I recently paid a visit to Canada. I had intended upon returning to Taiwan to write a fun little piece on the quirky nature of reverse culture shock. You know, a few quick and cute anecdotes about little things back home that now seem strange. This is not that.
On a personal level, the trip home was fantastic. I spent lots of time visiting old friends and family. I saw people I haven’t seen for decades. The time was booked solid with visiting. I loved it. But, oh my God, Saskatoon has had a precipitous socio-economic decline. Just stunning.
I first began to note a decline around 10 years ago, but the slide was just beginning and didn’t seem that bad. Just after Covid I visited again and really noticed creeping destitution, but I thought possibly it was a temporary post-Covid thing. However, this time it was worse.
The first thing you notice walking around Saskatoon is the homelessness. Not saying there weren’t homeless before, but there weren’t swaths of indigent people everywhere. There are now.
Inflation was amazing. It was so spectacular that for me it was almost a tourist attraction. “Hey, look at this $19 bag of cookies I bought at the airport…. Really?!? Did my cocktail really cost $30? That’s amazing!… Wait, wait, wait, I want to get a selfie of myself with this $27 plate of nachos.” As a tourist, once I got past the initial shock, it had a surreal quality that was vaguely entertaining, but if that were the life you were living, day in, day out,…my God. I felt a deep and profound connection to my grandfather who was fond of saying things like, “Why if I’d had a nickel back then I’d have considered myself rich.” Or my version, which I’ve actually caught myself saying, “Five bucks! Five bucks! My God, I could live for a week on five bucks,” which indeed I used to do.
Western Canadian healthcare is terrifying. Saskatchewan is the birthplace of socialized medicine in Canada, but if you can find a primary care physician there you are damn lucky. I’m personally aware of several individuals who have waited 2-3 months for emergency [E-M-E-R-G-E-N-C-Y] medical care. If you have hemorrhoids, God knows how long you have to wait to get them lanced.
Homelessness, poverty, inflation, declining social welfare, the increase in these problems seems to be universal across Canada. The increasing levels of violence that I found in Saskatchewan, I think, is just a Saskatchewan thing. The last time I was in there I nearly got into two fights. I thought that was bad. This time, upon arrival in Saskatoon, a family member “kindly” explained to me how to avoid getting stabbed. That doesn’t seem like it should be something that needs explication. I was uncomfortable.
Friends and family seemed able to see the decline in medical care, inflation, etc., with the exception of one friend who has raised willful blindness to an art. However, when it came to the violence everyone put on their blinders. When I expressed my disquiet over the amount of violence I was perceived as unreasonably negative. To me everyone seemed like the proverbial frog being brought to a slow boil. The consensus among them seemed to be as long as you avoided this street, that area, the other side of the river, this end of town, then you would be fine. That’s not how violence works. If I’m standing on my side of the street, and that guy on the “bad” side of the street starts shooting, I’m not safe. Time and again people contrived to build a narrative that it’s safe as long as you avoid here or there. (The areas considered unsafe have expanded greatly since I lived there). A couple friends had that illusion forcefully torn away when they were on the receiving end of violence. That’ll make a frog sit up and take notice of the pot he’s in.
To really drive home my perceptions, days after returning to Taiwan, a 14-year-old girl dowsed a 15-year-old girl in lighter fluid and set her ablaze in the halls of my old high school. Go Souls! Nobody knows what precipitated the incident. An educated guess would be teenage girl shit and mental illness, or maybe it’s those issues along with the increased culture of violence in Saskatoon. Who knows?!?
In fairness these problems aren’t specific to Saskatoon, or Canada. Many expats visiting their homelands after Covid have reported similar situations. It is hard to judge how much living outside a society affects your perceptions. When I lived in Saskatoon, I lived in, and was the super of, an apartment in a slightly dubious part of town. I had to don rubber gloves and clean blood smears off the hallway walls multiple times. Once during a visit home in my early days as an expat, I was shot at. Well, actually I was shot past. I was in a car that found itself between a gun that was being actively fired and the bullet’s intended destination. At the time I was unconcerned by both these situations. I really think things are worse now, but maybe it’s just that I was once one of the frogs.
Anyway, that’s been my reverse culture shock and it ain’t cute.