your first degree so that helps. But I still meet people here who wish they lived in Canada because they think it's the land of opportunity. I tell them Canada is a good place to be an old fogy. In Hungary, a young person can get a job or sixteen jobs each of which pays miserably but they're all real jobs (as opposed to McJobs). Since I'm in my thirties my priorities are split between those of a young person and those of a fogy. The government taxes the shit out of everybody including the cardboard box people. It's about forty percent if you count the health etc premiums and that's for people who make three hundred dollars a month too so it's hard to make a living. Blah blah blah, I'm talking too much.

Talk away - its interesting. I think sometimes that Canadian moanery is based on a forgetfulness of how "bad" feels like. My father used to say of one community in which he was a Minister that it had to make its trouble because it really had none. Isn't Canada the opposite of the Chinese curse about living in interesting times?

Yes, absolutely. I often wonder what it would have been like to live under Trudeau or Pearson or one of the other great Canadian prime ministers. Would we have the same sense of ennui and the same pervasive, whinging drone? I lived in both Sweden and Denmark for a short while, and got the impression that people felt the same nostalgia. Sweden and Canada have two of the most successful -- if not the most successful -- governments in the western world (as judged by the state of the public finances, the economy and providing efficient public services), yet their peoples are no longer impelled by ideas. They have forsaken any sense of their place in the world and any grandiose notion for a coddled technocracy.

I love Canada, but sometimes I wish there was a better way. During the Clinton administration, I was charmed by this aspect of the US. I thought that the US was a place that, although in some ways very different from Canada, was fuelled by profound ideas hearkening back to the war of independence and the constitutional convention. It turns out that I was wrong. If this country is fuelled by ideas, they're often not very good ones.