Universal Health Care and Scandinavian Countries

Scandinavian countries: You don t make Scandinavian countries seem like places we would want to move to, even Canadians who brave cold weather and have universal health care and high taxes. Despite the quality education, the equality between the sexes, the high marks from the there is a great deal of conformity and an inability to integrate immigrants, according to Toronto Star. My book was not meant to say, Come and live here, it perfect, or Don t come and live here, it awful. It was to paint a nuanced picture about life in Scandinavian countries. I don t think most Westerners understand or know about life there. I live in Denmark of my own free will; I really like it and as the years go by and I get older I feel more and more comfortable living here. Maybe it doesn t suit others: the conformity, the striving for the middle ground and British journalist Michael Booth moved to Denmark 10 years ago. And while researching his latest book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, he learned the region isn t just about film star Greta Garbo, Lego, pop star Bjork and Marimekko designs. Booth discovered the eccentricities of life in Scandinavian countries he includes Finland and Iceland beyond what we re familiar with: the Danes who smoke and drink to excess, love their plates of pickled herring and will sing at the drop of a hat; Icelanders who still believe in fairies; Finnish women who expect men to do the housework; and Swedes who really do prize their saunas. Our conversation has been edited for length. Yes, there have been problems with integration. All of Europe is having problems integrating non-Western immigrants right now. I don t think anyone has the perfect recipe. The Danes are probably doing a better job than the others, for all the controversy over the Mohammed cartoons. It a few steps further down the path than Norway, Sweden and Finland and there are radically different levels of immigration. Sweden has the highest number of immigrants, Finland the lowest. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.