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Moving to Canada, Eh?Let Slate help you decide if it's really for you.

By Dahlia Lithwick and Alex Lithwick
Updated Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 6:37 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty

Five out of seven Fraysters surveyed agree: It's time to move to Canada. And it looks like those Fraysters may just be the thin edge of a disenfranchised wedge. The Web is buzzing as newspapers report hundreds of threats to move north, from unhappy Democrats in New York, California, Oregon, Ohio, Illinois, and, well, Massachusetts (which is really sort of Canada already). The possible Canadian monopoly on disaffected American emigrants prompted nervous Europeans to redouble their efforts to be the place disenchanted Americans go to die. The Canadian immigration Web site had 179,000 visitors Wednesday—six times its usual traffic—the vast majority of which came from the United States.

Suggestions to accommodate this mass defection northward include the Toronto Star's proposal to gerrymander the border and this newly redrawn map. A Web site belonging to this generous collective of sexy Canadians willing to marry Americans—no questions asked—has had 14,000 visitors since Monday. While some demoralized liberals attempt to muster earnest arguments for sticking around, this time it sounds like some folks really, really, really plan to go. "If the country votes for Bush, then 51 percent of the people in this country are psychos," one Colorado resident told the Denver Post before the election. He'd already opened a bank account in British Columbia. Last week's Ottawa Citizen reported that Scott Schaffer—an assistant professor of sociology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania—had already lined up an immigration lawyer and was applying for jobs in Quebec.

Not so fast, my fine Yankee friends. One of the reasons you tend to scare poor Canadians is that you know next to nothing about them. Which is why, hours after the election, Reuters was forced to disseminate this sobering story about how defection is not always just a matter of showing up at the border in a parka and being welcomed warmly by the simple northern folk amassed there to greet you. No, there are hurdles to be jumped and requirements to be met before becoming a Canadian, as Slate explained this week. Here's the immigration test you can use to decide if you're smart enough to get a job there. And that smartness requirement won't be waived—not even for Alec Baldwin, Robert Altman, and Eddie Vedder (who all allegedly threatened to leave if Bush was elected in 2000), at least according to this article.

(One of the best things about Canada is that major national newspapers sometimes run pieces like this—with glossy photos of the famous people, in this case Robert Redford, who aren't moving to Canada and never actually planned to).

One of the great frustrations of any Canadian is that well-intentioned Americans attempting to introduce other Americans to the real Canada seem to be in command of only about 12 words. Here they are in no particular order: loonies, toonies, snow, Tim Hortons, hockey, poutine, socialized medicine, DeGrassi Junior High, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Labatt, French, and the expression "eh."

But there is so much more to Canada. Just ask any one of the many Canadians who are lurking about in your midst. (We lurk because we love.) There are great reasons, beyond frostbite and pink currency, to seriously consider relocation to the Great White. But still, Canada is still not for everyone. So here's a quiz, for those of you still considering joining the Bush-dodgers relocating to Canada. It isn't about loonies or toonies or socialized medicine. It's about the important stuff—stuff that will determine whether you really want to be a Canadian or just dress like one:

1) Do you like to shoot people? Circle one: yes / no

(If you answered "yes" you should know that there is no Second Amendment or equivalent thereof in the Canadian constitution. Perhaps as a consequence only 22 percent of Canadians own guns as opposed to 49 percent of Americans, while handguns and assault rifles are verboten. Perhaps related to that statistic, the violent crime rate in Canada is 10 times lower than in the United States. This may have no connection to guns, though, and rather a strong correlation to general mellowness of the Canadian temperament. (See Question 3, below.)

2) Have you recently shot someone? Circle one: yes / no

(If you answered yes, you may find Canada appealing. The Canadian courts abolished capital punishment in the '70s, and Canada hasn't seen an execution since 1962. Texas hasn't seen one since about 11 seconds ago.)

3) Do you like to smoke pot? Circle one: yes / no / only for medicinal reasons / only with John Ashcroft

(Judges in at least three provinces have now decriminalized marijuana possession and the federal government is considering decriminalizing it in small quantities. We are advised that the feds also grow great masses of it in large underground caverns and may soon expand the use of these caverns as shelters to which the entire country would retreat in the event of a terrorist attack or to spur mass-munchies in case of a national Doritos glut. And only in Canada would you find marijuana advocates genuinely arguing that people actually drive better stoned.)

4) Are you covered in vast quantities of coarse, black fur? Circle one: yes / no

(Don't kid yourself. It is freakin' cold up there. While 90 percent of Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border, the places they live north of are Green Bay and Buffalo.)

5) Do you like to wear white sneakers (Canadians call these "running shoes") with jeans? Circle one: yes / no

(Canadians are an extraordinarily stylish people, without the excess snobbery of Europeans; and most of them manifest this by being strikingly well-shod. Canadians generally find themselves perplexed by shiny tracksuits, leggings, baseball caps, and sweaters with reindeer on them.)

6) Do you generally find being alive to be just fine? Circle one: yes / no

(For some reason Canadians seem to live longer, be healthier, and pay less for these privileges. It has something to do with national health insurance, adequate primary care, particularly for children, and the availability of quality prescription drugs. (See, e.g., Question 3, above.)

7) Are you gay, or, alternatively, do you suspect that the institution of marriage should be open to all couples who are committed to living together and/or raising children in a loving environment? Circle one: yes / no

(Six and possibly soon seven Canadian provinces currently permit gay marriage. Before leaving office last year, Prime Minister Jean Chretien referred the question of the constitutionality of same-sex marriage to the Supreme Court for an opinion. The court hasn't yet decided the question.)

8) Are your political views either too complicated to be expressed in two-word bumper stickers, or, alternatively, do you find that you just don't much care about your neighbors' views on guns/the unborn/or which deity is their copilot? Circle one: yes / no

(Canadians tend to subscribe to a live-and-let-live view of political ideology. It's not that Canadians don't care about their politics or moral issues. It's simply that they appear to operate under the assumption that, whatever their personal beliefs might be, you, their neighbor, may not care all that much to learn every detail of them on the way to the 7-Eleven. As a consequence, T-shirts in Canada are still funny, signage is still commercial, and bumpers are reserved for smashing into telephone poles after cottage parties. [Cottage: Def. Sprawling lakefront estate in rural Canada, quaintly Hamptonesque but with indoor plumbing optional.])

9) Are you bored to death of razor-thin margins between radical ideologues in every aspect of public life? Circle one: yes / no

(The 5-4 split on the Canadian Supreme Court is male/female as opposed to crazy/crazier.)

10) Does the idea of pluralism appeal to you? Not just in the sense that I-want-to-be-surrounded-by-lots-of-diverse-and-fascinating-people-who-all-worship-my-Lord, but rather, in the sense, that a country is a richer place for competing values, religions and cultures? Circle one: yes / no

(When Canadians talk about "multiculturalism," it doesn't only mean they're for blondes hanging out with redheads. Canadian TV shows actually teem with racially diverse characters, and the major national catalogs have been known to feature models in wheelchairs. Moreover, Canada has not one but two official languages, and no one seems to be suffering for it. Indeed, some believe it makes them sort of interesting. Certainly it will be interesting when the thousands of Bush-dodgers someday return to the United States to visit relatives and amuse them by explaining that the Teton Mountains actually mean "big boobies" in French.)

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Canadian living in America. Alex Lithwick, her brother, is a Canadian living in Canada.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.Photograph of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers on the Slate home page by Gunter Marx Photography/Corbis.
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Remarks from the Fray:

As usual, it's a great pleasure to read Dahlia's work (solo or cowritten), but I'm afraid there's a factual error in one of the assertions. I had at first thought the assertion might be a joke, but it seems to be a serious claim, though in a partly humorous piece; so I thought that I'd alert people to it.

It's always hard to do international comparisons, but it appears that the violent crime rate in both countries is quite similar, though the Canadian homicide rate is much lower (by about a factor of 3.8 to 4) … pretty certainly not 10 times lower, as the article claims.

The best data we have on crime comes from victim surveys — these are inevitably flawed, as all surveys are. But at least they try to measure the same thing (rather than relying on legal definitions that may differ from country to country), and they ask about actual crimes, not crimes reported to the police (since the reporting rate may vary from country to country).

According to the International Crime Victimization Survey [www.minjust.nl:8080] (1999 data) -- a cooperative international project organized under the aegis of U.N. agencies -- the "contact crime" rate (robbery, sexual assault, and assault with force) is over 1.5 times higher in Canada than in the U.S.; 3.4% of all respondents were victimized once or more in Canada, 1.9% in the U.S. (fig. 5, p. 33). If one goes by respondent-reported seriousness (fig. 7, p. 48), the result is more favorable for Canada, though this category includes some nonviolent crimes that were felt to be serious, and excludes some violent ones that were felt not to be serious — from the graphic, it looks like Canada had about 11 or so "very serious" incidents per 100 inhabitants in 1999, while the U.S. had about 13 or so. If we combine "very serious" and "fairly serious," the result is a tie. So far, then, it seems that the U.S. and Canadian violent crime rates looks similar. (This excludes homicide, which the ICVS doesn't measure.)

The other possible source of data is crimes reported to the police, available from Statistics Canada in Canada and the DoJ's Uniform Crime Reports in the U.S. The 2003 robbery rate in Canada [www.statcan.ca] does seem lower than that in the U.S. [www.fbi.gov] (also 2003, see p. 31), by about a factor of 1.6 (89.6 per 100,000 in Canada and 142.2 per 100,000 in the U.S.).

The 2003 sexual assault rate in Canada [www.statcan.ca] seems higher than the 2003 forcible rape rate in the U.S. [www.fbi.gov] (which includes attempted forcible rape) in the U.S. (89.6 vs. 32.1, see p. 27), but of course sexual assault might be defined differently and more broadly in Canada, which is one reason that ICVS data, for all its possible flaws, is probably better than the Statistics Canada / UCR data.

As to aggravated assaults, unfortunately the Canada report that I found doesn't seem to separate serious assaults from less serious ones — the 2003 rate for all assaults in Canada [www.statcan.ca] is 746.5 per 100,000 in Canada, and the 2003 rate for aggravated assaults is 295.0 per 100,000 in the U.S. [www.fbi.gov] is 295.0 per 100,000, but I can't really tell how to compare these.

The "10 times lower violent crime rate" claim apparently froms from a Spokane Spokesman-Review (Sept. 5, 2004) newspaper article. Like most newspaper articles, it doesn't give any specific citation for its assertions, so it isn't the best source to rely on. But it does earlier refer to Seymour Martin Lipset's book "Continental Divide," so I had the library get me the book. The chapter on "Law and Deviance," where such data would be given, does not have any such 10-times-lower claim.

It seems to me, then, that the "10 times lower crime rate" assertion is mistaken. It was an error in the Spokane newspaper, and now it's been repeated here. To keep it from being repeated further, it would be nice if Slate published a correction, unless of course it turns out that the UN data and the U.S. and Canadian government data are wrong and the Spokane Spokesman-Review assertion is correct.

Eugene Volokh
Professor of Law
UCLA School of Law
volokh@law.ucla.edu
Editor, The Volokh Conspiracy, http://volokh.com

--Eugene_Volokh

(To reply, click here.)

(11/17)

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