Moving Out 

Moving Out

Ann Althouse has a number of posts about Americans who have threatened to leave the U.S. because of the election. Some say they will go...er...come, to Canada.

(Pierre Salinger moved to France, where Richard Perle summers).

I e-mailed Ann to say I was reminded of a professor at the University of Alberta in the 70s who said he had left the U.S. over the failure of the Eugene McCarthy campaign. Somehow he was less impressive than the draft dodgers, who were more or less our heroes.

The draft dodgers, in fact, remain a significant part of the intellectual life of Canada. That's one reason it often seems that instead of the whole spectrum of U.S. opinion, we have mainly the secular liberal Democratic strand. Of course, there has always been anti-Americanism in Canada, but it used to have a pro-British tone that I think is pretty much gone.

How many draft dodgers and deserters came to Canada? 30,000 or more, and many of them stayed after the amnesty--in contrast, say, to Sweden. What is less well known is that somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Canadians served in the U.S. forces in the Vietnam era--quite a few in Vietnam itself.

(This anti-war piece, written for an encyclopedia, claims 10,000 Canadians served in the U.S. forces, vs. 20,000 draft dodgers and 12,000 deserters.)

There is a complicated relationship between our two countries--a relationship that we Canadians tend to obsess about, but to which Americans generally don't give any thought. Once in my grad school days in Toronto a group of us were having a beer, and discussing one of the U.S. invasions--I think Grenada. One aging Canadian, getting a bit in his cups, listened for a while and then yelled out: "Long live President Reagan [pronouncing it Reegan]."

We all drank to that.

When I was going to Political Science conventions in the U.S., looking for jobs, I bumped into one guy several times who had married a Canadian woman. The last time I met him he and his wife had actually moved to Canada. "I've learned," he said, "that Canadians are anti-American in direct proportion to their degree of higher education."

I think that's about right. If so, there's a "red state" Canada below the surface, less visible than "blue state" Canada. But the reds also have fewer votes, proportionally, than in the U.S.