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MONTREAL— Before last year’s election, lots of blue-state Americans said they'd leave for Canada if Bush was re-elected. Then the unthinkable happened. But the word on the street is that few have left. 

I think that’s too bad, speaking as a U.S./Canadian dual citizen. (Binationality isn’t just for Ahnold anymore.) More Americans really should head north—at least for a few days’ visit. Canadians don’t brag as well as Texans, but they do some other things better. Run a country, for example. 

Just after the State of the Union speech, in which Bush and his cohorts formally sharpened their knives to carve up Social Security and progressive taxation, I flew up here for a scheduled trip. In Canada’s centrist national newspaper, I found a column saluting Canada as “one of only three countries (the others are Britain and Australia) whose citizens can have full confidence that their pensions will be available for them.” 

“Canadian business and Canadian workers accepted that their payroll taxes were going to have to go up” in 1998, wrote the Toronto Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson, “and now we enjoy both the security and the competitive advantage of a fully funded pension scheme. ... Good on us.”  

Even better when you consider that Canada’s payroll-tax rates are still a good deal lower than their U.S. counterparts. And they phase out at sharply lower income levels. (Canada’s equivalent of Social Security is actually several programs, some funded out of general tax revenues.) So even if the core Canada Pension Plan turns out not to be fully endowed through the Baby Boomers’ retirement, Canadian officials have plenty of room for relatively painless maneuver. 

While solving fiscal issues that seem insoluble in the U.S., Canada has also dodged U.S.-style circular culture wars. The country is about to legislatively extend marriage rights to gays in the same way that it permanently abolished capital punishment in 1976: with the support (active or tacit) of most national party leaders. Marijuana decriminalization is on a similar track. On global warming, Canada signed the Kyoto accord years ago. 

While U.S. broadcasters self-censor Saving Private Ryan lest the FCC fine them for a stray naughty word buried in the soundtrack, Canadian networks feel no pressure to snip incidental nudity out of prime-time movies. Late at night, lots of over-the-air stations show adult flicks. Public radio unblushingly runs risque spoken-word pieces. When Canada’s answer to CNN rehashes the Janet Jackson controversy from last year’s Super Bowl, it shows the “wardrobe-malfunction” footage again—unaltered and uncut. It’s basically Europe, eh? 

The cover girls on my Air Canada seat-back magazine were three mass-media sex educators. After the in-flight movie, where U.S. carriers would run cheesy network infomercials, we enjoyed Canadian-produced indie animation shorts whose tone ranged from edgy to pleasantly macabre. The weather report included Cuba, a popular vacation spot for snowbound Canadians. 

Mark Twain once wrote that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” And it’s our red-staters who really deserve a trip up north. 

Tens of millions of them fervently believe that government-run health care is unthinkable—despite living just south of a country where free, universal health care works pretty well, thank you. Canada’s national budget has been in surplus every year since 1998. 

Despite its liberal social policies, or because of them, Canada has a lower crime rate than the U.S. And it scores substantially better on most social indicators. 

U.S.-Canadian cultural differences can’t be reduced to simply abstemious versus unrestrained. While the U.S. diligently curbs sexual expression, it runs persistently huge budget deficits and maintains one of the industrial world’s lowest savings rates. The Canadian ethos is to tolerate higher income-tax rates, save up for your retirement, then get jiggy all you want (but please be careful). Who’s more responsible here? 

Canada certainly isn’t paradise, and red-state tourists deserve to see its lows as well as its, um, highs. GOP radicals who salivate about replacing the income tax with a national sales tax should experience first-hand the displeasure of paying Canada’s national “goods and services tax.” Combined with local sales taxes, it imposes a premium of up to 15 percent on everything from fun to funerals. 

Where Canadians dully do right, it’s not because they’re a nation of angels. Nor is there LSD in the water supply. Gay marriage and Kyoto have been—and remain—Canadian controversies. But you’ll find the same basic social tolerance and respect for public enterprise in Minnesota, Vermont, Sweden, or Norway. Cold weather tends to bring people together. 

Another influence on Canadians: If travel kills prejudice, so does migration. Canada’s percentage of residents born abroad is about twice that in the U.S., and Canada seeks out immigrants with advanced degrees. Those well-educated transplants help leaven a more cosmopolitan country. So does a higher urbanization rate. 

Canada is far from a classless society, but you have to look hard to find either the gated palaces or the crumbling slums that define U.S. cities’ extremes. You’ll look even harder to find the rigid segregation, deep despair, alienation, or lethal rage that afflict U.S. or European ethnic ghettos. 

I can’t make a good case for Californians to visit Canada this time of year for the weather. But Quebec City’s festive Winter Carnival certainly shows how to make lemonade from lemons (or at least ice sculptures from frozen water), with a backdrop of postcard-ready 17th-century architecture. 

Montreal is hosting an exhibition of Egyptian antiquities from the renowned British Museum. Ottawa and Vancouver museums have 1960s retrospectives. North of Vancouver, there’s world-class powder skiing at Whistler’s European-style resort. And plenty is always hopping in Toronto. 

So come on, all you would-be blue-state expatriates: Put your blue noses where your mouths are. At least for a few days. By the way, you’ll need about 10 years of Canadian residence to qualify for Canada’s Old Age Security Pension, so don’t put off requesting those threatened immigration papers too much longer. 

Michael Katz lives in Berkeley when he’s not soaking up the winter sun in eastern Canada.