Canada

I don't have the time to reply to all your answers…, But I am very thankful for your replies.

I didn't know that /r/Canada really was just a bad example.

Just to be clear to everyone, there are literal Neo-Nazi mods of /r/Canada..

r/canada is a complete and utter shithole, don't base your opinion of Canada off that sub cause I'd be shocked if more than a 1/3rd of regular commenters/posters are actually Canadian. Unpopular opinion on Lemmy, but I still use reddit daily on my pc so I can block ads and use RES with old reddit. 99% of the time I just browse by my subscribed subs which are all niche stuff that hasn't yet made its way to Lemmy, but when I do dare to venture to r/all, I can feel my brain cells committing suicide.

Anyways, I've been subbed to r/canada since 2015 when I first started using that website and the massive increase in right wing propaganda is very noticeable. If a non-Canadian looked at that sub, they'd think Canada was a mostly right leaning country, when the opposite is true. If the left vote wasn't split between people holding their noses and voting for the Liberals, and those voting for the NDP (my preferred party for 14 years now) then the tories would never win another election for a long time.

I'm 30 and born and raised in Canada. I can count the amount of right-wingers I've met on 2 hands. Most people I've met are friendly and accepting of people, although the rise in brainwashing from "conspiracies" is sadly increasing the amount of right-wingers. It also doesn't help that the TFW (temporary foreign worker) program is being abused to fucking hell by shitty, greedy corporations and that's starting to slowly turn people against immigrants. Even as a very left wing person, I'm getting annoyed at how many companies exclusively hire TFW's in jobs that used to go to high school kids and young people in general. Why hire a teen that has a complicated schedule with school and just generally being a teen, when you can hire a TFW that depends on your pathetically small pay cheque to make ends meet?

I've been working with immigrants since I got my first job 17 years ago, and I can count on one hand the amount of shitty immigrants I've met. There are far more "natural born" assholes than there are immigrants, it's not even a comparison. 99% of the immigrants I've met are awesome and hard working people that Canada is lucky to have. But companies are 100% abusing the shit out of it to suppress wages, and landlords are absolutely loving the shortage of housing due to our insane population growth. My rent went from $1800 a month in 2017 for a decent, well maintained 3 bedroom in a nice neighbourhood, to $2800 in 2022 for a complete shithole 3 bedroom in a sketchy neighbourhood.

People are rightfully frustrated with the state of Canada, but unfortunately that leads to a lot of brain dead morons blaming immigrants rather than the government that's happily serving the corporate and landlord classes at the working classes expense.

I know the last half of my post makes me sound like I'm against immigrants, but I'm absolutely not. Like I said, I've met far more shitty "natural born" Canadians than I have immigrants. I'm always happy for more good people to come to Canada and help to make our country better and more diverse. I'm just against greedy assholes abusing immigrants for profit at the expense of the common Canadian. Wages are being suppressed and rent is being artificially inflated because of the government caring more about keeping a good stock of wage slaves to support the boomers retirement. Trudeau even straight up said "house prices must remain stable" because god forbid the fucking boomers lose a bit of their net worth by reigning in housing prices.

The average Canadian is just getting bent over and fucked by the greedy owner class and I'm fucking sick of it, but the NDP have basically zero chance to win unfortunately and they're the only ones that would actually help the average Canadian.

IMHO Canadians are not significantly friendlier than most nationalities. At most they are friendlier than the average big-city dwelling Americans, and that's where the meme came from. Up until a few years ago Canada was a country of small cities, and these comparisons are all inherently flawed given the myriad of factors involved.

There is a LOT of conservatism brewing in Canada, and this hasn't much to do with friendliness. Some of the most astoundingly friendly people I've met were midwesterner Americans... and these same people were very bigoted in some regards. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.

Of course there's a theme, and big truck jackasses playing heavy metal with "Fuck Trudeau" & MAGA stickers abound. But visit an assembly from any affluent neighbourhood residents association and you will see highly educated and courteous old ladies parrot genocidal talking points.

Males worldwide are swinging hard to the right. It's concerning.

It's not just right wing criticizing our immigration policies right now. It's basically every single person.

I haven't used Reddit in a while, but back when I did, r/canada was alt-right and I doubt it had real Canadians on it. It seemed like a Russian troll farm like r/the_donald. The actual Canadian subreddit seemed to be r/onguardforthee. The media is also mostly privately owned by wealthy conservatives so there's a clear bias. I personally don't read or watch anything that isn't put out by the CBC, which has a mandate to be politically neutral.

Even Canada's right wing party doesn't hate immigrants, as they make up a large part of the Canadian labour market and are a source of tax revenue. The only valid criticism has been over student visas, which were essentially temporary visas given to people with lots of money. A lot of these "students" were middle aged, already had advanced degrees, and spent more time working a high paying job, or simply just living in Canada, than attending school. The conditions of a student visa were mostly "do you have $100,000 per year?" Nobody had much reason to put a cap on it, since it was a large revenue source, but once there were over 1 million active student visas it might have attributed to actual issues. The conditions are changing and there is now going to be a cap on the amount of active student visas.

The Conservatives are blaming Trudeau for everything though. That's definitely real. Their current leader is Pierre Poilievre who spent most of his 20 year career as an "attack dog". I don't think he knows how to do anything else besides trash talk people. It used to get him in a lot of trouble, but now it's gotten him party leadership and is probably going to get him the title of Prime Minister. Not because Canadians aren't friendly, but because this is Trudeau's 4th election and Canadians don't like voting for the same person 4 times in a row.

Canadians tend to watch a lot of television from the USA. As the country lost its connections to the British it became more easily influenced by the Americans. For now I think a majority are still relatively sane, but there's probably a solid 20% who are hoping that our next president will be Donald Trump.

In terms of social values left. Even the last conservative prime minister was smart enough to keep his opinions to himself and not try to push evangelical policies, he knew he would lose.

In terms of economics.. well the average person globally doesn't know the difference between monatary policy, fiscal policy, and their own asshole. Currently Canadians are being promised a magical fix all solution with absolutely no details, but they sure are angry that things are expensive, so at the moment right.

r/metaCanada was super right wing, honestly I think r/Canada had some of the same tendencies and moderation, making them right wing, them being a default canada sub is silly to me, but I'm not on reddit anymore so whatever. r/Onguardforthee was Canada's more leftwing subreddit, closer to Lemmy's [email protected]

In real life Canada, provinces of BC, ON, QC and some of the maritimes lean left generally, SK, AB lean right (like the Montana and Texas of Canada). Cities lean a lot more left but outlying suburbs tend to lean right.

Toronto and Vancouver have let in lots and lots of immigrants and refugees (about the same as the US despite being 1/10th the size), which is great but it does put pressure on housing, wages and other supports. The problems are more a failure of housing policy and use of Temporary Foreign Worker plan to intentionally pay Canadians less, than it is the fault of the immigrants.

We are culturally diverse, yet there are some voices from people including those who are first or second generation immigrants that oppose immigration (pulling up the ladder behind them). Now there are some aspects of foreign culture I don't wish to import that immigrants will need to discard (caste discrimination for example) but in other respects, diversity is our strength and it's what makes us Canada. Not the colour of our skin.

A lot of is anti-Trudeau sentiment. Trudeau has been power a long time and people are getting sick of him. Trudeau has preached about helping people however has shown at times, they only care about their rich friends.

However there is a lot of push from right wing disinformation groups (sex ed is bad, LGBT are bad, immigrants are bad, etc).

There has been a cost of living crisis/housing crisis which allows bad faith actors to push the narrative that it's specific out groups are to blame instead of government policy of allowing the rich to loot the country.

The right are overrepresented online due to foreign influence campaigns