The monarchy is stupid.  I actually have nothing aginst them personally, but the simple fact is that nobody I know up here thinks of Queen Elizabeth as "our" queen.   She's the Queen of England.   It's high time for Canada to become a republic.   I realize that this can't happen while Liz is alive but when she favours us by departing this world, I hope the government of the day will have the good sense to depart in turn from the Windsors.
 

Our debt is too high.  At about 60% of GDP, it's not disastrous but it's about the same as the US debt to GDP ratio and we all know how healthy their debt situation is.  A least we're not increasing our debt as quickly as they are.  This debt we've managed to accumulate is entirely due to the idiotic deficit spending and tax cutting of the conservative Mulroney government two decades ago.  A subsequent decade of Liberal governments with budget surpluses paid off a huge amount of that debt, but our current conservatives are deficit spending like crazy again (as conservatives generally do, while talking tough on spending).  Hopefully they'll be turfed out soon and we'll go back to Liberal governments with balanced budgets and resumed debt paydown.
 

Celine, Avril, Nelly, Shania, Bryan.
 

Free speech isn't adequately protected here.  It's a bit better than Western Europe overall, but not as good as the US.  Stay away from the sacred cows and you're fine, generally, but that's a small comfort to those of us who value freedom of expression.  Kick one of the sacred cows (like Zundel did) and end up in jail.  Watch what you say.  Or better yet, say nothing at all.   Welcome to the new world.
 

Our governments are all lame ducks.   Until a few years ago, minority governments (where no party has more than half the seats and can therefore be voted out by the opposition) were extremely rare in Canada.  We had a few in the 70s.  Trudeau had one, lost a confidence vote to Joe Clark, who almost immediately then lost one back to Trudeau.   Trudeau then won a majority, and we've had majorities since...until a few years ago, that is.   Suddenly the Conservatives and the Reformers joined forces and united the right, and now we can't seem to decide anymore.  We haven't had a majority since Chretien and neither party is showing any signs of winning one in the near future.  We seem doomed to middle of the road, visionless, caretaker leadership for the time being.
 

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (the CRTC) has to be the most obnoxious institution in the country.  Most countries have some regulator trying to make sure that their citizens don't only watch US movies, but ours is stupider than most.  I suppose there's some entertainment value in a regulatory body getting every major decision wrong for a couple of decades, but it's less funny when you live here.  This group has decided that we're all subject to Canadian content laws, forcing us to watch what appears to be the worst television programming in the western world including such shows as Little Mosque on the Prairie.  I'm not making that up.   Thankfully the net lets us easily circumvent these stupid rules.  I solved the problem by throwing away my TV years ago.
 

We seem to be getting a bit fatter each year.
 

Anti nuclear religionists.  This isn't just a point of principle.  How we propose to move to electric vehicles without nuclear power seems to be something nobody has thought through.   This is more a BC problem than a nationwide one, but it exists throughout the country.   There's just no interest in improving our nuclear power generation capacity.  This is a byproduct of the visionless leadership mentioned above.  I suppose the problem will correct itself eventually -- the tree huggers will notice when their electric cars can't get charged at night.