Chris Ouellet, right, and his partner, Andrew Kennedy, moved to British Columbia in 2020.
Courtesy of Chris Ouellet
Chris Ouellet, 40, and his partner moved from Portland, Oregon, to Victoria, British Columbia, in 2020. In Canada he feels safer and thinks the government looks out for people.Ouellet wanted to leave the US because of his experiences with gun violence and the opioid epidemic.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Ouellet, 40, about his and his partner’s decision to move from the US to Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, Canada. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
It seems like in the US, a lot of people are on edge. They have a lot to be on edge about.
Canada was actually our backup plan when the pandemic started. We had just gotten back from a three-week trip in New Zealand with our family. We took the pandemic as a way to start over, a fresh start. So we were like, let’s move to New Zealand.
A couple of months later after we had given our notices at work, after the house was already in the process of being sold, the New Zealand borders closed because of Covid and we stayed in Portland.
We stayed in Portland for eight months just waiting for the borders to open and they never did. So we said, “We love the Pacific Northwest and Canada is not far up the road.”
Ouellet, right, and Kennedy.
Courtesy of Chris Ouellet
It’s very similar weather, and they have a lot of the things that we were looking for in New Zealand, which was a lower cost of education, socialized healthcare, and politics that weren’t so incredibly polarizing.
With the Trump presidency and how inflammatory it made people towards each other, and the way that the government is not really working for the people, it’s very much our side versus their side. And if you’re not on our side, we don’t like you. It’s become so extremely polarized.
In Canada, I’m seeing things in the news more often about the government trying to proactively make life better for its citizens rather than focusing on the theatrics of the politics of the day.
There were just a lot of things that British Columbia had in common with New Zealand. So British Columbia is actually our backup plan from New Zealand, but it’s been a very good backup.
Surprisingly, the food is a lot different
We definitely miss our friends and family. The first couple of years of the pandemic were not great for growing a social circle.
I will say what I miss from the US is the food. Being on an island, there’s some diversity in food, but coming from Chicago, where you can get any type of food and it is world-class, to a small island, has definitely made us cook a lot more.
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Mitch Diamond/Getty Images
When you go to a grocery store, the produce in the US is picture-perfect, no blemishes. Everything looks like it’s ready for a commercial. Here, the produce is a little rougher looking. It’s fine, it’s perfectly usable. But that was one of the things we noticed when we moved here. We were like, “Oh, the produce is a little dirtier,” like it was freshly taken out of the ground, because some of it is local.
Another thing that we noticed is in the US you’ll have 50 different options for shampoo, deodorant, food stuff. There’s just so many brands for all of the same products and you’re just faced with a wall of options. Here there’s three to five options: You’ve got the no-name, you’ve got a name brand, and an off-brand, and maybe something else, and that’s about it.
We wanted to escape gun violence and the opioid crisis
Years ago, when we were living in Chicago, we were taking public transport everywhere. We did that until we started seeing people flashing guns on the subway, and the train cars turning into a mad rush to get out because people are afraid that someone’s going to get shot.
There was one day where I was in a grocery store and we got locked in the store because there were people shooting at each other in the parking lot. I had to wait an hour for police to tell everybody it was okay to go.
We heard gun pops pretty often, and it was just getting worse and worse. That, with terrible snow, is what made us move to Portland, Oregon.
As far as guns in British Columbia, the regulations for being able to own a gun are extremely tight. Because there are so many safeguards in place to keep people from having guns, there aren’t very many.
When you’re out in public, and you hear a noise, no one runs, no one checks over their shoulder, no one thinks that it could possibly be gun violence. Here, everybody just walks like nothing because it’s fireworks or it’s kids playing with toys or whatever. The gun culture here is extremely different from the US.
Portland’s a beautiful city and I really enjoyed living there, but there’s a pretty bad opioid epidemic going on. There is an opioid problem here, too, in British Columbia — like there is in a lot of places in the world.
In Portland, we would see syringes on the ground in parks, in trash, in the woods — pretty much all over the place. In British Columbia, at least here in Victoria, there are sharps containers everywhere. Every bathroom you go to, every place out in public, out on the streets, there are sharps containers all over the place.
In three years living in Victoria, I’ve seen one syringe.
In British Columbia, it’s not perfect but it seems like they’re trying.