Vietnam War resisters were welcomed as heroes in Canada
And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam… I FEEL LIKE I’M FIXING TO DIE RAG BY COUNTRY JOE & THE FISH, 1967
To Michael Hendricks, Montreal seemed “like the other end of the world” in 1968.
“I knew nothing about Canada,” said Hendricks, 75, a New Jersey native who was among the estimated 25,000 young American men who moved to Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s to avoid serving in Vietnam.
An equal number of young women came north during the same period, many accompanying husbands or boyfriends.
Hendricks, a computer programmer in New York City, had become firmly opposed to the war after seeing news reports on American atrocities on TV.
“I couldn’t see myself pointing a gun at an elderly lady. I’m just not like that,” he said.
Visiting Montreal in the summer of 1968, he was directed to a head shop on Bleury St. called the Purple Unknown for tips on moving to Canada.
That September, he moved north and has never looked back.
While war resisters were treated as cowards in the United States, they were welcomed as heroes in Canada, said Hendricks, who was entranced by Montreal’s European flavour and multicultural mix.
“My first impression was that it was very exotic,” he said.
It was the first step in a lifetime of activism that led to new careers in filmmaking, community organizing and HIV-AIDS advocacy.
Moving to Canada “turned out to be the smartest thing I ever did,” Hendricks said.
“It was just a life-changing experience that I would never have had otherwise. My life would have just gone on like an old horse doing the milk run. Everything got shaken up and I got a new lease on life. I got a chance to do things I could never have done before,” he said.
He came out as a gay man after leaving the U.S. and in 2004 married René Leboeuf in Quebec’s first legal same-sex union.
That positive experience is typical of the life stories of war resisters in Canada, said John Hagan, author of Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada, published in 2001 by Harvard University Press.
“Almost everyone I interviewed said it was the best thing that could have happened to their lives and that was true across both the draft resisters and the military resisters,” said Hagan, who interviewed 100 war resisters in Toronto for the book.
Hagan, 71, a professor of sociology and law at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and professor emeritus at University of Toronto, moved to Canada in 1969 to oppose the war.
He said groups representing Vietnam War resisters no longer use the terms “draft dodger” and “deserter” in order not to emphasize differences between the two groups.
About 80 per cent of the war resisters who came to Canada did so to avoid being drafted, while the remainder deserted from the army, he said.
About half of all Vietnam War resisters eventually returned to the U.S., Hagan said.
However, almost all the military resisters (deserters) remained in Canada, since they were not covered by the pardon issued by then-president Jimmy Carter in 1976, he said.
A history of Canadian immigration by the federal government described the war resisters as “the largest, best educated group this country had ever received.” In 2009, the text was pulled from the website of Citizenship and Immigration Canada amid controversy over Iraq war resisters.
Many, like Hendricks, carried on their activism in other fields.
Among the resisters who have made a mark in Canada were the brilliant singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester, who died in 2014; CBC Toronto radio host Andy Barrie, awarded the Order of Canada in 2012 for his contribution to broadcasting and advocacy for people with Parkinson’s; physician Michael Klein, also a member of the Order of Canada for his pioneering work integrating family medicine and maternity care; and his wife, the feminist, documentary filmmaker and disability rights activist Bonnie Sherr Klein, an officer of the Order of Canada. They are the parents of author and activist Naomi Klein.
“Lots of people came during that period for these reasons and went on to be involved in other social movements,” said Hagan, who noted that his stance on the Vietnam War influenced his academic career as an expert on international war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
“Other people are involved in the environmental movement, the women’s movement and all sorts of social movements,” he added, “and they continued to be involved.”