COLUMN: Viewpoint – Five weeks in Morocco

My husband and I are spending five weeks in Morocco. We’re touring around the country with a Canadian company called G Adventures. It invests heavily in Morocco by using only locally-owned hotels and restaurants and local guides. It assists a variety of charities throughout the country. Our group, for example, had lunch at a restaurant run by an organization that provides support to differently abled children as well as shelter and employment to Moroccan women fleeing domestic violence. G Adventures donates money to them and invites their customers to do so too.

As we travel we are learning there are many things Canada and Morocco have in common.

Our populations are similar. Morocco has 39 million residents. Canada has 41 million. French is widely spoken in Morocco just as it is in Canada. In the last few years our country has invested fairly heavily in Morocco in the areas of mining, agriculture and technology. We trade nearly $2 billion in goods annually with Morocco. We send them vehicles, airplane parts, food grains, and machinery and they send us fruit, nuts, fertilizer and chemicals. They also send us people. Some 100,000 Moroccans live in Canada.

Morocco has the same kind of varied geography that Canada does. In our country you can be skiing in the Rocky Mountains one day and hiking in the Okanogan Desert the next. Here in Morocco we were high up in the Atlas Mountains having a snowball fight one day and the next riding camels across the Sahara Desert.

The gap between the rich and poor is ever widening in Canada. I witness it in my Winnipeg neighbourhood which has a huge number of homeless folks camped along a riverbank lined with some of the most expensive condos in the city. Here in Morocco we see that same kind of disparity. We visited one of the king’s magnificent palaces. He has 13 such royal residences throughout the country. It is estimated the one in Rabat alone, cost $1.5 billion to build. Although Morocco has greatly reduced its poverty rate in the last decade, driving through the countryside, one sees the extremely harsh and impoverished conditions in which many rural, nomadic people continue to live.

In Canada, we have been experiencing wildfires and floods as a result of climate change. Here in Morocco they have just come through seven years of drought that severely impacted the agricultural economy. Thankfully in January of 2026 record rainfalls turned the landscape green. Even communities that flooded were grateful for the moisture.

Morocco was a French colony till 1956. Until just recently children’s school lessons were in Arabic, while French was taught as a second language. Now however, the traditional Tifinagh language of the Indigenous Amazigh people is being reintroduced in many Moroccan schools, just the way Indigenous languages like Cree, Ojibwe, Inuktitut and Dene are being offered in a growing number of Canadian schools.

Traveling helps you put things in perspective. We are learning so much about what we have in common with the people of Morocco. We are also gaining new insights from the other folks in our touring group which has travelers originally from India, Taiwan, Jamaica, the United States, Australia, Russia and Tahiti. As we share stories about the public health care and education systems in all of our countries, Canada is definitely the envy of everyone else, when it comes to the personal cost and the comparable quality of those services.

Traveling is a great way to learn about other countries and people, but also a way to learn to appreciate your own country.