Haiti or Canada: which is a better place to live?

The title may seem a little outrageous to the right wing readers of this blog (unfortunately im not sure if we have any right wing readers). But lately i have been doing a lot of thinking about what is wrong with Canada. I will continue my analysis through a comparative political lens drawing comparisons to Haiti. My goal is not to say that "hey guys, you should be happy that you live in Canada and not Haiti", but rather to show how Canadians and Haitains face many of the same problems but on different scales. I will use the CIA world fact book as my resource.

In haiti there is on average 34 homicides per 100,000 people while in Canada there is 2 homicides per 100,000 per year. To me, this does not seem like a significant difference. I don't know anyone in Canada that has been murdered and i think it would be very easy to be a Haitain citizen that does not know someone that has been murdered as well.

According to the Enviromental Sustainability Index, Canada was the 6th best country while Haiti was 141st out of 146. link That being said, Canada has had the benefit of money to invest in the enviroment while Haiti does not even have the luxury of investing money in food for its own people.

Official unemployment in Haitis ranges from 50-70 percent while in Canada it is about 6 percent. Most haitians live off under 2 dollars a day, i already spent two dollars on nanaimo bars today.

28 percent of Haitains have health care which is supplied by NGO's instead of the government while 100 percent of canadians have health care (i could be wrong on this latter number).

In a poll of Haitains 70 percent said they were thinking of leaving the country. of a current population of 8 million in the country, 2 million haitians live in the US. BEtween 1991 and 1995 the US coast guard intercepted 65,000 boat people fleeing the country. i wonder how many actually made it?

The UN ranked countries based on the best place to live:

1. Iceland
2. Norway
3. Australia
4. Canada
5. Ireland

I did not have enough finger power to revolve the wheel on my mouse downwards 47 times in order to get to the bottom of the list and find Haiti. But im sure its there.

Never mind. This post does not work. Haiti fucking sucks to live in. Canada is a way better place to live.

But should it give canadians pleasure to know that we are so much better off and that it could be worse if we lived in haiti? i think this would be the most sickening pleasure in the world. but equally as flawed is the approach that Canada is significantly flawed and needs drastic overhaul because this appraoch values the problems at home over the problems abroad.

I think that Canadians have cushy lives. We are at the winning end of the capitalistic game. we are not subjugating others into poverty in order to maintain our stance as winners of the capitalistic game, rather we just don't care about whats going on in the developing world very much because we are too busy eating nanaimo bars. ignorance is bliss my friends, and it comes in two forms:

1) only thinking about the problems at home rather than the problems in the developing world

2) thinking the world is an aristocracy with natural winners and losers and there is nothing that we can do about it.