- In the months leading up to the American Presidential
election, I had a number of progressive-minded Americans say to me "If
Bush wins, I'm moving to Canada." They weren't being flippant and
they certainly weren't alone. In fact, Googling the terms "Bush"
+ "I'm moving to Canada" generates an incredible 5,580
hits.
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- It's not the first time that left-leaning Americans have
looked north for a refuge from their country's political climate (the one
type of climate in which Canada enjoys an advantage over the United
States).
During the Vietnam War, for example, thousands of draft-age Americans whose
dads could not get them into the Texas Air National Guard fled to Canada.
Others have had different, less political reasons (such as work, love,
or a sense of adventure) for moving here. All told, there are over one
million American citizens currently living in Canada.
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- Now, with the U.S. stuck in another quagmire in Iraq,
same sex unions being constitutionally banned in a growing number of states
and the Patriot Act criminalizing many forms of peaceful political dissent,
Canada must be looking very attractive to progressives in the United
States.
We could be faced with another "brain gain." The possibility
is being taken seriously enough that Immigration Minister Judy Sgro was
compelled to respond to numerous inquiries about immigration on the day
after Americans voted. Sgro told Reuters "Let me tell you - if they're
hard-working honest people, there's a process, and let them apply. No
[there
will be no special treatment], they'll join the crowd like all the other
people who want to come to Canada."
-
- According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle,
countries such as New Zealand and Australia were also reporting a surge
in immigration-related inquiries on the day after the election. The article
quotes an official at the Canadian embassy in Washington who confirms that
"Yes, we've heard from Americans distraught with the election results.
We do hear regularly from people distressed by the direction of the
country."
It's worth noting that 83 per cent of San Francisco voters chose John
Kerry,
so the newspaper was clearly filling a significant potential need by
publishing
the article.
-
- Canada's This Magazine has even had a little fun with
the exasperation felt by many American progressives - who can't figure
out how so many of their fellow Americans could have voted for Bush. They
set up a website called Marry an American, looking for Canadians willing
to help "single, sexy American liberals ó already a threatened
species." This would be achieved by offering to give up their
"singlehood
to save our southern neighbors from four more years of cowboy
conservatism."
The satirical site's motto is "No good American will be left
behind!"
-
- Still, I'm actually hoping that most of them stick around
to continue the fight against Bush's policies. If everyone who disagreed
with Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War had fled the country in 1972 (when
Nixon won a crushing majority), they wouldn't have been around to witness
his resignation and the subsequent defeat of his successor Gerald
Ford.
-
- The website Common Dreams has published a list of Ten
Reasons Not to Move to Canada. Among them:
-
- The Rest of the World. After the February 2003 antiwar
protests, the New York Times described the global peace movement as the
world's second superpower. Their actions didn't prevent the war, but
protesters
in nine countries have succeeded in pressuring their governments to pull
their troops from Iraq and/or withdraw from the so-called coalition of
the willing. Antiwar Americans owe it to the majority of the people on
this planet who agree with them to stay and do what they can to end the
suffering in Iraq and prevent future pre-emptive wars.
-
- People Power Can Trump Presidential Power. The strength
of social movements can be more important than whoever is in the White
House. Example: In 1970, President Nixon supported the Occupational Safety
and Health Act, widely considered the most important pro-worker legislation
of the last 50 years. It didn't happen because Nixon loved labour unions,
but because union power was strong. Stay and help build the peace, economic
justice, environmental and other social movements that can make
change.
-
- Like Nicaraguans in the 1980s, Iraqis Need U.S. Allies.
After Ronald Reagan was re-elected in 1984, progressives resisted the urge
to flee northwards and instead stayed to fight the U.S. government's secret
war of arming the contras in Nicaragua and supporting human rights
atrocities
throughout Central America. Iraq is a different scenario, but we can still
learn from the U.S.-Central America solidarity work that exposed illegal
U.S. activities and their brutal consequences and ultimately prevailed
by forcing a change in policy.
-
- Americans are Not All Yahoos. Although I wouldn't attempt
to convince a Frenchman of it right now, many surveys indicate that
Americans
are more internationalist than the election results suggest. In a September
poll by the University of Maryland, majorities of Bush supporters expressed
support for multilateral approaches to security, including the United
States
being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (68 per cent), the
International
Criminal Court (75 per cent), the treaty banning land mines (66 per cent),
and the Kyoto Treaty on climate change (54 per cent). The problem is that
most of these Bush supporters weren't aware that Bush opposed these
positions.
Stay and help turn progressive instincts into political power.
-
- Let's be brutally frank: there are so many reasons that
Bush's agenda needs to be opposed that it would take an encyclopedia to
list them all.
-
- Polls show that Canadians were overwhelmingly opposed
to Bush's re-election, even among Conservative Party supporters. There
is much that we can do to assist those Americans who decide to stick around
and fight. We can push our own government to say no to Bush's Missile
Defence
Program. We can insist that Ottawa say no to any renewed request for
Canadian
involvement in Iraq. And, we can continue to set a strong example by
maintaining
a strong public health care system and pursuing progressive social policies
such as legalizing same-sex marriage, keeping abortion accessible and
decriminalizing
marijuana possession.
-
- If some Americans decide that they want to join us in
our struggle here in Canada, they should be more than welcome to apply.
But, it would be better if we fought the good fight in Canada while they
continued to hold out for a better America.
-
- - Scott Piatkowski is a Kitchener-based freelance writer.
- Copyright © 2001-2004 the authors
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- http://www.rabble.ca/news_full_story.shtml
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