CanadaJimmy

It really does vary massively by company and also the personality of your superiors. When I first moved to Canada I was working at a very small firm that only gave me two weeks vacation and also docked sick days off my pay. The next company I worked at was a start up but heavily boosted with venture capital and they gave me two weeks plus 5 flex days. The one after that was another small company so back to 2 weeks again. But at my current job which is a huge company with offices all over the world I get 4 weeks. So I think the lesson here is if you can find work at a larger company you usually get much better treatment and perks. My boss often encourages us to take time off throughout the year to de-stress. He's from Germany originally so he has imported a bit more of the European mindset when it comes to work-life balance.

Also important to note that it is 10 days paid leave. Many employers are very understanding if you need to take some additional unpaid time off, and you can bring this up during negotiations. If it turns out you get paid more in Canada then this balances out and you can simply keep aside some money each month to cover the off time.

Problem with generalizing across a huge country. I would say it varies a lot by province, eastern Canada and the US is more uptight than here on the west coast where things are a bit more laid back, so that might be where those comments are coming from.

dbd33

I dunno about that. My daughter in Vancouver has a government job but her husband does not. According to her he works hours like me. I know he works 6 12 hour days when things are slack and more when they're busy. I just don't know how many more. We were all at another daughter's wedding in Italy and he had numerous online meetings at strange times of the day despite being "on vacation". Even the government job has spells of travelling to a one boat town and working flat out for a week.

I don't think all jobs in Vancouver are laid back. If they were, how would workers generate the revenue for a two million dollar condo?

jandro

In my experience it's been more stressful working in Canada than the UK. Factors contributing to it are: not having enough resources to properly do the job, lack of job security, less time off.

I also find the West Coast laid back attitude is largely a myth with jobs in Vancouver paying many factors less than the cost of real estate, terrible traffic etc. Maybe it stems from the sixties and seventies when you could rent an apartment cheaply near the beach in Kitsilano.

dbd33

Jobs in Vancouver also pay less than the same jobs elsewhere in Canada. My daughter and husband would both get a pay jump if they moved to Toronto and stayed with the same employers. If money was everything they could move to Ottawa, get the pay jump, and be in a place with cheap houses. I don't get Vancouver at all, if you're willing to spend a million and a half pounds for a townhouse and willing to put in the hours at work to achieve that then there's no need to live there, lots of places are open to you. You could live in Brighton, have a beach and cultural activities and, if you're still allowed to go there, have France on your doorstep.

BristolUK

But the article appears to be referring to said cradles.

dbd33

One encounters so few of them that it may as well describe the work habits of Peruvians. If you're educated in Canada and have computer skills, you're in with a good chance of moving to the US, so even relative to the population (less than half of which was born here), cradles are underrepresented in computing in Canada.

CanadaJimmy

This may have been true 5-10 years ago, now with Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Philips and other corporations opening large offices and R&D centres in Vancouver salaries are getting pushed up and becoming quite competitive. Still lower than the US, but in line with the rest of Canada I would say.

Paul_Shepherd

I hear you.... this is one of the huge downsides of living in Canada...,its a real pet peeve of mine. However its all about the big picture, what you want from Canada and what you are prepared to sacrifice for that, in addition to that I think there are ways around dealing with the pitiful 10days vacation per year.

I have lived in Canada now for 12 years, and I think things are slowly improving, 3 weeks is becoming more regular now. I just started a new job and got not only 3 weeks, but could use is immediately, at many companies you can't do that, you have to work a year first to earn your crappy 10 days of vacation, which adds insult to injury! This new job I took is a unionised postion, so that may have a bearing on it, I am not a huge fan of unions, but in cases like this I think it probably does help.

I found when I first came to Canada, one of my ways of dealing with the lack of vacation was to ask for unpaid leave, and I just used to factor that into my salary and spread it over the year so I didn't notice it. most companies will let you have a unpaid leave....a week at least some more, so that was one way, which helped me enormously. Another way is to use the 10 days sparingly... I tended to tag one or two days onto every statutory holiday weekend in the year or some at least, this way you feel like you have had a kind of "micro holiday" lol.

I also accepted that international holidays as I once knew them were a thing of the past, which was hard on me as I loved to travel....I just accepted that until I had more vacation I can't do that. I mentioned earlier that you have to look at the big picture to justify your sacrifice of giving up your vacation, so to me this was to live in a country of the great outdoors... I get to do things here that I could only dream of in the UK. I love hiking, camping, boating, skiing, snowmobiling all of these I can do on a weekend here, so I don't have to travel far, plus we have defined seasons here (for the most part) hot summers on near the water boating or camping respectively, cold snowy winters for skiing and snowmobiling, so I make every weekend a vacation, (some extra long weekends as I was explaining earlier) that way I felt I didn't miss the 2 weeks away somewhere if I am doing something exciting every weekend, and for me personally Canada has one of the best outdoor play grounds in the world for all of that, its natural beauty at its best! For me this sweetens the bitter pill of the pathetic vacation allowance.

dbd33

I don't buy this "Canada great outdoors" line of argument.

I will say that, if skiing is your thing and if you can arrange to live near the Rockies then Canada is better than Brighton. That said it's not Switzerland, skiing in Canada isn't a pastime for the impecunious, it's not something everyone can do.

Otherwise the model for outdoor activity is different but the outdoors is the same. If based in Brighton, one might hike or ride a horse on the South Downs, one might join a sailing club and get out on the channel. The advantage of the UK is that there are fewer oafs on noisy smelly machines such as snowmobiles and ATVs disrupting the peace and destroying the environment. Granted, jet skis seem as much of a plague in either location. The UK has a litter problem which might detract from the pleasure of the hike but Canada has Tim Hortons which is the mother of all litter problems.

It may be that proportionally more people participate in outdoor pastimes in Canada (though I haven't seen any figures). If so, I suggest that's because most indoor pastimes, museums, art galleries, theatre, the opera, require a trip to Europe or NYC. That's prohibitively expensive so people are left shooting at things in the back field.

dbd33

That's probably true for IT jobs, yes. fair enough.

scilly

Noting that you live in or near Toronto, that city and that province are NOT the rest of Canada!

Yes, skiing is probably expensive (in your eyes at least) ......... I haven't checked recently how much it would cost to ski in Switzerland, for example.

It would be expensive to ski in Banff, Jasper, Whistler/Blackcomb ......... in high season!

We met a couple in their 30s from the UK in Jasper some years ago, he was a tradesman, and they had just had a week skiing in Banff and another week skiing in Jasper over the Christmas period, spending Christmas in Banff and New Year in Jasper.

They were raving about their holiday ................ stayed a week in the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel and a week in the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge. Both top rated hotels.

It had cost them less than half what 2 weeks in Switzerland would have cost.

The Christmas period happens to be out of season in the Rockies over Christmas and New Y,ear they lay off staff and then bring them back in February, school break time.

Or there are the myriad of small ski resorts around ......... not to be sniffed at as most of Canada's top class skiers have emerged from small towns.

Whistler/Blackcomb IS expensive .............. the cost has risen at least two-fold since that resort was taken over by the big American conglomerate that also owns Vail in CO and several other ski areas that they design to appeal to the moneyed rich.

Vail Resorts paid $Can 1.39 billion forWhistler Blackcomb Holdings, while another company that had 25% interest in WBH has retained that interest in VR.

Their approach has been to attract the wealthy ............ the Trumpoid sons, wives and entourage stayed there for several days when they came to Vancouver to open the Trump Tower hotel in 2017, which has now gone belly up.

There is still skiing at Whistler/Blackcomb at reasonable rates out of high season, as well as reasonable hotel rates.

I believe there are ski towns in Switzerland and Austria that charge similar rates
.


In my humble opinion, if vacation time is such a big deal for anyone, it is better NOT to come to Canada, or they will just be a moaning minnie for years to come.

We came 53 years ago, went from being teachers in the UK to 2 weeks vacation plus 11 or 12 stat holidays. We were out doing things, taking trips almost every weekend, and certainly never felt deprived.

Granted I was in a union, so my 2 weeks went to 3 weeks and finally to 6 weeks at 10 years in the position, then stayed at that until I retired.

OH was a faculty member at a university ............... he got 4 weeks vacation after the first year, and it stayed at 4 weeks until he retired.

So vacation time differs depending on your occupation, the employer, and to a certain extent the area of Canada.

dbd33

The reason I know a little about skiing is that, when Canada had a good skier, Steve Podborski, I was married to, and lived with a Swiss. The Swiss star of the time, Pirmin Zurbriggen, had learned to ski because that's how he got to school while the Canadian came from suburban Toronto and learned to ski in resorts. It was pointed out to me repeatedly, indeed endlessly, that Podborski spent more on each trip to ski practice than Zurbriggen had spent on skiing in his lifetime.

Now I have a daughter who is nominally resident in Switzerland who skis whenever she's there. It's not a snob thing, it's just what everyone does in a mountainous terrain. By contrast, the daughter in Vancouver used to ski weekly when she was at university and could go to Whistler at student rates. That came to a shuddering halt when she graduated and couldn't afford the bus fare, never mind the ski pass.

Except for a few people who live in resorts, skiing in Canada is a pastime for the affluent. That's true in the UK as you have to go to Europe to enjoy it but, for most people in the UK, the distance to, say, Zermatt, is shorter than the distance to Banff is for most people in Canada. In Europe, there are discount airlines and even trains whereas, in Canada, there is Air Canada. Skiing is more accessible to most people in the UK than it is to most people in Canada.

Skiing isn't the only outdoor activity in Canada, of course. I think fox hunting is much more accessible here than in the UK. In both countries the cost of entry is high, one must have some horses and a pack of hounds, but in the UK there's a snobbery about it, a need to cultivate the right connections. In Canada, anyone who has the money and an inclination to see prey animals torn apart, is welcome to join in.

Overall, if an outdoor activity is free and mildly athletic, hiking for example, one can pursue it equally well in either country. If the pastime is expensive, yachting, for example, then historically Canada was better because houses were cheap and there was salary left over. That advantage has gone now.

Two other factors make the UK a better place to enjoy the outdoors:

- the weather. Usually in Canada it's too hot or too cold to want to go outside, the UK climate is more moderate.

- rights of way. Extensive in the UK, very limited in Canada. Yes, there's Crown land in BC but, if we compare the situation of someone in Toronto and someone in London, the latter has access to massively more publicly owned open space.

scilly

I hate London

Mind you, I don't think Toronto is much better.

When I said about Canadian skiers, I was talking about Nancy Greene Raine who grew up in Rossland from a young age (actually born in Ottawa), was on the mountains every weekend

Erik Guay, from Montreal, but home club was Mont Tremblant.

and all the other skiers, not to mention boarders, moguls, etc who actually grew up in places like Canmore, Trail, Smithers, even Jasper and Banff and got special passes.

Interesting .......... googling for something else, I came across a list of the 9 most expensive ski resorts in the world ............

• #8. Davos, Switzerland.
• #7. Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.
• #6. Zermatt, Switzerland.
• #5. St. Moritz, Switzerland.
• #4. Aspen, Colorado.
• #3. Kitzbühel, Austria.
• #2. Vail, Colorado.
• #1. Gstaad, Switzerland

Number 9 was Whistler.

Now Kitzbuhel was not at all expensive when I went there many years ago ............... but again, we went out of season!


I think this is an argument that we could have many times over. We agree to disagree.

We spent 40+ years out in the wild, camping mainly, and nothing ever cost us as much as we paid in England.

I agree skiing is expensive, but so it is in all the other countries, in Europe and the US.

But I also believe very strongly that skiing out of high season or mid-week is not expensive in Canada, especially away from the one now run by Vail Resorts.

bats

I'm guessing you aren't in a clinical post in the NHS as you onky have four weeks off but just in case you are you might want to reconsider working here. Seniority, ie whoever has worked there the longest gets first dibs on days off, shift selection, usually promotion too regardless of merit. Its frustrating to say the least. I worked part time/ casual for 9 years. Happy to be retired now. I woukd have hated it if I'd come here earlier expecting a decent career.

dbd33

ok.

Skiing isn't the only outdoor pastime one can pursue in Canada in winter. There is also shoveling the sidewalk, blowing the driveway and pointing a hairdryer at the frozen door locks with a view to gaining ingress/egress. At least if it's snowing there are fewer biting things flying around.