The Generous Country: How Canada's Social Safety Net Raised a Generation

The first time I truly understood what a library was, I was overwhelmed. My parents had taken me to a public library in Toronto, and I stood in the children's section, surrounded by shelves upon shelves of books. Every single one was free. In China, where my parents were from, books were a luxury. Here, they were a right. With my library card, I could take out forty books at a time. Forty. We'd go weekly, my backpack full and my mother's grocery totes overflowing. I spent entire summers there, because our apartment lacked air conditioning and the library was cool and quiet. That simple access to knowledge, provided freely by my municipality, was a gift that shaped the person I would become.

This is the story of my childhood in Canada, a narrative of quiet generosity. My family was poor. There were weeks when lunch was frozen dumplings and dinner was cabbage and rice. But Canada helped my mother hide our poverty from me. We lived in a rent-subsidized apartment, and until I was eighteen, the government sent us five hundred dollars a month for my care. That was the foundation. But Canada went further.

It taught me to swim and to skate. In our Toronto suburb, community centers with ice rinks and pools were standard civic infrastructure. These municipally-run facilities offered classes for a few hundred dollars for a ten-week session, but for low-income families, the cost was negligible. My mother bought the skates and the swimsuits, and I spent my childhood moving through water and on ice. This wasn't just recreation; it was the cultivation of muscle memory and physical confidence. Years later, when university friends invited me to a lakeside cabin, I could jump in with glee. When a holiday Airbnb was near an outdoor rink, I could join a pickup hockey game. These were not luxuries; they were skills and experiences provided as a public good.

Canada also made the holidays magical. A local charity would deliver a jumbo translucent garbage bag, pink for girls, filled with toys for Christmas. Sketchbooks, markers, stuffed animals, play-doh. For a child who loved art, this was everything. The same charity provided two turkeys a year, for Thanksgiving and Christmas. At the end of the school year, my report card would arrive with an envelope full of free tickets—to the Canadian National Exhibition, to the science centre. These were my summers: botanical gardens, the zoo, Blue Jays games. An annual family pass to the science centre, a splurge my mother could afford because the membership was reasonably priced, meant every rainy weekend was a new adventure among the exhibits.

This generosity extended into adulthood. When I graduated into the pandemic, Employment Insurance provided a crucial breathing room. My Canadian passport makes travel to the US for work and conferences simple. I know my mother will be cared for in her old age without the threat of medical bankruptcy. This slack, this buffer against absolute precarity, allows me to pursue meaningful work without being solely mercenary about salary.

Canada is not without its problems. It has a "go for bronze" mentality. The smartest often leave for the US, where opportunity feels more expansive. Public infrastructure is crumbling in places, and housing prices are frightening. The nation is sick. Yet, when I travel to the US, I see a different kind of fragility. I see the medical self-serve kiosks in grocery stores, the necessities locked behind glass at CVS. I see a system where parents are not given five hundred dollars a month for infant formula, despite a GDP per capita twice Canada's. The wealth there often feels brittle, not load-bearing.

I try to imagine the counterfactual version of me who grew up in New York or Los Angeles. I see someone more stunted. No skating classes. Libraries too far to walk to regularly, and likely less well-stocked. Student debt. Without public incentives, her life would be confined to what her parents could afford. I see someone more mercenary about money, more disembodied from her own body. I see someone less optimistic about the capacity of large institutions to do good.

I am glad I grew up in Canada. I want to stay here and help it recover from its sickness. Part of this is obligation. I feel deep gratitude toward every Canadian who paid taxes to ensure I had enough to eat, a warm place to sleep, and the chance to be delighted by giraffes. To leave would feel ungrateful. But it's more than that. I love my country. I want to stay because it is my home, with good bones and a solid foundation. I want to live in a place that loves its children, where the social safety net is generous, the people are easygoing, and public skating rinks are treated as a human right.

If you are fortunate, you might not realize how much Canada cares for those who are not. To give up on it, to count it out of the game, feels like a terrible waste. I love it too much to leave.

Note: I'm minimizing the amount of labour my mother did throughout this piece. Not every impoverished child got as much out of living in Canada as I did, because some programs required additional effort to apply for, and poor parents often lack the time, effort, or knowledge to take full advantage.

#blog #longform