18 Years in Canada: Would I Do It All Over Again?

A question about immigration, nostalgia, hail the size of pocket change, and the strange feeling of having more than one home.

Jul 10, 2026

Duffey Lake *by Wilko van de Kamp Fine Photo Art*

Someone asked me a few weeks ago whether, after 18 years in Canada, I would do it all over again.

The honest answer: I don’t know. Every major life decision creates a shadow life beside it: the version you did not live. In my case: The version of me who stayed in Europe, and maybe moved somewhere else entirely, but much later in life. The version who made one different phone call, booked one different ticket, said yes instead of no, or no instead of yes.

Those unlived lives are easy to romanticize because they never had to deal with dentist appointments, taxes, bad bosses, or the price of wine.

The Life Not Lived

When I left the Netherlands 18 years ago, I remember seeing a cartoon of a couple about to board a plane. The caption was something along the lines of, “Funny how we’ll romanticize this sh*t country again in a few decades.”

I laughed at it then, but by now it’s become uncomfortably accurate. Nostalgia edits out the reasons you left, softens the things that annoyed you, and adds a silver lining to everyday habits you couldn’t wait to escape. The things that once made you restless become part of a homeland reel on Instagram. Even the rain becomes charming (hello, Vancouver), and the smallness becomes cozy, or better yet, gezellig1.

But nostalgia isn’t entirely wrong. There is a real loss in leaving. There are birthdays, funerals, ordinary Sundays, friendships changing shape, and places that continue without you. There are versions of home you miss not because they were perfect, but because they belonged to a version of you that no longer exists.

I sometimes miss a version of the Netherlands that remained frozen in my mind while the actual country kept moving, renovating, arguing, building, pricing people out, changing governments, changing menus, changing moods. Meanwhile, I changed too. So when I go back, I am not returning as the person who left. I am visiting with 18 years of Canada in my luggage, whether I checked it in or not.

Home Gets Complicated

Whenever I’m back in the Netherlands, I enjoy being home. There is something easy about understanding the small codes of a place without having to think about them. The dry humour, the blunt directness, and even the way people complain about everything. Everyone has an opinion about everything and they’re not afraid to let you know.

And then, after a few days of homey comforts, I start missing Canada.

That is when immigration becomes inconveniently honest. Home is not as simple as a passport, a postal code, or the place where your childhood photos were taken. Home is a feeling, and sometimes that feeling exists between multiple places.

There are days when Canada feels really like home. There are also days when it feels like a country I am still figuring out after nearly two decades. Then I go somewhere else entirely and, within about 36 hours, I start fantasizing about moving there too (hello Santiago, Tulum, Lima, Buenos Aires, …). My brain sees a nice café, a walkable neighbourhood, and a decent view, and immediately starts browsing real estate listings. Very reasonable behaviour.

Maybe that is part of the immigrant condition, or maybe it is just my particular kind of restlessness. Either way, “home” has become less of a final destination and more a recurring question.

Canadian Pride And The Loud Neighbour

The “proudly Canadian” vibe comes out a lot more recently, especially when Canada is being compared to the United States. It’s unfortunate two great countries are pitched against each other in a trade war that doesn’t benefit most people living on either side of the border.

I wish Canadian pride did not need that contrast to become visible. I would like us to be proud of Canada for the sake of Canada, not by comparison “against” the neighbour.

Why does it take outside pressure to make us talk seriously about fixing things inside the country? Why does interprovincial trade suddenly become more of a priority only when our southern neighbour has another tantrum? Canada has enough internal absurdities to keep us busy without needing a third party to remind us to care.

That is not anti-American, by the way. It is more anti-comparison. We can like the quiet, the space, the imperfect healthcare, the landscapes, the relative politeness, and the deeply Canadian habit of measuring hail by coin size without needing to wave a flag in someone’s face.2

The Outsider’s Verdict

I overheard a Dutch tourist on the phone the other day, saying (in Dutch) that Canada is like Australia: just a piece of the world nobody else wants anything to do with.

In true Dutch-opinionated fashion, it sounded like the kind of conclusion a person reaches after spending a lot of money on a two-week vacation to Western Canada and deciding they have now understood this entire country, and Australia. Impressive efficiency.

There may be some truth in it. Canada is geographically inconvenient in many ways. It is huge, spread out, expensive to cross, and often weirdly disconnected from itself. Flying across Canada can feel like you accidentally booked an expensive international itinerary without the benefit of arriving somewhere warm. The country is vast enough to create distance not only between provinces, but between realities.

But the “nobody wants anything to do with it” misses something important. People do want something to do with Canada. Many of us built lives here, from scratch, with no guarantee that any of it would work. Many stayed not because the country was perfect, but because it offered enough room to become more fully ourselves.

Canada is not an easy country to summarize, which is inconvenient for people who like tidy opinions. It is both generous and frustrating, open and bureaucratic, beautiful and expensive, calm and occasionally ridiculous. It offers space, but in that space you can also find loneliness. It offers a neutral kind of peace, but not always peace of mind.

Summarizing these contradictions is probably why I have no real clear cut answer to “Would I do it again?”.

Knowing What You Know Now

“If you knew then what you know now, would you do it all over again?”

The question sounds smart until you realize it is built on an impossible premise. The only reason I know what I know now is because of the choice I made 18 years ago. Hindsight 20/20 says you cannot remove the experience and keep the wisdom.

The younger version of me who left the Netherlands did not have all the information I have now. He had restlessness, ambition, curiosity, probably a little impatience, and a plane ticket. He did not know which parts of Canada would become familiar. He did not know which friendships would last, which ones would fade, which places would matter, which winters would test his sense of humour, or how often he would end up explaining the Dutch concept of gezellig to people who were mostly just being polite.

He also did not know what staying would have cost.

That is the part we forget when we imagine the alternative. We compare the difficulties of the life we lived with the highlights of the life we did not. We imagine the other path as smoother because we never had to walk it. But even the life not lived would have had its own disappointments, compromises, bills, illnesses, missed chances, and weather alerts. Maybe the hail would have been smaller. Maybe not.

I Would Not Trade The Question

Canada changed the shape of my life. It gave me distance from where I came from, which helped me see it more clearly. It gave me room to build, explore, work, travel, run, write, photograph, and become a person I might not have become otherwise. From time to time, it also gave me homesickness, for more places than one.

Belonging is not always a settled feeling. Sometimes it is just a rhythm where you carry pieces of one place into another. You become fluent in more than one kind of normal.

Would I do it all over again? Maybe the better answer is this: I would not want to lose the person I became by doing it once.

That kind of reflection is exactly why I wrote The Freedom Project: Happiness. Freedom often starts with understanding the life you actually built, not the imaginary one that keeps looking better from a safe distance.

After 18 years in Canada, I still don’t have a perfect answer. But I do have a better question: what kind of home am I still looking to create from here?