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US Results Could Spur A
Canadian Brain Gain

By Scott Piatkowski
rabble.ca
11-5-4
 
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.
 
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.
 
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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