Having kids makes big difference in U.S.

As a 40 year old who moved from the U.S. to Canada 21 months ago you are missing some very important categories in your comparisons. I am not planning on looking into all the different categories you have listed and sending in an entry, but I can tell you from personal experience that it is FAR cheaper to live in the U.S. in my case.
The first category you are missing is the difference that children make. I am a bit unique, perhaps, in that I have 9 children ages 13 and under. In the U.S. this made a huge difference in many areas. In Canada I get a check each month for approx $750 in child tax benefits. This may seem like a lot but I got way more than that in the U.S. in things you cannot compare. For example, the number of children I have affects my tax bill in the U.S. but not here. In the U.S. there is a $500 per child tax credit. Not only did I not pay any federal tax (that is correct - zero) but I also got back everything I paid to Social Security! My family size was also figured in when calculating eligibility for many government programs so that I was considered poor even though I made $45,000 per year. My children got reduced price hot lunches at school at 40 cents per day and every school has a hot lunch program and 2 free milk servings per day. We had free health care even though I had excellent insurance for my children 6 and under and for my wife when she was pregnant up to 2 months post delivery. I was eligible for heating cost assistance, food stamps, WIC (women, infant, and children - a free food program where we got about $150 free per month), and home weather-proofing assistance.
Another category is taxes. You have property taxes but not income or sales taxes. I touched a bit on income taxes above but the difference is astounding. I pay way more income taxes up here. Also there is 7% PST and 7% GST here in Manitoba whereas I used to live in Wisconsin and work in Minnesota. Their state taxes were 5.5% and 6.5% respectively but Minnesota had no sales tax on clothing so I would buy diapers and other clothing in Minnesota.
Another category is insurance. Both my auto and homeowners insurance were much cheaper in the U.S.
I am not complaining - we love it here and plan on staying for good. It is just that the things you had on your list have far less impact on your disposable income than the things you missed. So what if videos cost $.25 less to rent here if I have to pay $15,000 more per year in taxes?

Blair Hamren
Ste. Anne, MB

Globe survey says Canadians live better

Are Americans really better off? The National Union of Public and General Employees has looked at the evidence, and found the following item in a strange source, the Globe and Mail. It did a comprehensive analysis of this issue, using Statistics Canada data, in its December 21, 1998 edition.
According to that analysis, the median family in Canada had $30,200 to spend in 1995 after taxes, compared with $29,500 for the U.S. family (both in Canadian dollars). The Canadian family has already paid for health care in its taxes while the US family may still have to pay premiums, or worse, thousands in ruinous medical bills if it's among the 43 million US residents without health insurance. So Canadians are even better off than this $700 difference.
After health care, the other great burden in the United States is the cost of education. Good private colleges charge annual tuition of $25,000 (U.S.), or more, though state schools charge considerably less. In Canada, tuition is about $3,400. Although this represents a tremendous increase over the past several years, this figure is still a lot cheaper than the average state university. Private primary and secondary schools in the United States can cost thousands, as they can in Canada. The difference is that many Americans think their public schools are poor, making private schools a necessity for them.
The same article also found that if we divide the Canadian population into quintiles, the top 20 per cent of Americans are better off than the top 20% of Canadians. But the rest of us, the other 80 per cent, are better off in Canada.
In addition, consider a recent survey by the US Conference of Mayors, which found that the leading cause of hunger in that country is low paying jobs. Overall, the study found that 37 per cent of adults requesting food assistance are employed.

Bob Dale

Inner city Chicago like Beirut during the civil war

I don't think I'll have the time to fill out the questionnaire, but I thought I could give you my perspective as a Canadian having moved from an inner-city neighbourhood in Montreal to an inner city neighbourhood in Chicago. There is the whole intangible question of the quality of life that you can't put a dollar sign to.
Cities in the US are still segregated on racial and class lines, and everything down to the shape of streets, sidewalks, playgrounds, and especially the housing stock, varies like night and day between rich and poor areas. The ghetto areas a few kilometres down my street look like Beirut during the civil war.
As a cyclist, I've learned to be very cautious on the streets here. You can never show your anger to a driver, because he might just have a gun in his glove compartment.
The police are often more of a hindrance than help, especially in minority neighbourhoods. In black and Latino areas, the police respond very slowly (or not at all) to calls for assistance. There is also the question of police brutality, which exists in Canada, but is on an epidemic scale here. In fact, a local study showed that teenagers in Chicago are more afraid of the police than of gangs, in spite of a constant media and political barrage aimed at criminalizing poor, minority youth.
Not only the cost but the quality of health care is vastly inferior here. There is such a shortage of doctors in inner-city neighbourhoods in Chicago (per capita, on a par with Third World countries) that even with an appointment, my family and I wait on the average 2 hours to see a doctor at our local clinic.
The quality of public education is abysmal. My spouse teaches at a university here and is amazed at the poor academic level of the students coming out of public schools. As well, all public high schools in this city have metal detectors at their entrances.
The mass transit system is still reeling from the Reagan-era cutbacks, and the frequency of trains and buses is atrocious.
My neighbourhood is rat-infested - the mechanic in the garage down my street even found a Burger King wrapper in my engine, where the rodents decided to set up shop.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture.
Yours,

David Alper
Chicago, Illinois

U.S. is not going to break me
Transplanted Canadian looks forward to going home

As regards the myth that somehow soil conditions are more favourable south of the border as are economic and social trends I must take up my position in line for the soapbox.
Two and a half years ago I was living in my birth town, London Ontario where I was working low-paying marketing jobs with fly by night companies intent on selling anything they could to anyone willing to part with their hard earned dollars. I had long been the neighbourhood computer guru and expert helping family and friends not only buy them, but learn the software and get on the internet (even before there really was one to speak of). Friends and loved ones seeing my dismay at the marketing and sales industry I had fallen into urged me to pursue my education in computer support so I eventually did.
Placing my resume on the "net" it wasn't long before a major fortune 100 corporate head office in the United States called me up and offered me a contract job as a computer analyst. I had not lived outside of Ontario in the previous 27 years of my life and was surprised how much all the hidden costs of living in the "Great US of A" added up. First there was rent, which on the surface seemed pretty cheap, but add the cost of contracting your own garbage removal, your own sewer service company, fees for water, electricity, gas and mail delivery. Wow, I had no idea how little of my paycheque I'd get to see after bills got paid.
It still costs roughly $25.00 for two people to go to a movie and buy one popcorn and two drinks here so in that respect it's very much like the Canadian entertainment pricing. But I know here you get Football Stadium seating, your choice of Starbucks coffee and truffle cake or a deli sandwich with wine if you think popcorn is a bit too light for your appetite. I think the phrase is: "Only in America!"
Jobs... oh yes, the reason I was lured into the "green pasture" in the first place. Well being a contract employee on a NAFTA TN-1 work visa legally allows a Canadian to work as the ONE specific job title listed within the American INS dictionary of occupational titles. You are only legally allowed to work for the one company specified on the reverse of your $110.00 work visa. This means, that when a contract ends (as the computer industry, I have learned, ends contracts with more whimsy than the jet stream changes flow direction) you are required to immediately leave US soil, cross back to Canada and hunt for another job from Canada.
So, the burning question is why am I still in the United States of America if it is such a Draconian workplace that treats Canadians like criminals if you get laid off from a contract job? I ask myself that a lot too. I know my family asks me that every time they call me, or sends me some money so I can pay the rent or catch up on an overdue bill.
I guess my answer is this: there is NO WAY the United States is going to beat me. I am very good at what I do, there are a lot of things I would like to do still, a lot of places I'd like to see and I have to have faith that after enough hardship somewhere I'll get that break I've been looking for. I'm due. It's my time. Leaving now would be like going to CasinoRama and pumping quarters into a slot machine.
The past two and a half years I've lived here have been enough hard work and stressful enough that I can't give up now. I'm going to make it. When I do, and I achieve what I set out to do and have nothing more to glean from this experience then look out Toronto, here I come.

Scott W. Donaldson
Houston, Texas

Canadians lured away by opportunity
Spirit of entrepreneurial risk taking in US

I think that Murray G. Dobbin's article on "the brain drain" (Tues. Feb. 15th) was naïve and narrow in its treatment of this "grass is greener" issue. While most Canadians who go to the U.S. might not be solely motivated by the obviously lower U.S.income taxes, I believe that what lures our best and brightest South are work opportunities that do not exist here at home due to other forms of taxation and government regulations.
Simply put there is a spirit of entrepreneurial risk taking that exists in the U.S. that doesn't exist here in Canada because the government makes it too costly to take those same risks. There is no way of calculating how many millions of dollars we lose to American corporations every time a young Canadian takes a "great idea" to the States instead of building a business here in Canada. The government does not make starting a business here in Canada very appealing and many young entrepreneurs feel as if they are being penalised from the start by high taxes and a lower dollar.

David J. MacNeil
Toronto, Ontario

Coming back across the fence
Wages may be higher and taxes lower in US, but that's only part of the story

Let's face it - the grass is only greener for those Canadians who can take their skills and market them South of the border. There's no "free trade" for people in most jobs.
The Canadians who will have the opportunity to rate the differences are those who have skills in demand in the U.S., meaning people whose incomes place them in the upper middle class. Are we to believe, as the CEOs of software and telecommunications corporations often trumpet, that the grass is greener South of the border or is there perhaps another political agenda afoot?
I have been privileged enough to lead a middle-class lifestyle in both countries and chose to return to Canada. Over the years, I have had occasion to contact the middle-class professionals I worked with in a middle-class, university town, Berkeley California. When I left Berkeley in 1976, they could hardly believe that I wanted to return to Canada. More recently they ask me how they can immigrate here.
Generally wages, particularly if you take into account the exchange rate, are higher in the U.S. Taxes in the States tend to be lower. But this tells only half the story. Crime rates, particularly violent crimes, are higher there. Public schools for the most part are so poor that most middle-class American parents opt to pay for and send their children to private schools. Last but not least, the vagaries and costs of the American medical insurance system cause many a middle-class bankruptcy and suffering.
I know too that I am not alone and would dearly love to see statistics on the numbers of Canadians who opt to return to Canada after a stint in the U.S. So where is the even- handedness of our media in covering this issue? Why in the press is it almost always a given that the grass is greener South of the border? My hunch is that at least a few CEOs are out to maximize their profits and minimize their corporations' tax burdens. They would dearly love the feds to cut taxes rather than maintain or increase social programmes.
I guess it is too much to expect even a facade of even-handed coverage on this issue?

Pam Fitzgerald
Ottawa, Ontario

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