Go in peace, my former countrymen

ABC News: Love it or Leave it -- Record Number of Americans Flee to Canada:

"In 2006, 10,942 Americans went to Canada, compared with 9,262 in 2005 and 5,828 in 2000, according to a survey by the Association for Canadian Studies.
"Of course, those numbers are still outweighed by the number of Canadians going the other way. Yet, that imbalance is shrinking. Last year, 23,913 Canadians moved to the United States, a significant decrease from 29,930 in 2005."

If, as the article says, the reason for so many Americans heading to the Frozen North is politics, then let them go and good riddance. They can't make Canada much worse and they might help the real Americans keep this country from becoming another Canada.

Americans heading to Canada for political reasons has much deeper roots than the article's mention of the tens of thousands of vacationers who preferred the tundra to the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. All the way back to the American Revolution, people unhappy with the political trends in this counrty have made Canada their preferred destination - it's not far away and they speak English - most of them, anyway, albeit with a funny accent.

ABC uses the word "flee" in the headline even though one of the two persons quoted admitted to keeping an American Flag on his wall in Canada and having no intention to renounce his citizenshp here to become a Canadian. The Tories who went to Canada in the 1770s and 1780s were fleeing. One might even say that of the draft resisters of the 1960s and 1970s. But the word seems an odd choice in the present context.

A little perspective is in order here. ABC's idea of perspective is to say that the numbers of Americans moving to Canada are starting to catch up to the niumbers of Canadians following the sun southward. This is true, but less instructive than it might seem.

Canada is a huge territory with a small population - only a little more than one-tenth the population of the US. Using 2006 population estimates from the TIME Almanac and the figures given in the article for immigration each way in that year yields a very different picture.

So easy a caveman could do it. But not, it seems, easy enough for an ABC reporter. The bottom line: a Canadian is about 20 times more likely to move to the US as an American is to move to Canada. QED