Intent For A Nation: What is Canada For. Michael Byers
as she ushered me towards the secondary-screening room.
“Yes,” I replied. “I don’t want to lie to you. I no longer live in the United States.”
Under U.S. law, permanent residents lose that status if they leave the country for more than one year. Yet many green-card holders flout this law, returning to the United States periodically to “keep their options open.” Many maintain U.S. addresses, sometimes with family or friends but often with commercial providers, to sustain the fiction that they reside in the United States. Some companies even rent street addresses, as opposed to box numbers, and will automatically ship mail onward to a designated foreign address.
Absentee green-card holders in the past often used their driver’s licences to cross the border, or they relied on new passports that were free of stamps that might alert an attentive immigration officer to their dubious status. If asked, they denied having a connection with the United States.
Such ploys are becoming riskier as the computer systems of different U.S. government departments, and different national governments, are linked together as part of the post-9/11 drive to improve security. At particular risk are green-card holders who have failed to file U.S. tax returns, as all those with permanent resident status are required to do.
As of January 2007, anyone entering the United States by air or sea has been required to have a passport. From June 2009, the same requirement will apply to all those who enter at land crossings. The Canadian government has lobbied against this move because of concerns that it will deter millions of Americans—less than one-quarter of whom currently have passports—from visiting Canada. The cruise ship and conference industries are particularly vulnerable, along with the 2010 Winter Olympics to be held in Vancouver. The new requirement will also make it more difficult for green-card holders living in Canada, and Canadians living illegally in the United States, to move freely between the two countries.
At the secondary screening, I was greeted by an immigration officer whose name tag, features and accent suggested Vietnamese origins.
“Which form should I use?” he asked his supervisor. The supervisor, a stout man with a Midwestern accent, gave a world-weary sigh: “Voluntaries get the short form.”
It took forty-five minutes to complete the short form. It was an entirely businesslike procedure: no small talk, no smiles. At one point, I commented on the complexity of the process. The immigration officer replied, “Well, this is a big deal. It’s like getting married.”
More like getting divorced, I thought.
My wife and I had moved to North Carolina in 1999. The stock market was booming, most Americans felt prosperous and secure and Bill Clinton—despite Whitewater and Lewinsky—was still capably in charge. It seemed obvious that one of two smart, experienced, open-minded internationalists, Al Gore or John McCain, would follow in January 2001.
But then we were amused, perplexed and finally appalled at the dirty tricks deployed in the 2000 election campaign, first to defeat McCain and then to steal victory from Gore. And we felt nothing but horror as the Twin Towers collapsed, knowing not only that thousands of lives had been lost, but also that George W. Bush’s neo-conservative advisers would seize their chance to plot a militaristic course.
My instinctive response was to put words to paper. Five days later, on September 16, 2001, my article “The hawks are hovering. Prepare for more bombs” appeared in London’s Independent on Sunday. I continued to write about the Bush administration, almost exclusively for British papers, chastising it for its violations of human rights and international law, its hostility towards multilateral institutions and its destabilizing doctrine of pre-emption.
Needless to say, my opinions attracted considerable hostility, all the more so because I was expressing them from within a conservative law school at a conservative university in the very conservative South. I stood my ground, but it was not easy. And then it occurred to me: the United States was not my country; it was not a place for which I wanted to fight. My thoughts drifted northward, to the place where my values had been forged.
The immigration officer worked his way through a series of questions designed to confirm my identity and soundness of mind. The last question was the toughest: “Why do you wish to surrender your permanent resident card?”
How do you explain to an American—especially one with a flag on his shoulder and a gun on his hip—that you no longer wish to live in his country?
I thought about the man across the counter, how he might have fled the postwar chaos and poverty of Vietnam, how he might have been plucked off a rickety boat by the U.S. Navy and perhaps gravitated towards the immigration service out of gratitude to his new homeland.
At the same time, I thought about how I might be replicating his experience in one small but important respect. My principal motivation in surrendering my green card was not to avoid problems at the border. I was seeking to commit—without hesitation or qualification—to my own special place.
You see, as someone who was born in Canada, I never had to affirm my citizenship. I never had to demonstrate my deep love for this country, with its vast and spectacular landscapes and diverse yet tolerant peoples, its distinct and complex history, values and institutions and its oh-so-promising future. Unlike the millions of Canadians who were born outside Canada, I had never made my choice.
The moment was upon me. My heart bursting with pride, I looked the immigration officer in the eye and said, as simply and non-judgementally as possible: “I have chosen to live permanently in Canada.”
“Permanently?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
INTENT FOR A NATION
When Stephen Harper was asked whether he loved Canada, he hesitated, pursed his lips and replied, “Canada is a great country.”
The Canadian political philosopher George Grant would not have been surprised. He wrote about people like Harper four decades ago in his influential 1965 book, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism: “In its simplest form, continentalism is the view of those who do not see what all the fuss is about. The purpose of life is consumption, and therefore the border is an anachronism.” Grant pronounced that Canada had effectively ceased to exist, since the distinctive aspects of Canadian society and politics could not withstand the integrating forces of continental capitalism and universal modernism radiating from the United States.
Was he right?
Grant said foreign policy would be first to succumb: “A branch-plant society could not possibly show independence over an issue on which the American government was seriously determined.” He thought that the defence crisis of 1963 proved his point: when the U.S. State Department publicly rebuked John Diefenbaker for refusing to allow nuclear-armed missiles on Canadian soil, Canadians did not rally around their embattled prime minister; they voted him out of office.
I was born in 1966, one year after Lament for a Nation was published, and I have lived with Grant’s thesis ever since. As a student at McGill, I remember one of my professors arguing that the 1988 “free-trade election” confirmed Grant’s prediction. Canadians had given Prime Minister Brian Mulroney a clear mandate to eliminate tariffs on U.S. exports and thus the need for U.S. corporations to maintain subsidiaries here. They also endorsed Mulroney’s acceptance that U.S. domestic law would apply to disputes between Canada and the United States over “dumping”—a technical term for the export of products, such as softwood lumber, at less than their alleged cost of production.
Around the same time, another young man was falling under the influence of a group of neo-conservative professors at the University of Calgary whose policy prescriptions would have made Canada almost indistinguishable from the United States. Although Stephen Harper ran against the Mulroney government in 1988 under the Reform Party banner, he supported the free trade agreement unequivocally.
Four years later, when I left Canada, I was convinced that the country was finished. My conviction deepened in 1994 when Jean Chrétien broke an election