Biggest difference between Canada and the USA

[CCIP]

Having lived in Ottawa for a number of years, nothing stood out to me more than the difference between our Houses of Parliament and the US embassy which is just a couple of blocks away. The Parliament houses our entire government, and yet you can wander the lawn and the grounds however you want. All you see is a few RCMP cars here and there, but security presence is pretty light. You can usually go into the parliament itself for free by grabbing a ticket about an hour in advance, and the metal detector protocols there are way looser than the average airport. There are brightly-coloured shuttle buses for our parliamentarians, but often they walk around. Me and my dad bumped into the late Jack Layton, one of the federal party leaders, and chatted a couple of times on the street corner.



Meanwhile, the US embassy looks like some kind of creepy space-age weapons facility, with opaque windows, towers that look like they house some kind of secret laser weapons, a triple security barrier, and half the lanes on both streets on either side of it blocked off. There's no way anyone can even get near that building. It's an embassy that literally has several orders more security than both of our houses of government!



I was very relieved when after last year's attack on the parliament, the security protocols remain the same as before and when I visited this summer, I happily wandered the grounds on Parliament in Ottawa with crowds of people. The US embassy? Remains a creepy and ridiculous eyesore.

(To be fair, I did visit DC several times as well and although security is way tighter there, it at least didn't strike me as being completely in my face).