Oh, Canada…here we come again
No, celebrities, you’re not moving if your candidate loses
Look out for Girls Montreal. Well, probably not, but this week Lena Dunham joined the ranks of celebrities who’ve said they’d move abroad if Donald Trump claims the White House. “I know a lovely place in Vancouver, and I can get my work done from there,” Dunham insisted to the Hollywood Reporter. “I know a lot of people have been threatening to do this, but I really will.”
Of course, Trump was unbothered, calling the millennial darling a “B-list” actor with “no mojo.”
Dunham is just the latest in a long line of politically frustrated Americans for whom “I’m moving to Canada” has become a convenient, if sometimes disingenuous, proxy — a social-media-friendly quip that says everything in a few words.
If X wins, I’m moving to Canada = I love my country, but I’ve had enough.
Disgruntled Americans have threatened to “move to Canada” for decades. During the heart of the tumultuous 1960s, from 1964 to 1968, more than 70,000 Americans moved north of the border. Draft dodgers and opponents of the Vietnam war accounted for most of the record exodus, but many fled in reaction to liberal policies of the Kennedy-Johnson era. Some just wanted more space.
“In other words, Canada may now play the safety valve role ascribed by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner to the American West in the 19th century,” wrote Edward Cowan in the New York Times in January, 1970. “Just as Americans once pushed west in search of farms, jobs, business opportunities and space to roam, now they are coming north — many of them from the West.”
But in the last 16 years or so, since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the moving-to-Canada (or elsewhere) theme has re-emerged — although there’s scant evidence that people follow through.
After Bush’s re-election and defeat of John F. Kerry in 2004, things got particularly rough for some Kerry supporters. Visits to the Canadian immigration department’s website surged from an average of 20,000 a day to 115,000 the day after Bush won the election, according to Reuters.
In November 2004 after Kerry’s defeat, psychologists and psychiatrists told the Los Angeles Times that post-election depression would likely be especially acute as Bush entered his second term.
“Many psychotherapists expect more Americans to find themselves stuck in the mire of post-election grief, loss and blame,” the paper wrote. “They’ll lie awake at night fuming over things that might have made the election go differently. They’ll ponder revenge, threaten to move to Canada, post screeds on Internet blogs and chat rooms.”
In 2008, during the contest between Obama and John McCain, yet more celebs pledged self-imposed exile.
Meanwhile, some “celebrities” focused their defection pledges at laws, rather than candidates.
While some weren’t geographically specific, but aimed squarely at candidates. Cher, for one, trained her guns on Mitt Romney.
And now, Trump. And now, Canada. Again. On Super Tuesday, as Trump swept most of the primaries and caucuses, Google searches for “how to move to Canada” ballooned 350%
If he clinches the nomination, that number will surely surge again, though actual relocations likely will not.
