THE STORY OF AMERICAN CANADIANS
Well I met him in England and he moved back with me from England after I finished my 4th year at Boston University. They drafted him. They classified him 1A after a year in the United States. So they actually didn’t get around to drafting him before we got out, but they gave him a draft card that said he was 1A which was the most eligible for service. After 1 year and what had happened was that we didn’t realize what was happening at the time. We found out after we came here that non-citizens don’t have to serve abroad. They can be drafted but they have the right to just serve within the United States but when he came over on the ship from England, they made him sign a paper waiving that right so that he could be drafted and sent abroad. We weren’t going to wait for them to come get him so we just decided to come to Canada.
As I said, my father was a history teacher and sort of got what was going on so he didn’t object but they weren’t terribly helpful or supportive. We were sort of on our own, both of us far away from our families, newly married, and right out of college. I wouldn’t have even married the guy, I don’t think, if we hadn’t had to make this decision. He had to leave. Was I going to go with him? Where were we going to go? I was very young to get married. I had no intention of getting married that fast actually. We were living together, but there was certainly no hurry to get married. But we did so we could immigrate and decide to move on together. People in Canada had varied reactions. Most people objected to the war.
Canadians at the time were very anti-American. I used to try to hide the fact that I was American most of the time because I didn’t want to people to know. “You Americans this, you Americans that. You think you have the right to take over the world.” As if we’re all, 300 million of us, all the same. And especially if you’re a female and an assertive female of course, you’re a pushy American broad. So I didn’t tell them for the most part. Though those who knew were very supportive. They were against the Vietnam War. The government was officially against the war. Pierre Trudeau said at the time that Canada should be refuge for militarism and he supported letting these draft dodgers into the country. So that was the official policy of the government. Some people who had a more conservative background might have objected. We also lived among a bunch of new immigrants for whom English was their second language. I think they were just struggling to get on with their own lives as immigrants and didn’t really have much feeling about it one way or the other. But most people were against the war and supportive of us. But they could still be very dismissive of Americans. Canadians have always had a love hate relationship with the Americans but they were particularly against the war. They thought it was imperialistic the way we did.
I don’t remember all the details. I just remember they promised they wouldn’t be prosecuted if they came home. Before that they could be tried and jailed, which happened to a lot of them who went home before that, if they went home. There was one case I mentioned to you of a guy who went home and his father was killed in a car accident and he was arrested on the spot and tried and jailed. I remember writing letters of support for him. In fact I looked him up the other day and he was back in Canada so he must have decided he wanted to come back here.