Tag Archive: Canada


Project 2025 Down South

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January 30, 2025

A few years from now, this post will seem either really silly or prescient. Either way, I’ll leave it up – what’s the point of having a lifelong blog if you slash and burn the parts you no longer like?

Donald Trump got sworn in for the second time just nine days ago, and things are not going well. Looks like the Republicans’ Project 2025 playbook was, in fact, their game plan. They’re currently acting like gremlins in a super-computer: turning random things off and on, just to see what they can get away with. (For example, Medicaid payments got temporarily suspended.)

One of the wilder things, and one that (as far as I know) wasn’t part of their playbook, is Trump’s apparently sincere desire to annex Canada and Greenland. Google has already submitted and showed its belly: Google Maps users within the US see the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America.” For the rest of the world, the original nomenclature remains. Ipso facto, Americans live in a bubble of their own making, with their collective reality separating from that of the rest of the world. That chasm will likely grow wider.

One other thing Trump wants to do is take over the Panama Canal… In political science, there’s the concept of the Overton Window: the acceptable range of public perception that shifts one way or another, and can be manipulated. For example, the first school shooting was a tragedy. Now, despite being just as tragic, they barely make headlines. The Overton Window at work.

Likewise here. If he succeeds at even one of his bizarre annexation schemes, it’ll become that much easier to orchestrate the rest of them: the window will have shifted. Just like Putin, with his limited military campaigns over the past couple of decades: attack Georgia, then gobble up half of Ukraine, then try to take over the other half. (I fear the resistance will end soon.)

And so… As a Russian-American-French-Canadian with three passports, having moved from Russia to the US to Canada (and specifically the French Canada), I just want some peace, y’all… It’s possible the next prodigious 19-year-old will use a hunting rifle instead of an automated rifle. (Seriously, who does that?) It’s just as possible Trump will live on for quite some time. It comes down to a binary choice: will he or will he not attempt to invade Canada? (Because it sure as hell won’t join voluntarily.) If yes, then will he succeed?

The very fact that we must entertain such an insane notion is disturbing. But if that does, in fact, happen… Canada is still part of the British Commonwealth: we have their royalty on our national currency and all that. Just spitballing here, but it’d be interesting to see if – in that worst-case scenario – the UK will allow its Canadian cousins to move in. Probably without any financial assistance, but with a fast-tracked path to citizenship as long as you can pay for your own ticket. Conversely, it’d be funny if France made the same offer to Quebec’s residents – partly due to the shared cultural heritage and the Quebec/France pipeline, and partly just to poke the UK.

As a Canadian citizen and a proud Quebecer, I’ll win in either of those scenarios, eh.

My big Continental Divide Trail thru-hike will start in less than three months, on April 28. This time, less than three months from today, I’ll be deep asleep somewhere in the New Mexico desert… There’s very little cell reception in the wilderness. Even when I do get it, during my five-month thru-hike, I’ll make a deliberate effort not to look at any news – nothing beyond what I’ll spot in newspaper headlines when I visit towns. (That was how I’d learned about Roe v Wade being overturned, back in 2022. Oof. Oof, I say.)

I look forward to that complete information blackout, and it can’t come soon enough… At the current rate of gremlins wrecking things, it’s entirely possible the US will break long-standing diplomatic rules even before I fly out to New Mexico. Likely, even.

A few years from now, this post will seem either really silly or prescient. If you’re reading this in the future (way beyond 2025), then you already know how this ended, you lucky bastard. Before you chuckle, I just want you to try and imagine what it was like to be stuck here, now, at this point in history, at this point in space, just north of an empire gone mad. I really, really don’t want to have to obtain my fourth passport, my fourth citizenship… But there’s a greater-than-zero chance that’ll happen whether I like it or not.

This will be one strange year.

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Five years in Canada

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March 27, 2024

Today is the first day of my sixth day in this beautiful country. Time flies, eh. I could’ve posted something yesterday but I was far too busy spending time with my partner and learning cool new stuff at a very special event later in the evening. Life is good!

Five years and a day ago, I made this short blog post to commemorate the end of my epic road trip from Seattle allll the way to Toronto. (It was epic. Would definitely do it again.) Incidentally, that meticulous record-keeping also came in useful when dealing with immigration paperwork later on. Huzzah! But anyway – that day, that crossing of the border still seems so recent in my memory…

A lot has happened since then. I had a couple of great partners, and buried two romantic interests, and ended up in a police interrogation room, and almost killed a cop trying to break into my apartment (on a separate occasion, it should be noted), and survived the first global pandemic in over a century. (While keeping meticulous daily records thereof for 406 days.) Got my Canadian residency, applied for citizenship (any day now!), quit Amazon, started my early retirement. Published a lot of e-books. Finished my sci-fi novel. (Still looking for an agent!) Oh, and hiked from Mexico to Canada, huzzah! Spent a year learning French at the local community college. A very eventful five years, to say the least.

I won’t even try to imagine how much wilder and more different my life will be in another five years, in that kinda-sorta-not-really distant year of 2029. I just know it won’t be anywhere close to what I have now. Will I have hiked and triumphed over the Continental Divide Trail and the Appalachian Trail, securing my Triple Crown achievement? Will I have become a published sci-fi author? Will I have done something so wild and cool that I can’t even imagine it right here and now? Hell, I hadn’t even know the Pacific Crest Trail was a thing until three months before I started hiking it. (I move fast.)

I love it here… Canada ain’t perfect – no country ever is – but it’s so much more sane, more safe, more civilized than the United States. And since the US will have Trump on the ballot for the third time in a row, there’s a fair chance things south of the border will get even more bizarre and chaotic in the next four years. The steadily growing anti-abortion movement is downright insane: they showed their cards a bit too early when they outlawed in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in Alabama earlier this year. Wild. Wild wild wild. They really do want to create Gilead, don’t they?..

Quebec, and especially Quebec City, is all I’ve ever wanted when I dreamed of a quiet, cheap, and exotic retirement destination. It’s so damn beautiful here… A whole alternate history. Even the locals look different, thanks to the overabundance of French genes from way back when. (Check out this wiki article on the “King’s Daughters” initiative – it’s so incredibly strange.) I love it here, and my pidgin French is slowly but surely getting better, woot!

Five-year plans… As someone born in the Soviet Union, I suppose that’s just part of how I see the world. And as someone who (thanks to the Soviet Union) grew up surrounded by pollution and radiation, I don’t think I’ll set any world records for longevity. How many more five-year stretches do any of us have ahead of us? The other day, on Reddit, a fellow thru-hiker said he measures his remaining life in summers: how many more healthy, active summers does he have left to thru-hike? (His two main interests in life are thru-hiking and the FIRE movement. Love it.) And that’s… a sobering way to look at things.

I am now 37. Realistically, if I stay in shape and eat my veggies and protein (side eye to the broccoli and mushrooms I bought two days ago and still haven’t even touched), that’s five more five-year stretches where I can be active and proactive. I imagine things will slow down a bit in my mid-60s. That’s 25 more summers, or 25 gigantic adventures, and many many more smaller ones. That’s quite a lot, but it’s also quite limited.

Just being greedy and overthinking things, I know. It’s entirely possible that some tourist driver unfamiliar with the local pedestrian crossing rules will shatter my legs with his SUV (had a few close calls last summer) and make this entire section of this blog post a prime example of hubris. Or maybe they’ll finally invent blood-borne nanobots with the ability to regenerate any cellular damage, and we’ll all live forever as paragons of health. Or maybe yet another unnoticed asteroid will swoop in, score a direct hit, and none of this will matter. Life can be random, no?

And so, off to year six. On a smaller scale, and just today, off to do more gaming and reading and hanging out with my partner. Here is to small triumphs and big victories, and every damn thing in between.

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Suddenly Canadian

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November 5, 2023

Well, that was unexpected. I moved to Canada in March 2019, and did a fair bit of travel both before and after getting my permanent resident (PR) status in 2021. To apply for the Canadian citizenship, one needs to spend 1,095 days total (the equivalent of 3 years) in Canada over the period of 5 years, but the pre-PR days count only as half-days. And when you throw in all the travel… That’s a lot of calculations, eh.

I’d had some basic mental idea that I’d accrue enough residency days sometime around November 2023, but I never actually sat down to crunch the numbers until getting so very, very bored this evening. After digging through all my emails to find 4-year-old travel receipts, I discovered that I was eligible to apply 3 whole weeks ago! Huzzah, mis amis!

It’s really quite remarkable how fast the immigration process is here in Canada. In the US, it takes quite a bit longer to obtain both the PR status and the citizenship. The big downside here and now is that the processing time is 17 months. Yeah, no, that wasn’t a typo. 17 months, as in 1 year and 5 months, as in I’ll probably get my digital citizenship certificate in the first half of 2025. Well, I guess I definitely have something planned for that year now. (I wonder how much of this is due to the covid bottleneck?.. Did the processing time used to be shorter? Will there come a day when even a 17-month wait will seem relatively short by comparison?)

It’s been quite a journey… Only 4.5 years, but that included 2 years of Amazon stress, a goddamn worldwide pandemic, a huge stock market success, being part of the GameStop mania (293% in 2 days, awww yeah), a few relationships and a couple of deaths, moving to Quebec, and hiking from Mexico to Canada. That was a pretty eventful stretch of my life, and it hasn’t even been 5 years.

It irks me somewhat that I can’t finish my citizenship application right this minute because I have to go out and find an official photographer to take my citizenship application picture. (They reserve the right to verify the photographer’s information, which makes sense from the security standpoint.) It irks me even more that it’s 9:30pm and there are absolutely no photographers open at this time of night. It also irks, though a tiny bit less, to know that I’ll be charged an arm and a leg for a simple digital picture against some plain background. A whole lot of irking, in other words.

But meanwhile, here and now, wooooooo! Wooooooo, I say! I wooooooo in Ottawa’s general direction! To celebrate, I’m going to have an unscheduled cup of tea, followed by chugging some Grade-A Canadian maple syrup right out of the bottle. (Gotta start integrating into my new society, eh.)

Life is good.

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Plague diaries, Day 355

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March 3, 2021

Wednesday night.

Suddenly closer to the weekend, for what it’s worth. (Spoiler alert: not a whole lot, really.)

I think my brain is officially digesting itself. I had the strangest dream… One of my stocks went up by 500% and I was running first through my old high school (rural Nevada) gym, then through the streets of New York, clutching my laptop and trying to find a wifi connection to log on and sell the stock. (One time, in real life, I really did lug my laptop around New York – my cellphone provider was too shoddy.) Then I was in a classroom with my old Russian classmates, but all the desks were American-style. We were staring at a blank wall. And then I realized the stock’s fundamentals wouldn’t have supported such a jump in price – and only then realized I was in a dream. So, yeah… My dreamscape is desperate for new experiences, so it’s just stringing along whatever it has handy in ye olde memory archive. Who knows, if I keep up this whole “normal amount of sleep” thing, I might actually learn lucid dreaming.

I’m devolving to the point of just wearing my bathrobe around my studio. When it’s time for a daily webcam call with my warehouse, I just put on a sweater on top and look extra official. Heh. I stopped putting product in my increasingly long hair a month or so ago: now I just put on a cap when it’s webcam time. Going a little bit feral, but I’m sure it’s not just me, eh.

My Internet addiction is becoming a superpower of sorts. While browsing Reddit, I found a very small post promoting an upcoming covid vaccine trial here in Canada. I literally had to go two layers deep to find a guy who gave me two email addresses: one of them replied right away and said he’d put me in touch with their local person here in Toronto. Their site doesn’t mention this particular clinical trial – a bit odd, but really, I’ll take what I can get at this point. A friend of mine in Omaha, Nebraska said that there are about 10 different vaccine trials happening at the same time there. Go figure. (I’m still quite sure I won’t be able to return to Canada if I fly to the US until I get my permanent residency. Best not to risk it.)

A cranberry radler seemed like a good idea when I bought it, and I’ll admit that the taste was quite novel, but that was the first time in almost 14 years that I had to pour my drink down the drain. (Tragic, I know.) The first time was right after my 21st birthday, when I decided to buy my first legal beer at the local store. I was a cheap bastard, so I went with the cheapest beer they had: Pabst Blue Ribbon. That was a huge mistake, and most of that 12-pack went unconsumed. Live and learn, I guess.

More Counter-Strike gaming… I’ve finally discovered my favourite mode and levels (Deathmatch Elimination) that are essentially a non-stop digital Valhalla. You don’t even have to wait for your team to win the round: you just run around, shoot people, and respawn right away as soon as someone else gets you. Dumb but fun, and those 10-minute matches really make the hours fly by. This is just like all the times in the past when I had nothing much going on and wanted to fast-forward through life…

Last night, I joined an online expat community and shared my big idea about contacting US officials about vaccinating expats. The reception was very mixed, to put it mildly. They did convey to me the idea that traditionally, US consulates don’t do much for expats. I guess I’ve still got a ways to go with my cynicism. (Presumably, the same consulate employees who replied to my email yesterday would get vaccinated somehow – but not their compatriots. Ho hum.) On the upside, I did some reading, and that community is filled with fascinating discussions about the peculiar difficulties of being an expat, trying to fit in, and living in multiple countries. I look forward to a very early and dirt-cheap retirement sometime in the near future, and I aspire to become a world traveler at long last, spending a month or two here and there. That community is full of people who already do that. They’re way ahead of me, and their perspectives are fascinating. That’s essentially applied anthropology, distilled to its purest form.

In covid news, a few days ago I wrote about the trivia pub outbreak in British Columbia. I was a bit off: it led to 300 covid exposures, not 300 cases. This infographic sums it up nicely: apparently, all of that happened because just one person at the pub had covid. Yeesh.

Here in Ontario, things are getting pretty funny, in that absurd sort of way. Now that the AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved, Canada will get several hundred thousand doses. (They supposedly arrived earlier today.) Ontario will get over 100,000 doses, but there are two caveats: they shouldn’t be given to folks over 65 (the efficiency in that age group is dubious), and they’ll expire on April 2. That means Ontario will have to scramble to find 100,000 young and middle-aged people and use up all those doses in less than a month. It’s quite telling that the top comment on social media is “Please don’t fuck this up. Please don’t fuck this up.” Heh. I think it’s quite likely that in order to avoid a PR disaster, they will just make it a free-for-all, especially toward the very end of their timeline, in late March or on April 1. That should be interesting. There’s the outside chance that they’ll a) fail to distribute the doses in time and b) have to throw them away, but that might set off actual riots on the streets of Toronto.

And lastly, NACI (National Advisory Committee on Immunization) has gone full YOLO with their official rationale for extending the gap between vaccine shots from three weeks to four months. (Or maybe longer, depending on how terrible the supply issues get.) They admit that the one-shot vaccination campaign is solely to cover as many people as possible. They also admit that “The duration of protection from one or two doses of COVID-19 vaccines is currently unknown.” Some prominent scientists on social media have already called them out for these risky lapses of logic…

If you’re reading this in the future, you probably already know how the four-month-gap approach played out: whether it worked fine or became an unmitigated disaster. Here and now, no one is really sure. We’re witnessing the scientific process – and, to be fair, a giant gamble – in real time, and it’s a hot mess. Should something go wrong, anti-vaxxers will gladly use that as a talking point forevermore. We’ll see. Here is hoping that vaccine trial reaches out to me, eh?

Good night, y’all. Stay safe.

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Plague diaries, Day 353

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March 1, 2021

Monday night.

Well, this was exciting. Today’s 90-minute orientation call with the local search&rescue group was probably the first even since August that really broke up the monotony of my new Groundhog-Day-like existence. They had my full and undivided attention, eh. Their team is small (just ~60 rescuers) and scrappy, and does only 8-12 missions per year. That’s quite different from my old crew in Seattle, who had over 600 members and did hundreds of missions per year. Still, that’s a great way to meet likeminded cool people – and I love their occasional missions to hard-hit foreign countries like Haiti or Cambodia (or Florida) to help with disaster relief.

One major downside: I’d have to become a permanent resident to actually join them. The same PR process that was supposed to come to fruition about a month ago. I can still sign up and hope the magic piece of paper makes its way through the bureaucratic maze by late May, but if it doesn’t… Well, I’d have to wait another year to join this quaint little band of badasses, but more importantly, that’ll be quite a blow to my big plan for this year. The only way to win is to keep playing, to wait until the very end of May, and then drop out if I don’t have my residency – but that’d also result in maximum disappointment. The only way is forward, I suppose.

Today is the first of March. Folks online are posting memes congratulating each other on the one-year anniversary of the two-week lockdown. Heh. Bitter humour is just about all folks got left these days.

In covid news… Damn it all to hell. There’s a lot of US/Canada news, and none of it is good. To start with, first British Columbia and then Ontario said they’ll increase the delay between the two shots of mRNA vaccines not just by weeks, but by months. Their new best bad idea is to make the gap four months long. Four goddamn months… The craziest part is that there is no clinical data to show that the first shot’s immunity stays high and strong for months. The only peer-reviewed paper I found was this one: it acknowledges there’s no hard data, but says that to vaccinate the most number of people, the gap should be increased to five weeks. Everyone is citing this paper without reading it as they argue for a gap that would be 12 weeks longer than that. Ye gods.

I’m not the only person that dislikes this proposal. Mona Nemer, Canada’s chief science adviser, reacted with “WTF? WTAF?!” Of course, she put it far more politely: “I think that it’s possible to do it. But it amounts right now to a basically population level experiment. And I think it needs to be done as we expect clinical trials to be carried out.” In other words, no bueno. One shot is better than no shots at all, but when there are pictures of happy-go-lucky Americans getting both shots three weeks apart at drivethrough centers… Technically, Trudeau’s promise that every Canadian would be able to get vaccinated by September would also work if they finished vaccinating you in January 2022. Heh. I don’t yet know how or when, but at some point this year I’ll engage in vaccine tourism to the US – or to any foreign country that has enough for its own people and would give the rest to tourists. I’ve given up a year of my life: even if I give four more months after the first shot (whenever that may be), there’ll be no guarantee it’d be as efficient as two shots three weeks apart. Getting a less-than-perfect result based on wishful thinking and zero clinical data is not my end goal.

One caveat, as always: there’s a chance Canada won’t let me in without my PR. The rules seem a bit ambiguous on whether you can fly back with mere work permit, and Canada is where I keep all my stuff… So much hinges on so little.

The Biden administration said neither Mexico nor Canada will get any vaccines until more Americans are vaccinated. Just as I figured. The really shady part of this, ethically speaking, is that the US also prohibits private companies from fulfilling previously placed orders: not a single dose is leaving the country. I wonder how much that’ll affect the US-Canadian relations in the future, or if people will even remember that far back. (If/when the US decides to start sharing, that might erase all the old memories.) And Canada’s Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) is not recommending the AstraZeneca vaccine to folks over 65, citing insufficient data. It’ll be up to the provinces what to do with it, but this is another complication.

In non-US/Canadian news, there’s a bit of a scandal. Frontier Airlines Miami-NYC flight got cancelled because a group of passengers (who happened to be Hasidic Jews) allegedly refused to put on masks. The airline claims that was multiple adults. The adults in question claim it was just a few little children. There are no videos of the actual incident – only of the aftermath. Unless there’s a video recording from the plane’s cameras (and I don’t think those exist), this will turn into a very ugly he-said-she-said incident. The Anti-Defamation league is already calling for an investigation. This probably won’t be the last incident of its kind…

Good night, y’all. Save a couple vaccines for me, would ya?

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