I'm probably rare here in that I actually remember the Vietnam-era movement north. I had a number of good friends (and more), in later years, who had taken that route. Two were co-workers of mine in the govt, for example.
(On the other hand, a current colleague of mine is the son of a Vietnam-era draft resister, now a professional in Montreal. The son has dual citizenship, and wanted to go to school in the US, so he registered for the US draft.)
Here's the problem I have, and the problem we discovered back then:
"educated people who feel that Canada reflects their values better than their country of birth"Most USAmericans really don't know what "Canadian values" are, and many would be quite mistaken if they thought that they mirrored their own, "liberal" USAmerican values.
They see things like same-sex marriage and non-punitive attitudes toward drug use, and they like what they see -- but they just don't understand what those phenomena are actually based on.
"Canadian values" aren't just the personal-liberty values that many USAmericans think have been abandoned in their own country. Canadians value
equality and social justice very highly -- and the modern manifestations of these concepts are truly foreign to most people who have lived in the US all their lives.
Thirty-five years ago, we found those skilled, educated migrants from the south doing things like taking over the faculties of some of our university departments, just by sheer force of numbers, and saw that the critical mass of what was being taught in psychology courses (behaviourism, at that time), for instance, did *not* reflect "Canadian values".
Of course it's hard to document any of these long-ago situations and debates from sources on the internet, but I managed to find this overview:
http://www.sfu.ca/~wwwpsyb/issues/1995/winter/ocoffey.htmA Review of the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science from 1965 to 1995
...
1.3 CJBS in 1967
Canada's Centennial year, 1967, saw the country dominated by its groping for maturity and nationhood. The Globe and Mail pessimistically notes that Canada was in "a crisis of unity". All the major news stories of the year had a single theme the nation, what it was, and what it should be. Appropriately the AGM of the Canadian Psychological Association was held in the nation's capital. It brought to Ottawa the academics, practitioners and students of "Canadian" psychology. But as we review the year in all these factions, we see some of the stresses affecting the nation being played out in this field. Both French-English, and North South dichotomies appear to have significant roles.
The keynote address at the CPA's 28th AGM, entitled "A Social Psychology of Bilingualism", was given by Prof. W. Lambert of McGill University. This itself illustrated the psycho- social significance of having two official languages in one country. At the business meeting of the CPA it was decided that all publications of the association would be in both French and English.
From the beginning, through the past, and to the present, we see the American influence on Canadian psychology. Behaviourism appears to dominate the work of Canadian psychologists. One half of the articles published in the CPA journal fell under the behavioural rubric, and seven out of nine parallel sessions at the AGM were dedicated to Behaviourism. Also, over 70% of the articles submitted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Psychology were reviewed by psychologists from the USA. An analysis of new appointments at three Canadian universities revealed the heavy reliance on the American origin of our professors. Of 20 faculty appointments, only three psychologists received their Ph.D. from a Canadian university.
With the 100 year celebration of our country,1967 appears to have been a pivotal time for looking back, with the intention of seeing parts of our future against this context. In the CJP of this year, four article addressed the history of psychology in Canada, however there was not one single article that spoke toward the future or offered a vision for Canadian psychology.
1.4 CJBS in 1968
By 1968 there were some new areas of interest, and a few familiar ones as well, such as the teaching of undergrads in psychology, childhood learning difficulties, and a few more articles were published in the CJP on the history of psychology in Canada.
Socially, then the world was in the throes of another flux. The Vietnam War had escalated almost to its peak, grabbing the bulk of media attention. This had some social effects like anti-war rallies, and draft dodging, which brought many Americans to Canada, a phenomenon especially felt by our universities.
The articles of the year in the .CJP had revealed new concerns, like alcoholism and cigarette addiction, with both behavioural and social learning points of view. The behaviourist dogma still had the loudest bark in the journal. There was, however, articles on artistic ability, creativity and identity. There was also a special talk at the AGM on the relationship between schizophrenia an the 'hippie' class of society.
...
"Artistic ability, creativity and identity" -- these *are* "Canadian" focuses of interest, today. Michael Adams, for instance, has written about this:
http://rabble.ca/in_their_own_words.shtml?x=22132(article by Andrew Potter)
Social values are the various beliefs and preferences people have of what constitutes the good life, such as community involvement, tolerance, and religiosity. Adams has spent the past ten years tracking changes in dozens of such values on both sides of the border, and the results are interesting.
Both countries are trending away from traditional values, are becoming less deferential to authority and more individualistic.
But while Canadians are moving toward values associated with idealism and personal self-fulfillment (e.g. creativity, ecological concern, and cultural sampling), Americans are apparently “moving away en masse from the trends associated with civic engagement and social and ecological concern.” According to Adams, Americans are becoming more survivalist in outlook, embracing “values of nihilism, aggression, fear of others, and consumptive one-upmanship.”
The fact that emigrants from the US may overtly reject that USAmerican outlook doesn't mean that they understand or embrace the Canadian one.
The academics coming to Canada from the US 35 years ago simply didn't know that there
were specifically Canadian issues of the nature described in the CJBS article, and that academics in their field were needed in Canada to bring their expertise to bear on Canadian problems from a perspective that grasped the issues and the stakes involved.
As that article notes in the 1969 summary:
Psychology has now been recognized by the Science Council as a science and a profession with great potential for the social and economical development of our country. The discipline is being viewed as an important national resource to be exploited by government and industry.
and goes on to say about the period from 1975 to 1979:
Between 1975 and 1979 the Canadian political climate was governed by issues of cultural identity and autonomy. English speaking whites feared the encroaching cultural and domination of Americans. Francophones resented the perceived attempts of those same Anglophones to acculturate Quebecois identity. Meanwhile, native Canadians were engaged in a tremendous effort to shake off centuries of cultural oppression at the hands of both English and French speaking whites. These large scale, intrinsically Canadian socio-cultural concerns infiltrated down into the CJBS. Applied psychologists working in this era of social activism (in a branch of the profession that encourage the practical application of scientific principles to real world issues) threw open a window in the Ivory tower and began taking notes on society.
It is really very important that academic workers in fields like this -- which include history, sociology, political science, economics and the other "human sciences", and of course literature -- be familiar with the specific needs of the society they live in, and of the forces at work in that society, and of course the values of the society.
Now, computer programmers may not have the same kind of influence on the socio-political discourse in a society that social scientists have, but eventually, they will be voting. And they will be living in a society that they may not really understand.
I worked closely with immigrants, and organizations advocating for immigrants, for many years -- not USAmericans, of course, since they tend not to need much assistance with integration. I was often disappointed with the attitude I observed on the part of some immigrants, like the ones who came here to make the proverbial better lives for themselves and then became abusive, exploitive landlords or employers. They were contemptuous of the very rules that made Canada the place they chose to live in.
The society that gave them the opportunities they were seeking is the same society that has chosen to place limits on their "freedom" -- that prohibited them from raising rents above the legal limit or terminating tenancies without legal grounds, that required that they comply with the zoning bylaws that apply to small businesses, and so on.
Many immigrants will find that they don't have quite the "freedom" they would like in Canada, because there are quite a lot of rules like those. Rules that are made to advance equality and social justice, at the expense, where necessary, of individual interests, or personal "freedom".
And I worry about the influence that a large influx of people who aren't acculturated to this social philosophy, and its practical manifestations, could have. Canada probably is *not* what the US would be like if the average US "liberal" had his/her druthers, and I can only hope that any who do come here make a real effort to understand and accept this.
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