- Dual citizen Michael Stiege was raised in Canada but spent many years working in the US.
- The darkness and cold climate of Canada pushed him to sunny California.
- For Americans thinking they can simply move up north, it’s not that easy, he said.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Michael Stiege, 75, a dual citizen of the US and Canada. Stiege was raised in Canada and spent roughly 30 years working in California before moving back to Canada 15 years ago. He soon plans to split his time between the US and Canada. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Because I’m a dual citizen of America and Canada, traveling between the two countries is virtually a non-issue.
If you’re an American coming to Canada, you can travel visa-free. Still, if you’re planning to move here and be able to work here, that’s another story.
You can visit for six months as long as you leave before the end of the six-month period. You can do that back and forth all the time — but you won’t get access to the social system and healthcare.
My friends, who used to live in Chicago, moved to California and said, “We’re going to move up to Canada when we retire,” but they couldn’t get a visa.
This fellow’s a Ph.D. and a really smart technical guy — and his wife is pretty bright, too. They couldn’t get a visa because they were simply too old. Once you’re — let’s say 50 — the immigration system disadvantages you. They have a merit-based point system and start worrying about things like age. That’s the thinking. Once you reach a certain age, or if you don’t have certain other legs up, the criteria by which you can get a working visa is stacked against you.
[In Canada’s Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) — which rates potential immigrants based on age, language fluency, education, professional expertise, and if you have a Canadian partner — applicants 45 years old or older receive 0 points.]
Whereas if you’re a young guy just out of college, you have some reasonable skills, and you even know a few words of French, you probably wouldn’t have a problem.
There are ways around it, but if the expectation is, “I’m just going to go up there and apply for a visa and get a visa,” it may not happen like that.
I needed a change from the cold and long nights in Canada
I was born in Stuttgart, Germany. When my parents and I moved to Canada, I was about 3 and written into my parents’ passports.
They got their visas and eventually became naturalized Canadians, which was bestowed on me. So, for all practical purposes, I’m a Canadian.
I grew up in Toronto, went to school in Toronto, and it wasn’t until the early side of my career that I moved out into western Canada to Calgary and British Columbia.
I have an engineering degree and an MBA — which, at that time, was a pretty good combination to earn a job and make a living. I looked at the available jobs in the market and thought, “Go to Silicon Valley, where your skills will be valued the most.”
I applied to a couple of things and got a call one day. It said, “Are you interested in coming down?” I said yeah, and there I was.
I needed warmer weather, and I was able to get rid of Canada’s long winter nights. The summers in Canada were great — you could golf at 11 p.m. — but the winters were awful.
Seasonal affective disorder really got to me. It’s not so much the cold as the long winter nights. It’s dark. My wife says I had started hibernating, so I wanted to leave that behind.
I rented in the US and bought a home in Canada
When I moved to the US, I found that if I pushed myself, I could’ve bought a house, but I kept holding off. I found it easy to rent — it was affordable. I could get by without any problem. What I didn’t put into a mortgage, I put into stocks and stuff like that.
I lived there for almost 30 years in two or three residences. I paid about $3,200 monthly in Los Altos Hills, California, right by Stanford University.
I came close to buying a couple of times, but the property tax burden in California is significantly higher than what you would find in Canada.
If you buy a house in California for $3 million, you’re looking at $40,000 yearly in property taxes. [Zillow estimates a $3 million home in Santa Clara County would cost $36,300 annually in property taxes.] I could go on a trip for six months on that.
If I did the same thing in Toronto, I might spend between $6,000 and $8,000 — and that’s a big difference. [According to the city of Toronto, a $3 million home costs $21,459 in city, education, and building fund taxes.]
I moved back to Canada about 15 years ago. My father was 96 then, and I said, “Let’s go back.” My wife is Canadian, and we have family up here. We settled in and bought our house.
We have a summer home up north in the lake country. It’s not bad, but it gets cold in the winter.
If I ever move back to the US, my preference is California.
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