IS CANADA THE AMERICA AMERICANS ARE LOOKING FOR?
Mark Wilkins’ wife thought he was crazy.
It was 2010 and his small businesses in Birmingham, Ala., were floundering. President Barack Obama, whom Wilkins had voted for, was not delivering on his promises and Congress was gridlocked. Disenchanted, Wilkins suggested the family move to Canada.
The country was not unfamiliar. The couple had got engaged in Montreal and Vancouver was in the midst of hosting the Winter Olympics.
The more they looked into it, the more it made sense: health care was better, tuition was cheaper. They started tuning in to CBC Radio, and Blue Jays and Raptors games. In 2013, they sold their house and cars, gave half their belongings to charity and moved the family to Toronto.
Wilkins, now a stay- athome dad to two boys, says they couldn’t be happier.
“I think deep down, Canada is the America all leftleaning Americans are looking for,” he said.
Many families across the U.S. seem to be considering following in their footsteps, especially if they don’t like the results of November’s presidential election.
In a review of more than four million Tweets mentioning Republican contender Donald Trump between Aug. 6 and Sept. 9, digital analytics firm Luminoso found 200,000 posts in which people said they would leave the country if the brash billionaire became president.
Mexico was their top destination, followed by Canada.
The day after George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, the number of people in the U.S. visiting Canada’s immigration website ballooned to 115,016, Reuters reported then, up from the daily average of 20,000.
However, data show the number of permanent residents from the U.S. has not fluctuated much since 2004, hovering around 8,000 or 9,000 a year.
Even if the “I’m moving to Canada” musings are mostly half-baked, they show how Americans are fed up with their country’s increasingly incendiary and unhinged political discourse, experts say.
The level of polarization and distrust in every branch of government hasn’t been this great since, perhaps, the Civil War, says Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M University.
“It’s more difficult to imagine what unites us all as a country,” she said.
Jane Moss, a visiting scholar at Duke University’s Council for North American Studies, wonders if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ascension to power could be spurring some of the talk around kitchen tables.
After all, it would “only be a Liberal who would talk about moving to Canada since a true conservative would not like your national health system and your gun laws,” she said.
Alex Vick is among those exploring the possibility. The 31-year-old paramedic in Atlanta says he fell in love with Canada after a visit to Toronto in January 2015.
For the first time, Vick, who is black, didn’t have to “actively think” about how he would be perceived by strangers. He was also enamoured of the mix of ethnicities and cultures. He followed up with a trip to Ottawa and Montreal last month.
Now, the “surreal” U. S. election campaign — he said Trump has “given people who hid their prejudices before a voice to come out and be who they are” — has invigorated his desire to move. He’s checking to see if his paramedic qualifications can be recognized in Canada.
“The political and social atmosphere has progressively eroded,” said Vick, who hangs a Canadian flag in his living room.
“I love my country. (But) I think there are definitely a lot of good people who get drowned out; it’s almost given to the lowest common denominator.”
Not all American expatriates in Canada are happy, of course.
In a column for the Washington Post after the 2004 election, Nora Jacobson, an American medical sociologist living in Toronto, warned those contemplating a move to Canada, “it’s not all beer and doughnuts.”
What irked her most was Canadians’ smug “antiAmericanism.” In a country that supposedly embraced multiculturalism, hostility toward Americans was “the last socially acceptable expression of bigotry and xenophobia,” she wrote.
But Jim DeLaHunt, who moved to Vancouver from Silicon Valley in 2005, says neither he nor his wife has encountered any anti-American feelings.
“What Jacobson interprets as anti-American sentiment, I interpret as absence of U.S.-is-best rose-coloured glasses,” he said.
DeLaHunt, a software engineering consultant, says they decided to move because they were turned off by the invasion of Iraq and what he described as right-wing fearmongering. He characterized the current U.S. election as a “comedy of tragedies.”
CANADA IS THE AMERICA ALL LEFT-LEANING AMERICANS ARE LOOKING
FOR.