alt Hacker NewsI hate to see this, but you’re comparing two completely different systems. Like it or not, but Canada is much more “socialist”, you can’t expect it in any case to be like US or viceversa.
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Canada is "much more socialist" in that it has socialized medical insurance. Aside from that, it's maybe a tiny bit more socialist, though one could argue it's not more socialist at all.
The systems are different, but saying they are completely different is really a stretch. There's a GST that the US doesn't have, which is, ironically, a regressive tax. If you ranked the tax code of countries by similarity to the US tax code, I'm not sure Canada would be at the top of the list, but it wouldn't be that far down.
I suppose it takes living in both countries to really just whether Canada is “much” more socialist. The US has a lot of socialism in the form of generous disability income replacement programs, Medicare and Medicaid, SNAP, and the like. Canadian provinces must implement a single payor medical insurance program within certain parameters, but dentistry - bar a very new and very small federal program - is fully private. And pharmaceutical pricing is largely free market.
When you zoom in on some of the Big Beautiful Bill’s new programs, they appear more “socialist” than anything Canadians have ever enjoyed.
Canada is much more socialist, in your take, so it has more programs for corporations and private enterprise? Huh? This is nonsensical.
Further, it's incredibly difficult to quantify countries on this purported socialism scale. Sure, Canada has universal healthcare like every single developed country but the US, but otherwise it's much more of a mixed bag. The US has always been vastly more "socialist" than its advocates think -- the military is a colossal make work project and is straight out of Soviet doctrine for central planning -- and of course the entire agricultural industry exists under a massive subsidization regime, but under the current administration....whoa.... There is no Western country that has a central planned economy, with a president that is taking direct control of corporations (US Steel) and demanding ownership of corporations (TikTok), while enlisting private executives as members of the military exactly like China (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/25/meta-exec...), all while saying the entire economy is a "store" that he has sole control over. Absolutely no one in the US, looking very Stalinesque ala the late 1930s, should be throwing stones about socialism.
I saw a chart that added the market value of government support to income for US persons, and it used the term "household resources." I'd like to see a table of household resource distributions for Canada and the US.