What To Expect When You’re Expecting (To Flee To Canada)

It’s understandable some Americans are looking to get out of Dodge given the very real possibility fascism-curious voters might win the day in the next presidential election. The term “fight-or-flight” was coined to describe the body’s natural response to a perceived threat, so it’s no surprise some folks might consider flying to Canada if Florida Man somehow oozes back into the Oval Office and the country goes Full Gilead.

The options of acute stress response are actually “fight-flight-or-freeze,” so there’s the bonus of a two-for-one if choosing to start over in a country that’s largely sub-Arctic.

It’s a common myth Canada is basically the USA but nicer, a mostly uninhabited land of milk and maple syrup where citizens’ bloodlust is confined to hockey rinks. There’s free healthcare, legal weed, and sexy French accents! The beer is better and fries come with gravy and delicious cheese curds! Abortions aren’t usually hard to come by and nobody gets all fired up over same-sex marriage or library books. Last year’s occupation of Ottawa, our equivalent of January 6, was essentially a bunch of unvaxxed idiots blasting air horns, harassing residents, and sitting in hot tubs rather than taking up arms to overthrow the government. It was a bit like if the drunk hosers from Fubar and Trailer Park Boys had attempted a coup, only less funny and more dark money.

We roll our eyes whenever some celebrity announces they’ll just “move to Canada” if their preferred presidential candidate loses because we’ve heard it since the Dubya days and there’s rarely follow through, or at least not publicly. Chelsea Handler, Snoop, Bryan Cranston, Lena Dunham, and Barbra Streisand are among the no-shows who said they’d take off to the Great White North if Trump won the first time around, although it’s fun to imagine Babs — who once upon a time used to hook up with our current prime minister’s dad — actually did make the move but didn’t cause a big fuss to avoid the Streisand Effect.

So many Americans googled “how to move to Canada” following TFG’s Electoral College victory it crashed Immigration Canada’s website. Applications from Yanks to acquire citizenship have more than tripled in the last two decades and it seems a safe bet the number will skyrocket accordingly if the unthinkable happens next November.

So it’s worth politely pointing out the grass isn’t all that much greener up here any more. Robin Williams once compared Canada to a nice apartment above a meth lab. But if it blows up, so do we. The world’s longest undefended border isn’t much help at keeping the MAGA cancer from spreading, and if an election were held tomorrow, polls say it would be a landslide for the Conservative Party (our GOP, as the name suggests), which is currently led by a vicious little prick named Pierre Poilievre after the previous leader was kicked to the curb last year for not being crazy or cruel enough.

Both the border and Poilievre were in the news together recently after what turned out of be a bizarre car crash. He spoke up in Parliament to ask Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for an update after “media reports of a terrorist attack at the border in Niagara.” Now, this isn’t particularly egregious. We all thought it was probably terrorism given cars don’t typically go airborne and explode at border crossings, and also because it’s not hard to imagine some delusional chud specifically targeting infrastructure named the Rainbow Bridge for being gay or something. Or to stop woke Thor from accessing the Bifröst to fight bad guys across the Nine Realms. The Venn diagram overlap of violent bigots and Marvel fans who miss the point is considerable. Just look at all the cops who strut around wearing the Punisher logo.

Most sane people were relieved to find out it was instead an older married couple who had a very bad day on their way to a KISS concert. (The KISS Army is not designated a terrorist organization in either country.) The problem is the only news outlet claiming it was a deliberate attack at this early stage was (surprise!) Fox News, and no government officials on either side had yet confirmed any details. When asked by a journalist the following day if it was responsible to prematurely claim it was an act of terrorism, he blamed a different news outlet, CTV, for getting it wrong and for reporters sucking ass at their jobs. This despite a time-stamp proving CTV hadn’t said a damn thing about it until after he made his remarks.

Watching Fox News in Canada isn’t against the law, no matter what Joe Rogan may tell you. It’s true regulators are looking into a permanent ban from cable packages due to all the misinformation and hate speech, and it takes effort to get around geo-restrictions by using streaming services or VPNs to hide your IP address. Something mercifully beyond the skill set of most gullible Canadian grandparents who should be nodding off to a rerun of Murdoch Mysteries instead of transparent rage bait.

Lying about where he first heard something is a small but telling example of the sort of man Pierre Poilievre is. Bigger ones include secretly embedding his YouTube videos with the hashtag #mgtow — an acronym for “Men Going Their Own Way,” which Robyn has ably covered over the years — to better reach the eyeballs of incels; cozying up to the Freedom Convoy; voting against a free trade agreement with Ukraine over some made-up bullshit it would somehow force a new carbon tax on them; and pumping Bitcoin as a great investment shortly before it all went kablooey. The Conservatives also recently voted against a bill to provide free school lunches to hungry children because something something socialism.

There’s still a chance Trudeau and the Liberal Party (our Democrats, as the name suggests) might turn the ship around before the next election, likely in October 2025, unless their deal with the NDP (our, uh, hard to explain party) to prop them up fizzles out before then. This is a guy who has survived no less than three blackface incidents to date, so it’s hard to ever count him out completely. The consensus is Trudeau isn’t racist but just a bit dumb, overly fond of playing dress-up, and insulated from reality by his life of unimaginable privilege, which ain’t a great look for the person in charge but it beats the alternative.

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There’d be a lot less paperwork to simply hightail it to protectorates like the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, or Guam. The beaches are surely better. Just a friendly heads-up the political climate in some of the more backward parts of your northern neighbor — looking at you, prairie provinces! — might be closer to what June and friends experienced (spoiler) in season 5 of “The Handmaid’s Tale” than how Newfoundlanders welcomed stranded 9/11 passengers in Come From Away.

Staying to fight rather than fly or freeze could be a good option as well, if necessary.

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