Canada pros and cons
(c) 2007 by Lydia DeKok
I'm on the way home with my family from a week in Canada. I've been to Canada on many previous occasions, but not since about 1999 and not for this long since my parents took us to Expo '67 in the summer of 1967. It is very much a different country from America despite certain similarities. They speak English--unless they speak French--but a mainly common language doesn't make them "just like Americans" anymore than it does people in Australia or England.
We spent most of the week in Prince Edward Island, the smallest Canadian province in both territory and population, and one day in New Brunswick, another of the Maritime Provinces. PEI, as it is universally known, is smaller than central Pennsylvania and has just 133,000 people. Being an island, and one without bridge access to the mainland until 1997, sets PEI apart. New Brunswick, which was founded by United Empire Loyalists (what we call Tories) after the Revolutionary War, could use "More of Maine" as a slogan.
Here are my Canada pros and cons:
--Prince Edward Island is not big on street signs at intersections. Many intersections on the island have no signs to let you know where you are. I mentioned this to a Canadian couple we met at the graduation ceremony for the summer vet camp my daughter attended, and they (being from Ontario) were as perplexed as we were. One of their PEI relatives commented that "we know what the streets are." A definite con.
--Prince Edward Island is big, really, really big, on recycling. They call themselves "The Green Province." You have to sort every bit of trash into one of four recycling bins. Plastic supermarket bags, bottles, and plastic wrap go in one bin, paper products in another, "compost," meaning food scraps, in a third, and glass bottles and cans in a fourth. Not only do you do this at home, there are similar recycling bins along city streets (see photo above). You'll search a long time before you find a gas station with a trash bin by the pumps where you an dump the empty coffee cups from your car. Don't get me wrong--this is a good thing. But it gets wearisome after awhile, and I wonder how many Canadians really follow all the recycling rules. Both a pro and a con.
--Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick residents are among the nicest people you will ever meet. They are friendly and helpful to strangers. My younger daughter slipped and fell in a puddle of soda pop in an indoor mall in St. John, N.B. She picked herself up and was fine. Ten minutes later, while waiting for rootbeers at the A&W, the mall janitor came over and apologized for not having mopped up the puddle more quickly and was my daughter okay? I got the sense it was sincere and that he hadn't been sent out to find me by the mall lawyer. This morning, leaving St. John, a gas station attendant apologized twice for the pay-at-the-pump function being inoperable and promised they were trying to get it fixed. A definite pro.
--Maritime Canada is expensive for American tourists. This is something new. Their prices have always been higher, but the very favorable exchange rate more than made up for it. At one time just a few years ago, the Canadian dollar was worth about 67 cents to the U.S. dollar. Now it's worth 95 cents, so those high prices pinch. Books in Canada are very expensive now. The new Harry Potter novel cost $38 after being discounted 20 percent. It cost $22 in America after being discounted a whole lot more from a list price that was lower to begin with. Big con.
--PEI seafood was terrific, as long as you prepared it yourself. We bought three one-pound live lobsters one night for $38 and steamed them. We had them with some of the excellent island potatos. Great dinner. The next night, not having satisfied our lobster fix, we went to the New Glasgow Lobster Supper, which is in all the tourist guidebooks. We paid $30 a head for two one-pound lobster dinners. That included a gallon bucket of PEI mussels that were the best I've ever had. But the lobster was a real disappointment, tough from being over-cooked. Our suspicion was that New Glasgow's mass production kitchen had heated up cold pre-cooked lobsters. I later cooked fresh haddock caught the day before off the coast of Nova Scotia and it was excellent. So was a Malpeque (from Malpeque Bay, PEI) oyster I ordered on the half-shell at a Charlottetown restaurant. First one I'd ever had. Mainly pro.
--Canada still has real local radio stations, the kind America used to have in the 1960s and 1970s before Congress eliminated the Fairness Doctrine and the requirement that radio stations offer news as part of their programming. You can actually figure out what's going on in the world on a Canadian radio station.