There’s this thing where a British (or comparable) person is complaining about the weather.

“Bruv, it’s minus two bleedin’ degrees, ‘innit?” they’d say.

At this point, the Canadian would jump in.

“That’s nothing, dude. It’s minus thirty degrees here, eh?”.

Let me sort this out. As someone who’s recently been to both countries, I can say with absolutely certainty (in the social-scientific sense) that -3 degrees in London is just as cold as -30 degrees in Ottawa.

There’s some psychological factor in play — and since every ‘maladise’ in Psychology has a name, let me lay stake to this one and call it the Trinhian Cold-Factor (notice the odd placement of the ‘h’), or the TC-Factor. The TC-Factor says that the dominant contributor to one’s actual feelings of numbness primarily derives from one’s expectation of potential numbness.

So for example, when I’m in Canada during the winter, I’m expecting to have to deal with -20 degrees weather. Thus, anything lower is felt as cold. Anything higher is warm.

Immediately, I jump on a plane to Britain. I arrive expecting 10 degree weather, and instead I’m confronted with -3 degree weather. Hence I am now cold. It doesn’t actually matter what the temperature is.

This of course, like all Psychological studies, has been backed up with real, honest-to-God statistics and unbiased sampling (i.e. me).

Thus, it has nothing to do with Canadians being tougher than the rest of the world. We need to stop acting like we’re tougher. We’re not.

What we are, however, is a morosely pessimistic country.

Because the worst we expect, the better we feel.

That’s why so many people are unwilling to move to Canada, see? It’s not they they can’t handle it physically. It’s that they simply cannot imagine being in a circumstance for which they have to wake up each and every day, and then look forward to that fantastic feeling of stepping outside in the morning, only to have their snot suddenly and seemingly inexplicably crystallize in their nose.