6 Dark Sides Of Canada That No One Ever Talks About
Google searches on how to move to Canada spiked 350 percent after Super Tuesday, as more and more Americans became certain that Donald Trump was the conductor on a train taking them all straight to Shitsville. This, of course, is a hasty fear response that any rational person could make when confronted with the idea of a turd golem being elected their president. But is it something you want to follow through with? Is Canada so much poutine and legalized marijuana with no downside? Oh, have you ever been lead astray. Canada has shit like ...
The Serial Killer Capital Of The World
Ever heard of London, Ontario? It was named after the more awesome London in England, and even features its own little Thames River. Isn't that adorable? And just like how London, England had Jack the Ripper, London, Ontario had a walking nightmare of stabbings and disappearances.
According to Michael Arntfield, a criminology professor at the University of Western Ontario, London was not just a hotbed for murder from the 1950s through the 1980s -- it qualified as the serial killer capital of the world, with as many as six serial killers operating in the area at the same time. How they didn't bumble into each other's rusty knives behind a poutine shack is anyone's guess. I mean, could you imagine three Canadian serial killers accidentally throwing down on each other at the same time? All the "I'm sorry" and "Die, ya hoser!"
Arntfield, who had also served as a cop in London for 15 years, reviewed detailed notes on a number of homicides -- 32 in particular that occurred over the years in which the victims were all women or children. While several were ultimately solved, a number of others remain unsolved, and all show patterns that he was able to link together based on his own observations and other reports. He concluded that, over the years, at least six serial killers were in operation in the city, whose population at the time barely topped 200,000.
The reason London was so full of chaos and stabby mayhem was its location and environment. Called the Forest City, London is replete with trees and forested areas. Lots of cover. It's also about halfway between Toronto and Detroit, a great kind of roadside stop for maniacs, with large stretches of open country on either side that were not monitored by local police, but by provincial police. So a victim killed in London could be dumped outside of London, and unless provincial police found it and linked it to London, neither of the two law enforcement groups would have any idea the other knew anything about the case.
200 Years Of Slavery
Picture it: The mid-1800s in America, as devoted men and women help slaves escape their racist tormentors by smuggling them North to Canada via a little something called the Underground Railroad. Why? Because Canada was wall-to-wall beavers, and not a single slave. Except for the part with all the slaves. All the acres -- or as they're known in Canada, hectares -- of slaves. Canada was up to their beavers in 'em.
Throughout the 1700s, before Canada was officially Canada, there was Upper Canada and Lower Canada. Upper Canada was under British rule and is mostly what is Ontario today, while Lower Canada is mostly what is modern-day Quebec and was chock-full of slaves, thanks to the prevailing attitudes at the time. Anyone who was anyone in Quebec had a slave. It was a sign of prestige and social importance. In fact, owning a slave was such an important sign of one's status that families would go into debt to buy the best one they could find.
Most slavery in Canada involved indigenous peoples, but for the social butterflies, a black slave was considered the best of the best, and they were worth double the price of Native slaves.
Now, it's hard to say if this makes slavery better or worse in Canada, but unlike in the US, Canadian slavery was not economically driven. There were only 4,200 or so slaves in the entire region, as Canada was never able to prove to slave traders that it was economically viable to take slaves up the coast to the St. Lawrence. Instead, the slaves in Canada were nothing more than show pieces, kept for the perceived stature of simply being able to own another human being. And it wasn't merely the French aristocracy doing it -- it was in all walks of life. Anyone who could afford a slave, from blacksmiths to clergy to tailors to the military, owned slaves. The founder of Montreal's McGill University was a slave owner, as was Marguerite D'Youville, the founder of the Grey Nuns who was canonized in 1990.
Of course, slavery was eventually abolished, but the last slave auction in Lower Canada was in 1797, and Britain abolished slavery entirely -- which included all across Canada -- by the 1830s, which was just around the time the Underground Railroad was getting underway, and the perfect chance to PR-spin Canada into Disneyland for former slaves.
Healthcare Wait Times
If you move to Canada, not only can you avoid the likes of Donald Trump and Jeff Dunham, but you can also benefit from free universal healthcare! Oh man, time to shoot yourself in the foot and burn your genitals on a waffle iron. Or is it?
Canada actually ranks last in hospital wait times among 11 countries of the OECD -- the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which includes Canada, the US, and several European nations. Twenty-six percent of Canadians asked in a survey had to wait four or more hours in an emergency room waiting room before seeing a doctor, compared to one percent in the Netherlands. Fifteen percent of Canadians don't even have a family doctor. The average wait time to see a specialist in the US is about 18 days, while a study in Canada has shown the median wait to be over 18 weeks.
Most healthcare in Canada is covered, but the reason it's covered is that the country is hoping you'll either die or get better before you need to see a doctor. Probably.
Horse Meat
If you're the kind of person who maybe doesn't want to eat a horse, you may also want to rethink coming to Canada. Not that Canadians are popping horse nuggets on every street corner and chowing down on delicious horse jerky while they ride the bus, but the fact remains that Canada sure has a lot of horse meat in it. More than you're probably going to find in the US.
There's actually a very large market for horse meat in Quebec, as well as a smaller market throughout English Canada. Butchers from Toronto to Vancouver can get it for you, but it's huge in Quebec, where it's a roughly $80 million industry. That's right, $80 million in My Little Pony gets scarfed down by voracious French-Canadians every year. Remember how you always wanted a pony? Remember that magical summer at camp when you rode a thoroughbred named Buttercup and it was like she could see into your soul? Some dude named Jean-Jacques ate her with a side of poutine and then listened to some Rush.
In 2014, over 61,000 horses were slaughtered for meat in Canada. That may be just a drop in the bucket compared to chickens, but can you hug a chicken while you ride it and tell it your dreams?
You might remember a big scandal in Europe several years back when people found out that the beef they thought they'd been eating was actually horse. Odds are a lot of that came from Canada, since the country is the third-largest exporter of horse meat in the world, shipping out somewhere in the neighborhood of 29 million pounds of the stuff a year. That's enough to make so many majestic and adorable burgers, you don't even know.
Seal Hunt
Yes, a horse meat market is harrowing and awful, but Canada can do better -- and by "better," I mean so much worse. No matter how adorable a horse is, it will always look like Kanye's recently-fingered butthole compared to something like a baby seal. A baby seal is basically condensed cuteness in little furry form, looking all adorable and huggable and squee-inducing. Now imagine the nearly 500,000 that Canada allowed to be killed for its 2015 annual culling.
According to official Canadian law, those adorable little white furry pups are not allowed to be clubbed to death. Instead, they have to be at least 12 days old before you bash their heads in, once they've started molting and look just barely less cute. The head is the main target because the pelts need to be kept intact for sale, which is mostly why the hunt takes place. Of course, the Humane Society of the US investigated the hunt and determined as many as 40 percent of seals sustained injuries that were not fatal, meaning the seals were probably skinned while they were still alive and responsive to pain. Despite facts like that, Canada continues to conduct the hunt every year, one of only a small handful of countries to do so.
Making the situation worse is the fact that the global market for seal products has decreased steadily for years, while Canada continues to up the quota on seals to be killed. The European market has all but collapsed at this point, and very few countries beyond Norway, Sweden, and a few others have any use for the pelts or oil that is harvested from the seals, while a handful of Asian countries will use the penises for aphrodisiacs, because nothing is sexier than the dong ripped from a helpless little flipper kitten.
Residential Schools
Ask any Canadian what the darkest moment in Canadian history is, and you might hear something about Celine Dion. Stop talking to that Canadian, for they are dimwitted. Instead, find a Canadian who can tell you about the absolutely abhorrent history of aboriginal residential schools.
The first residential schools in Canada were opened in 1876. Their purpose was to take Native children from their families so they wouldn't absorb any of that pesky Native culture and tradition, and instead could be raised like the good little white kids the government wanted them to be. Yes, there was in fact a time when white people thought they could just force nonwhite people into whiteness. The schools were often run by Christian churches, usually Roman Catholic, and were basically unfathomable horror shows for the children forced to attend them.
Over the years -- the last school wasn't closed until 1996 -- over 150,000 First Nations, Metis, and Inuit were forced into these schools. Upwards of 3,000 (and possibly over 6,000) of those children never left. Children at these schools were made to give up their ancestral languages and speak only English. Many underwent forced sterilization and extensive physical and sexual abuse. In addition, forcible enfranchisement was par for the course, which meant any trace of Nativeness was to be scrubbed from the student, body and soul. They would read and speak English and no longer be considered Native, but proper British citizens.
Mortality rates at these schools were as high as 60 percent over five years in some cases, due to healthy children being housed with others who had tuberculosis. Many of those who made it out alive suffered long-lasting effects such as PTSD, anxiety and personality disorders, and depression. It was a massive load of shit that was instituted by the Canadian government. They've since tried to apologize, but Hallmark doesn't really make a card to cover the systemic abuse of an entire culture.
For more reasons to never go to Canada, check out 5 Stories That Prove Police Are Just as Terrifying in Canada. But then again, see why Chris Bucholz swears by Canada in 15 Reasons Canada is better than your country.
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