Canada is a good country. That is worth stating plainly before anything else, because most writing about living abroad starts from the opposite premise, that the place you are leaving has somehow failed you. Millions of people spend years and fortunes trying to move here. Anyone fortunate enough to already hold a Canadian passport should begin any conversation about leaving from a position of gratitude rather than grievance.

So this is not an argument that you should go. It is an argument that you might have more choices than you have been treating as available.

The interesting question is not whether Canada is a good country. It obviously is. The more interesting question is whether one country has to supply every chapter of a life. The default Canadian script runs in a straight line: grow up, build a career, buy a house, raise children, retire, and perhaps escape the worst of a few winters somewhere warm near the end. That script is not wrong. It has just quietly been treated as the only one.