I’ve been thinking about this for a while. If you looks at our major industries that aren’t controlled by Canadian oligopolies, we let the US take over and continue to support them. For example, streaming services (Netflix, Spotify, Paramount, HBO, Disney, YouTube, etc…), fast food (McDonald’s, Starbucks, Wendy’s, Five Guys, Timmies, etc…), home improvement (Home Depot, Lowe’s, Rona), retail (Wal-Mart, Amazon, Costco), tech (Google, Apple, Microsoft), credit payments (Visa, Mastercard), food brands (Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, print media (Postmedia Network, which controls over 130 newspapers across the country), social media (Insta, Snap, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp), retail gas (Esso, Ultramar, Chevron, Pioneer) are all US companies. I can keep going on (pharmaceuticals, oil and gas operations in Alberta, and entertainment).
It’s ironic when I see Canadians hating on immigrants for not being “Canadian”, yet those Canadians copy Americans like no tomorrow. And now we have separatists in Alberta simping for the US and politicians that vocally support Trump (Doug Ford, Danielle Smith, and PP). Wtf is going on?
Good points, but I’d want to add that your last point about immigrants applies more to newer immigrants, rather than people who have been here since the pre-Trump years.
That’d seem likely, though there’s one particular anecdotal encounter I had that goes against that thought. The Iranian woman I’d mentioned, was a hairdresser who’d come over from Iran in order to go to university, and then she stuck around – she was in her mid 40s, had been in Canada ~20 years. I didn’t probe too much in the convo, cause that’d be weird I reckon, but what she had said was something along the lines of here in Canada, she’s had no luck dating, and she’s stuck working day after day in a generally low income job. Part of her dating issues seemingly stemming from an assumption that women don’t work, and men provide everything. Back home, she’d have been a ‘respected’ housewife at her age, or live independently as a ward with her parents – either way, nothing but spare time and freedom, so long as you don’t want/care about the freedom to do stuff in public. Instead she ended up as a wage slave, with basically nothing to look forward to but another 20+ years of being a wage slave.
Yeah, I can certainly see those kinds of cases, but at that point she’s just describing the plight of any low-wage worker in Canada, immigrant or not. I would think that people in those situations have a bit more opportunity to escape the trap in Canada compared to other countries, but it really does depend on personal circumstance and luck.