One of the reasons that Canadians have a bad attitude about the U.S. is becasue of Detroit. That city is the first impression many Canadians have of the U.S. and is used as an example of why the U.S. is such a 'bad' place. The reasoning is that if the U.S. is so prosperous, they how can the U.S. allow such horrible conditions in their own country? They actually believe that Detroit is representative of America in general. Then again, Detroit is the most liberal city. Any coincidence that it is on the Canadian border?
I think relatively speaking, American cities going down the socialist paths seem to be on a faster track to ruin than other Western countries. One of the reasons is due to policy differences between city and outlying suburban townships due to the nature of local self-government in America. When you raise taxes, businesses automatically relocate to suburbs.
But in Canada, there is much less local self-government: basically most policies of significance are decided at the provincial or even federal (national) level. City councils largely function as maintaining local roads and clearing rubbish and even on these policies there are all sorts of "councils cocrdination efforts" by the provincial and/or national/federal government making all cities living under more or less the same degrees of socialism. What's the point of escaping the Toronto socialism when the suburbs or Ottawa have very similar politics?
Things are a lot more different in terms of council policies between Detroit proper and Novi in the suburbs than between Toronto and Whitby (an outlying suburb in the GTA), and of course there is basically no difference between Auckland City and Rodney District. In other words, US cities employing socialism is like driving a car at 100 mph with 2 wheels just fallen off, while non-US Western cities employing socialism is like driving a car at the same speed with one tyre slowly leaking. Things may seem to be better for the non-US cities under socialism in the short term, but at the end the result is still the same: wreck.