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MANUAL FOR DRAFT-AGE IMMIGRANTS TO CANADA
By Mark Satin
Director, Toronto Anti-Draft Programme
FIRST EDITION
First Printing, January, 1968 5,000 copies
SECOND EDITION
Second Printing, March, 1968 20,000 copies
THE TORONTO ANTI-DRAFT PROGRAMME
HOUSE OF ANANSI
TORONTO 1968
Copyright 1968 House of Anansi Press
Introduction 2017 James Laxer
Afterword 2017 Mark Satin
First published in 1968 by House of Anansi Press
This edition published in Canada in 2017 and the USA in 2017
by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the authors rights.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Satin, Mark Ivor, 1946, author
Manual for draft-age immigrants to Canada / Mark Satin.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0289-3 (softcover).ISBN 978-1-4870-0290-9
(EPUB).ISBN 978-1-4870-0291-6 (Kindle)
1. Emigration and immigration lawCanadaPopular
works. 2. CanadaEmigration and immigrationHandbooks,
manuals, etc. 3. AmericansLegal status, laws, etc.Canada.
4. Draft resistersLegal status, laws, etc.Canada. 5. Vietnam
War, 1961-1975Draft resistersCanada. 6. Vietnam War,
1961-1975Draft resistersUnited States. 7. CanadaDescription
and travel. I. Title.
KE4454.S28 2017 342.71082 C2017-901318-1
KF4483.I54C65 2017 C2017-901319-X
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933808
Series design: Brian Morgan
Cover illustration: Sydney Smith
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program
the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
INTRODUCTION
The Welcome Mat is Out in Canada
By James Laxer
This manual, originally published by House of Anansi Press in 1968, tells of a time nearly half a century ago when Canadians were welcoming American draft dodgers and deserters to Canada. The United States was locked in the agony of the Vietnam War. The official toll of Americans who died in combat or of other causes in Vietnam is 58,220. While estimates vary widely, several million Vietnamese, civilians and military, perished. During the war, American society was wracked by the most severe divisions experienced since the Civil War.
The Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada introduced newcomers to Canadian society in a series of essays. Among the authors was J. M. S. Careless, the distinguished historian.
The manual summarized the workings of Canadian immigration regulations and procedures. The Canada to which those seeking refuge will be coming today has evolved considerably over the past five decades. Immigration laws have changed and as a consequence of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, embedded in the new Canadian Constitution of 1982, the rights of individuals, including those of refugees seeking sanctuary, have been enhanced. However, a major barrier to the rights of refugees coming from the United States to Canada is the Safe Third Country Agreement between the two countries. The agreement deems the U.S. a safe haven for refugees and bars them from refugee status in Canada. With the Trump administration in office, that agreement is being vigorously challenged by human rights advocates in Canada.
In 2017, Canada is once again a refuge for people fleeing persecution in the U.S. A titanic societal struggle is underway inside the American republic, between a New America based mainly in increasingly multiracial cities and an Old America centred in the South and the Midwest. With Donald Trump in the White House, Old America has come to power in all three branches of the American government. The Trump administration has lashed out at Native peoples, Mexicans, Central Americans, Muslim immigrants and refugees, women, the LGBTQ community, and trade unions.
The welcome mat is out in Canada. Evidence of this assertion is in the settling in Canada of forty thousand refugees from the Syrian conflict since November 2015 (as of January 2017). Enthusiastic Canadians have become private sponsors of a high proportion of the refugees. They have pledged themselves to support newcomer families during their first year in Canada.
Those who arrive in Canada from south of the border in coming months will find a country that is deceivingly similar to the U.S. As they will discover over time, it is also bafflingly dissimilar.
Its not that Canada boastfully proclaims itself a sanctuary for the suffering of the world. Quite the contrary, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared in 2016, Canada is a modest country. No Statue of Liberty welcomes the weary and the oppressed to Canadian shores.
History, geography, and culture have made Canadians skeptics about any notion of human perfectibility. Traditional conservatism is in the very bones of Canadians, along with a pronounced streak of social democracy. This makes even our liberalism odd, especially to Americans.
If you migrate to our country, you will find us welcoming and not very anxious to assimilate you. The term un-Canadian does not compute. Yet racism and exclusionism exist in Canada. When a horror occurs in Canada, such as the massacre of six Muslim worshippers in a mosque outside Quebec City in January 2017, Canadians condemn it in the strongest possible terms and proclaim appropriately that such an atrocity has no place in our peaceful country. The inclination of Canadians is to conclude that we live in an era in which xenophobic atrocities afflict humanity and that we have no special protection from them. Most Canadians are not inclined to believe that we can erect a City on a Hill in which perfection is within reach.
A major explanation for the oddness of the country is that the regions that are at the centre of todays transcontinental Canada were remnants left to Britain following the American Revolution. English-speaking Canadians are historically rooted in counter-revolution. Indeed, the Qubcois are descended from the French-speaking people who avoided the French Revolution as a consequence of the British conquest of New France in 1759. For a century and a half following the Conquest, the most potent institution in French Canada was the Roman Catholic Church.
None of this is meant to suggest that Anglophones, Francophones, and the millions of Canadians who are descended from newcomers from many parts of the world are conservatives. Those who now occupy the lands of Aboriginal peoples, without having yet come close to recognizing the rights of those peoples, have created a country that is not rooted in a quasi-religious obeisance to the values of eighteenth-century Founders. Canadians draw heavily on their past on the things Canadians have achieved together without fearing the future to the extent that is so patently the case in the United States and in much of Europe.
