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   Tim Smyth (@Tpsmyth01) · November 10, 2021 - 11:09 am ·

   I don’t know if this is an answer to this problem but something I have noticed(which ironically the Florida Squeeze is an outlier to) is Americans in my opinion don’t actually have a lot pride in there institutions or infrastructure at the moment. Just to compare to another English speaking country our neighbor to the North, Canada there seems to be a lot more national pride and also provincial pride in Canada’s largest provinces like Ontario, Alberta, and Quebec. It is quite common for mainstream media figures like Steve Paikin of TV Ontario to write and comment extensively on all of the achievements of past leaders of Ontario like John Robarts and Bill Davis still have on the average Ontarian/Canadian to this day whereas in the US this is left to be more smaller media figures(I hope no offense is taken)like Kartik and Robert Buccaletto.

   Now to be fair to more cynical Americans and trying to not knock past Florida leaders like Collins and Askew the stuff the two aforementioned Ontario leaders Robarts and Davis(along with Robarts predecessor Leslie Frost in the 1950s) did in the mid to late 20th century is basically out of this world. Two massive hydroelectric power stations at Niagara Falls and the St Lawrence Seaway, three massive nuclear power stations(each larger than the largest US nuclear power plant one of which Bruce is the largest in the world with 8 reactors), the Toronto Subway system, the GO Commuter Rail service in Toronto, six or seven new public universities, massive expansion of the K12 school system, big expansion of the provincial park system, and on and on. Additionally most of the underlying technology for the nuclear power stations in Ontario was homegrown in Canada(i.e. the CANDU reactor and NOT licensed from the US as most other Western countries did)

   Why does this matter. Well, I do think all of these past achievements do have a way of bringing together blue and white collar workers. Just maintaining and refurbishing the power stations I mentioned entails thousands of highly skilled blue collar workers for example but yet for white collar environmentalists because of nuclear and hydroelectric power Ontario has one of the cleanest power grids in the world.

   https://app.electricitymap.org/map

   Anyways if you follow me on Twitter I am fairly active in these types of discussions. Some interesting videos if you want to get a sense of what I am talking about is this one below of a woman who does YouTube walking tours of different sights on Ontario going over the Sir Adam Beck Hydro Station in Niagara Falls and explaining how her grandfather an immigrant from Poland in the early 1950s was one of the construction workers.

   And these two not very good quality videos of the once or twice a year TD Bank(Canada’s second largest) gives public tours of historic parts of there headquarters built in Canada’s centennial year of 1967. Can anyone imagine regular people having any type of national pride in the major “Wall Street” banks to want to go on a tour?

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