The Definitive Ranking of Canadian Provinces, by Freedom

Canada is a truly great country. It has nice scenery and reasonably good health care as long as you have no psychiatric problems or toothaches and you never need to buy medicine. We all love it here and everyone is our friend.

But it's also got its share of problems. Notably, most of its provinces are socialist hellholes that want to tax you to death and then make it impossible to have any fun with liquor or strippers. You can't even arbitrarily buy an unlimited amount of unlicensed assault weapons to prepare for your private war against the United Nations world government (sponsored by George Soros) and its sinister Agenda 21 population control/white genocide program. And to top it all off, soon Ontario is going to make it really stupid to buy legalized weed. What a country!

Of course, not every provincial government hates your freedom. To help you navigate our country's patchwork of freedom-hating fiefdoms, here is a very exhaustive and thoroughly-researched ranking of the provinces from Nanny State to Drunk Uncle Who Leaves Pornography Lying Around State.

Unlike the rest of the country where regulations are cobbled together haphazardly by the interaction of well-meaning incompetence and the demands of loud or wealthy lobbyists, the premier of Ontario wakes up every day looking for new ways to fuck up your life. This is not contained to any single person or political party; it is a spiritual disease centred in Queen's Park. What's better than a government monopoly on alcohol? A government monopoly on alcohol where the only alternative is a foreign-owned brewery monopoly on beer where it is still impossible to buy booze after 10 PM. This is a province that has Toronto—the city where food trucks are basically illegal anywhere people might want to be and having a beer (or swearing) in the park with your picnic is punishable by death.* And now they are forcing gullible millennials to eat goth food.

It's illegal to have fun in Ontario, basically. Thanks Kathleen.

You could argue that Quebec's high taxes are justified by the province's expansive social services like its comparatively low tuition rates and affordable daycare programs, and that these sorts of programs actually enhance individual freedom for the poor by removing some of the economic burdens which might otherwise constrain their daily lives. You would be wrong, because the only freedom that counts is measured by the tax burden. But the province outranks Ontario because the culture is far less puritanical and buying wine is not a goddamn nightmare. Just, uh, don't be visibly religious.

FACT: strip clubs are basically illegal in Saskatchewan, and where there are no dimly lit bars full of sad men who would prefer to take in the frankly quaint sight of a naked young woman dancing instead of staying home to indulge in the internet's infinite buffet of weird, twisted, and graphic pornography, well, there is no real freedom at all.

It's free to drive over the Confederation Bridge to get to PEI, but they will make you pay to leave. Why we allow the potato capital of Canada to hold people hostage is beyond me.

BC has a reputation as being a pretty chill place what with the shadow marijuana economy and the surfeit of hippies in the Gulf Islands. But you can't pack that much granola on unceded Indigenous land along the Alberta border and not end up with high taxes and a puritanical hangover.

But with the election of a new NDP government, all those hard-won liberties are about to be ground into the dust. Before you plummet to the bottom of this list, let's lament for all the good times.

Canada's youngest province occupies a very special place in the exact middle of the list. On the one hand, the provincial government loves taxes. It'll tax everything. It costs money to live here and it even costs money to die here. But on the other hand, even with all the taxes, the province is too broke to fund anything, like roads or hospitals, so in that sense we're radically free from the suffocating bosom of the welfare state. While there are definite downsides to a political system that somehow captures the worst of both late Soviet gerontocracy and Mad Max-style libertarianism, you can also pick up your beer and smokes in the same establishment—the absolute height of civilization and sophistication.

I'm going to be honest, pretty much everything between 7 and, like, 2 are basically interchangeable. This is really all just a lot of padding to dunk on Ontario. I feel comfortable revealing this in the entry on Manitoba because, really, who cares. Sorry to all the Manitobans reading this in search of recognition and acknowledgement from beyond your borders. You will get none here, but at least you are free from the tyranny of expectations and criticism from the outside world.

Everyday life in Nova Scotia, Canada's Ocean Playground, according to this documentary.

You are always free to be your full freaky bilingual self in Canada's most neglected province, and that's gotta count for a lot.

Alberta is Canada's only redeeming feature. It is this country's shining city on a hill. It has far and away the lowest taxes of any province and liquor is doled out liberally on almost every street corner by the gentle hand of the free(ish) market. Alberta has suffered after two years under the NDP yoke—farm workers, tragically, now have worker's comp—but they still don't have a sales tax. Best of all, strip clubs abound, and they are just as erotically horrifying as anything you will find online. We do not deserve Alberta and we need to cherish what we have. God bless the Wild Rose Country, and God help the rest of us.

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*or a $65 fine.