I mean, there is no Canadian identity so in that sense we're welcoming. I grew up with family that spoke Ukrainian every day on one side and French on the other (and I have never lived in Quebec either). I have no idea what Canadian identity is despite having been born here. To me Canada is prairies, mountains, and small Ukrainian, French, Nordic and German enclaves/towns dotting the countryside. I can't relate to a 10th generation Canadian from Ontario.

Economically though things were way better 20 years ago. We're losing ground on every single economic metric. Almost all of my family has already left for the US or back to Europe. All of my classmates I kind of kept up with have left the country. A bunch of the immigrants I used to know left.

If you have a good job and a house I'm sure things are fine. You can live a good life here if you do have a good income stream and already own a home. You can live well anywhere. I'm currently in the rocky mountains and it is nice.

But just looking at things critically (since my partner and I are looking to settle down and have kids, she has an EU country passport, I have a Canadian one, we both have family everywhere, she just bought an investment property in Europe), our taxes are too high for the services we receive, wages are too low for the cost of living, and things are objectively worse than they were before.

Europe is a big place with a lot of cultural differences. You can get away with painting Canada (35mm people) with a broad brush, but you probably shouldn’t do broad comparisons to Europe as a whole (750mm people).

As a Canadian who has lived in Europe as well as America, I experienced more sameness than difference. As Saskia Sassen writes, global metropoles of elites all have the same culture really. You can get a craft beer everywhere now. As I write from St. Petersburg, I can say that it too fits this, but, there is a sense of alienation - in a good way - wherein people ..don't even imagine what you are thinking or judge what you are up to .. it's hard to describe - like they do in the West. For example, there are signs everywhere for masks but few wear them, and I do sometimes and sometimes I do not. No one really notices. Vs in the West there is a mask fetish as it stands for one's inner moral position or something. That space - the space we all inhabit most of the time of our own fantasies and stuff we say to ourselves - remains inviolate here. I am not saying anything else about the problems in this country which are legion and I don't want to wade into that here - but on a subjectival level, in the context of 2021, I feel calm here.