Regina And The Different World Across The Border

 

Regina Downtown and Lake Wascana. A beautiful setting to center a city on. Creative Commons photo via Wikimedia

 Williston, where we live is only about an hour from the border with Canada. In some ways, I am a Canadaophile and like to explore that when given the chance. Toronto blew my mind last summer with its slightly different take on how to do North America. As an American in our current age of polarization, vast inequality and what seems like an inability to do anything about it, other developed nations (at least from the outside) seem to be doing it somewhat better. Spending some time in various Asian and European developed nations has made me think differently about how we do things here. While we live so close, I like to explore and think about Canada's sometimes similar, but sometimes radically different take on things.

Interesting, but very unscientific, a sizable majority of my favorite travel and urbanist vloggers hail from Canada. I don't know if this is just because there are more Canadian travel and urbanist vloggers from Canada or just my bias toward their content.

Williston sits in the middle of nowhere and to get anywhere with population from here you have to be willing to drive several hours. Minot, a nice city of just under 50,000 is two hours away, while Bismarck Mandan at just under four hours is around 100,000 on up depending on what statistics you look at. Beyond that, one has to  drive about five hours to get to Billings at about a 117,000 or 6 plus hours to get to Fargo Moorhead at 250,000. While just over the border at 186 miles about thirty miles less than Bismarck and more than Minot sits Regina a city of around 242,000.

The most striking thing is that between Williston and Regina, besides a handful of the type of towns one barely has to slow down for, Weyburn, a town of just over 10,000 is the only sizeable town. Interestingly, along the road, Kieffer Sutherland  installed a statue of his grandfather Tommy Douglas, the "father of Medicare". Douglas, who got his start in Weyburn, is most famous for initiating the Canadian national health care system as a provincial one in Saskatchewan. Just thirty miles north of the U.S. border, despite its shortcomings, is a monument to something I really admire. If a province like Saskachewan could create its own healthcare, why not North Dakota? Of course, they did it in the window of time before healthcare became technology and drug intensive. We missed the window. 

One of the Canadian vloggers who happens to be a Filipino from Regina, laments the struggles of having to downsize when taking their paid family leave. Canadians get 55 percent of their wage for family leave for a year compared to all but a few states in the U.S. where it is zero. Of course they pay for it in taxes, but don't we pay for it indirectly in other ways already?

Around Weyburn, the rolling bumpy prairie of western North Dakota flattens out to a lake bottom similar to Lake Agassiz in the Red River Valley of eastern North Dakota. The tip of Glacial Lake Regina begins in Weyburn and extends up to Regina. In comparison to the Red River Valley, there are far fewer trees and very few farms, but unlike the valley, there was little of the erosive dirty snow of windblown soil. The denizens of  the dryer western prairie have learned they can't leave soil open to the elements.

As one approaches Regina, it rises from the prairie like a block that is hard to see coming because it lacks the dappled sprawl of regional cities on the American side where the increasing frequency of houses and developments beginning tens of miles from the city and heralds the arrival of the larger urban mass. I wonder what the reasons for this are since I noticed a similar phenomenon last summer when we went to Winnipeg. Is it a form of zoning regulation? I have found a few articles denoting that Canadian cities have less sprawl than the U.S. and my senses seem to confirm it.

When one enters Canada, it is immediately apparent that the diversity scale goes way up. Williston, a diverse city by regional American standards, still pales once one arrives in Regina. Just one slice of that diversity, Regina has an estimated ten thousand Filipinos and part of  the reason we visit is to frequent the Philippines version of McDonalds and most successful international corporation; Jolibee. In addition, there are Filipino stores and a bakery and other restaurants providing access to things we don't have here. 

Among Filipino overseas workers there is an informal hierarchy of regions, if not countries, based on what the country provides and how they are treated. Canada rates at the top along with Western Europe. Wealthy East Asia might be next, but Filipinos are sometimes not treated well in some of those areas. America comes in third or fourth, largely because of our health care and provision of public services deficit puts us down the list. When you can choose a country that provides you healthcare, other services and quality of life for similar quality of life, which country would you choose? From a Filipino perspective, it is interesting to look at the world of choices of where one might want to live according to amenities.

 Some things are cheaper in Regina. Flights are always cheaper from Regina than anywhere in in the plains and mountains region. Restaurant meals, even with tax are still often cheaper and certain grocery items are oddly significantly less. Gas of course is much more expensive, which may account for the lack of sprawl in Regina if one compares it to a comparably sized city like Fargo-Moorhead. Our dependence on low gas prices is an Achilles heel that we find hard to shed.

A flight to San Francisco for example in June returning in July, which is a good jump off for the Philippines from Williston is about 600 dollars from Williston. By driving to Billings, we can save 150 dollars, while Regina is under 300 dollars. Why do I have to go to a different county to save money on a flight? Is it because Regina is a bigger city, or are there other dynamics at play?

For me, as a hobbyist urbanist, it is just interesting to visit Canada and see a different take on North Americanism.