When I visited Vancouver in 2004, I got some very different perspectives. One young man told me that one’s economic future in Canada pretty much would be working a government job somewhere, and he was not particularly excited with that prospect.

In Canada, if one is physically attacked by someone else who is bent in committing a crime, it is against the law to fight back, and especially fight back with what the government considers to be an “offensive weapon.” One Canadian told me that Canadians “were proud of this law, because it reduces violence.” So, if you are mugged in Canada, in order to be law-abiding, accept the mugging gracefully, and if you are killed, at least you did not “contribute to the violence.”

Then there is freedom of speech. While one might be politically ostracized for saying something regarded as “hate speech” in the USA, in Canada, it is a crime, a go-to-prison crime.

This is not to say that the situation here that Lew has described is not real. We are losing liberty in all sorts of ways in this country, and the sorry process seems to be accelerating.