National Post (National Edition)
How Vietnam draft dodgers became a memorable part of Canadian history.
HOW VIETNAM WAR DRAFT DODGERS BECAME A LIVELY PART OF CANADIAN HISTORY
During the 1960s, my aunt from New York said she was annoyed with the easy way Canada accepted young American immigrants who were dodging the draft and avoiding service in Vietnam.
She was 100 per cent American, always ready to see anything American as superior to anything Canadian — food, clothes, politics, whatever. When Marshall McLuhan of the University of Toronto became an international thinker of high standing, she hated seeing him mentioned in New York week after week. He was so damned Canadian! When I was invited to his daughter’s wedding, my aunt didn’t know whether to be mad at him or me.
She considered Vietnam an ugly, tragic war, yet it bothered her that thousands of young men from America were being welcomed into Canada. I asked her why she felt that way. What else should Canada have done except allow them entry? She couldn’t explain why, she just didn’t like it.
It occurred to me that she resented the attitude of Canadians who were happily helping the dodgers. The harder the Americans fought in Vietnam, the more Canadians welcomed the resisters. Newspapers and the CBC made draft dodgers a favourite subject.
Canadians, for the moment at least, held the moral upper hand over Americans. Smugness became a national characteristic. There were a few Canadians who disliked the draft dodgers in private but I can’t remember a single one who expressed that view in public. So far as you could tell from the coverage, the American dodgers and their Canadian supporters agreed on the immoral character of the war and the moral necessity of dodging it.
All this and much else came flowing back to me in a great wave of nostalgia when a famous book of 1968, the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, appeared in a new edition last week. It was a great success when it first appeared, selling something like 100,000 copies, a rare event for any book in Canada. There were several editions and many copies sold in the U.S.
It was funded by the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and written by Mark Satin with contributions from a squad of Canadian academics and activists. The publisher was the House of Anansi, then just beginning its life, now a force in Canadian literature.
Satin was a dodger himself who became an immigrant and then helped others to do the same. In this latest edition of the Manual, Satin tells us the Canadians and Americans were not always in agreement. Satin’s board, his employers during the writing of the Manual, considered him (he remembers) arrogant, irresponsible and a candidate for firing. Satin considered his overseers the personification of Canadian timidity, stodginess and “the refusal to dream big dreams.” It was not, in other words, a superb example of international co-operation.
The Manual tells possible immigrants how to negotiate with the government, how much rent they should pay and how much they should spend on food in the supermarkets. It also offers a scattering of facts ranging from what novelists to read in learning about Canada (Morley Callaghan, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence) to the rules you must follow to take your parrot across the border. It brings the immigrant up to date on crucial national events (“the most exciting thing happening in Canada has been ‘the Quiet Revolution’ in Quebec over the last ten years”) and the status of the Communist Party (“legal in Canada, but doddering”). There are a few depressing sections: “The Canadian Immigration Act prohibits immigration by prostitutes, homosexuals, mentally defective individuals .... ”
Most of the dodgers stayed after the war and after they were pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. They turned out to be, as Ottawa’s Citizenship and Immigration website declared, “the largest, best-educated group this country ever received.” The spectacular case was the Bob and Jane Jacobs family of New York. They moved to Toronto because they had two draft-age sons. Bob became a distinguished architect in Toronto. Jane became a worldfamous author on cities and the acknowledged leader of the civic reform movement.
Satin himself chose to return to America, where he wrote New Age Politics, a 1978 book about creating a “third force” in politics, focused on global responsibility. He helped found an organization, the New World Alliance and published an international political newsletter, New Options.
For while, at least in Toronto, the dodgers were an identifiable group and one of the most interesting in the city. They clustered on and around Baldwin Street but slowly assimilated into the city. Soon we could not remember who was a dodger and who wasn’t. Their coming became a lively and memorable part of Canadian history.