Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

The OP is coming to Vancouver - so he'd better be able to do this.

Unfair, but reasonably accurate.

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

I couldnt afford to buy a house in Norwich on my Jnr Engineers pay. After I was recruited here I can afford 3/4 acre riverview property with 3 bedroom crap house on it. I admit I may not be typical, but in my area of work there were limited places I could work in the UK, and none paid enough to support a single income parenting ideal.

However many of those considering emigrating may well be better served by looking at their options closer to home. The UK is by no means exclusively a horrible place to live and raise kids.

The bottom line is that happy parents are more likely to raise happy kids I think, and once the "lets move to Canada" genie has been let out of the lamp, its going to be hard to get it back in again.

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

They had the opportunity to move to Canada and later on, Bermuda, and they didn't. It may have benefited me but i was a child and didn't know any different. They, however, were happy where they were. In fact, we were all very happy and my childhood and young adulthood was great because of the interactions of my parents. We had holidays in a tent in our back garden on occasion of which the tent took up pretty much all of the grass. How cool is that.

I still stand by my statement that parents should move for themselves before anything else. That said, i do believe this is actually the case and that parents don't actually see this. For example, parents who are perfectly happy , comfortable, and content with their lives would be far less likely to leave all of that behind and risk moving to another country "for the kids" than parents who are unhappy/discontented/etc.

Of course, if your family are having a horrendous time in the UK then of course it makes sense to leave or look elsewhere within. That doesn't seem the case on this forum. My point is that if you have a family and you have a comfortable life in the UK, it matters not whether you up sticks and move to Canada. Your children will still have opportunities as long as the parents allow it.


Maybe having no children at the moment allows me to see more clearly. Yes parents will put up with many things for their children. Do they have to put up with these things to alleviate all they are worried about? In many cases,in this context, i very much doubt it.

But still, when i do have kids maybe i'll brain fart and retract my opinions on this :D


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Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

Recruited as a Jnr Engineer? Also once you progress in your career, surely your affordability progresses.

A larger property doesn't increase your childs opportunities, other than offering a larger garden to run around in, and more housework to be bribed into doing ;)

I do very much agree with you regarding the happy parents part. And if the parents are happier living in Canada because of their false beliefs, then that's great.


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Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

Well thanks again for all of your comments. If nothing else i've given you lot something to talk about. I'll let you argue amonst yourselves and return when i have a question. Good luck to you all.:)

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

Would that still be the case for a junior engineer today moving from the UK to Canada? I thought house price inflation and currency movements made Canada no longer any cheaper than the UK?

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

Trouble with London is that most parts are rough now as far as crime goes & the housing that even decent wage earners can afford is not of the same standard that they would get for the same price (or cheaper) in most of Canada.

Also the public schools, even in the better areas, are often not much to sing about & the disrespect from many of kids you meet on the streets is dreadful. We scrimped to send ours to private school in London because our local school was so bad (we were not in a rough area by any stretch.) Here I don't feel the need to, the public system is just fine.

I also disagree with the comment earlier about green space. Here in Calgary there is way, way more green space than in any UK city or town. Only those really out in the sticks would get as much as Calgary has to offer.

Also the harsher winter climate does not mean you can't take advantage of those spaces. I think pretty much all communities have ice-rinks outdoors in winter, there are an abundance of hills for kids to toboggan down plus Bowness (& other similar ponds) to skate on (complete with pit fires, piped music & a quaint tea shop.) Not to mention there's COP for the beginner to learn to ski or snowboard before taking to the mountains to hone their skills. Those mountains also offer snowshoe trips or Husky pulled sledge adventures.

Summer brings camping, rafting, hiking, horse riding, lazy day picnics in the many lovely parks or simple BBQ's on the deck.

There is no way I would go back to my London life for all the tea in China. We are not better off here financially, at least not yet anyway as my hubbie's business is still in it's infancy :-) so I'm the main money earner but as far as quality of life goes we're miles & miles better off here.

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

Not way more than in the London Borough of Westminster, I'll bet. And not green eleven months of the year.

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

I am rather out of touch with UK salaries. I suspect it would take something in excess of £40k to fund anything like a comparable life, and that would rather limit my housing options anyway I think.

As a visitor now I find all the security cameras and paranoia about crime rather insidious, so doubt very much I would ever settle there again anyway, so its rather a moor point.

My comments on green space were based on driving around bits of Surrey and Sheffield. Considering the reputation of the Greater London area as a concrete jungle and Sheffields as a post industrial wreck it was a wonder to see the abundance of parks, fields and public footpaths through otherwise private property. Ive been to Calgary in September, It was largely brown with the usual preponderance of North american housing and shopping tracts. While there are green spaces here, outside of the parks its hard to get decent access to them, there is little crown land near the cities, and much of the crown land has restricted access anyway due to lease agreements with logging companies and the like.

I only visited a couple of junior schools on my visit, both "good" ones that parents had moved to particular areas in order to gain admission. It was immediatley obvious to me that they both had very good atmospheres and that the vast majority of kids were happy to be there and looking forward to the day. It was certainly something of an eye opener compared to my kids school here, but I will concede that in part thats likely due to the fact that far more parents walk or drop their kids off at school there, rather than the mass bussing from all over that happens here, so perhaps more of a sense of community? Schools vary by location anyway at the best of time though.

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

Yes, more - there was a recent stat that said Calgary has the most green space per Capita of any major city. Plus the pollution is less than Westminster & the streets are cleaner. Not to mention that Westminster is somewhat out of reach as a place to live for the vast majority of Londoners.

Nope, still not going back to London:rofl:

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

Got a link? I think that's gotta come from some Rah, Rah, Calgary publication as per capita is a peculiar way to measure it. By that standard the city including Fort McMoney, (Wood Buffalo, maybe?) or somewhere in the NWT ought to win; lots of space, few permanent residents.

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

It was in the national media a week or two ago...Calgary Canadas greenest city etc...there was a thread here as I recall.

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

It wasn't on the BBC and google doesn't seem to find it. What's needed, I think, is the proportion by area of parkland in Calgary, something we can compare directly to London boroughs (assuming that is, that "Calgary" means the city itself and doesn't include fields on the edge).

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

The "greenest" title was not a reference to green spaces but to green policies etc. I think you are talking about two different things.

Re: We are thinking about Canada any advice please?
 

having green spaces only within city limits seems to be a biasing of 'survey criteria' to suggest some kind of desirable trait.

point is, Calgary is a city situated within an ocean of brown.

vancouver (for example) by comparison doesn't need to have green space within its city limits, because it is situated within 'national park' like topography.

and so Calgary is welcome to its little squares of grass; i live in Beautiful British Columbia :D