You’re Doing it Wrong: Moving To Canada

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f you’ve been on Facebook or Twitter this week, you’ve no doubt seen or heard about the outrage from those opposed to President Obama’s health care plan over the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the law. Some Tea Partiers and others among the anti-Obama factions have purportedly become so outraged by the Supremes’ decision that they’ve threatened to move to Canada.

The idea of Canada-as-escape-plan originated during the Vietnam War, when those seeking to evade the draft would cross the border to find refuge. 

Of course, threatening to move to a country with socialized medicine isn’t the best way to protest what you believe to be the socialization of medicine here at home. But irony aside, any time people in the U.S. feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction they always seem to talk about fleeing in the same direction: north.

The idea of Canada-as-escape-plan originated during the Vietnam War, when those seeking to evade the draft would cross the border to find refuge. Since then the idea has remained alive, usually during times of political upheaval.

Last year, comedian George Lopez threatened to move there if Sarah Palin was elected president, and Hillary Duff said she was going to flee to Canada to save her baby from the glare of the paparazzi spotlight.

During the 2008 presidential election there was lots of talk of emigrating to the Great White North. Steven Baldwin said he’d move to Canada if Obama were elected (he later claimed he was joking). His brother Alec had previously made the same threat, although it was a Bush reelection that he feared.

Typically the “moving to Canada” talk has been the purview of the left wing. Psychology Today ran an article in June titled “When The Going Gets Tough, Liberals Threaten to Move to Canada” that referred to Canada as “the reliable mistress of left wing malcontents.” And in 2004 the headline “Immigration Web Site Flooded by Anti-Bush Voters” made the rounds on the wire services.

So while the idea of emigrating to the country that spawned Nickelback, Rush, and Bob and Doug Mackenzie may be new to those on the right, it’s a threat we’ve heard many times before. Sadly, the only person we know of to actually follow through has been Randy Quaid, but he moved there for an entirely different, although no less crazy, reason.