Millions of Americans in Canada downplay links to Uncle Sam

With the Canadian government’s decision to comply in July with a Washington tax crackdown on “U.S. persons” around the world, many Ameri-Canadians are feeling rising anger, fear and even hatred toward their powerful country of origin.

That said, the self-identities of Americans in Canada have been more ambiguous than they tend to be for members of more visible immigrant groups, long before the U.S. began its notorious attempt to catch tax cheaters through the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, better known as FATCA. The U.S. is the only major country to tax based on citizenship, not residency.

Canada has for centuries provided a haven for millions of Americans and their descendants, including the United Empire Loyalists who fled persecution during the 18th-century American Revolution, blacks escaping from slavery during the 19th century and draft resisters protesting the Vietnam War in the 20th century. Such Ameri-Canadians have tended to blend into this northern country.

{NOTE to READERS: I’m still on vacation, having cycled on the Danube River and travelled on high-speed European trains. But I’m posting this piece I wrote two weeks ago since it was just published in the weekend Sun. Soon I’ll be writing about being on the trail of Luther and Bach.}

The American-born and American-descended in Canada have never felt organized as a self-conscious ethnic group, chiefly because Americans have never felt terribly ‘foreign’ in Canada and can usually find their American identification so easily,” University of Montreal scholar Lise Maisonneuve writes in The Canadian Encyclopedia.

“At the same time, the sense of a vague hostility to Americans within Canadian society has also helped reduce overt displays of American consciousness.”

Now, open displays of American pride in Canada are becoming even less likely as Ameri-Canadians seek shelter from the long reach of FATCA.

FATCA is causing global tax law firms such as Moodys Gartner to question whether maintaining the “juice” of dual American-Canadian citizenship “is worth the squeeze.”

Anti-FATCA websites in Canada, such as the Isaac Brock Society, are urging Americans to renounce their U.S. citizenship — and to show their positive commitment to Canada. The number of American expatriates relinquishing citizenship, according to the U.S. State Department, has quadrupled in the past couple of years.

In addition, the flow of Americans leaving the U.S. for Canada more than doubled in the decade up until 2011, according to Statistics Canada. The U.S.-led recession of 2008 has further sped up the American exodus.

Many Canadians don’t realize Americans have made up the fourth to sixth largest immigrant group in Canada for decades, usually behind those from China, Britain, India and the Philippines. As a destination point for expatriate Americans, Canada has tended to come in second, behind the most popular national refuge, Mexico.

And Western Canada, including B.C., has since 1991 been proving more popular for American expatriates than Eastern Canada, according to Jack Jedwab, executive vice-president of the Association for Canadian Studies.

Most Americans now immigrate to Canada for interesting job prospects, because they’ve studied in Canada, have married a Canadian or dislike U.S. political trends.

Unlike some so-called “visible minorities” from beyond North America, however, most Americans as an ethnic group often don’t stand out as particularly different in Canada. Maisonneuve says there has always been a “natural” flow across the international border that tends to blur the identities of inhabitants of the two countries.

The Canadian census reveals about 350,000 Canadian either claim an American ethnic origin or say they were born in the U.S. But this represents only a small fraction of all Ameri-Canadians. Scholars’ estimate about three million Canadians have American roots, including those born in Canada to a parent with a dual passport.

Many such Ameri-Canadians, however, don’t identify strongly with the U.S.

That’s in part because, as Jedwab has found, nearly half of those in Canada with American roots are third-generation or older. Their ancestors began coming to Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries, he said, to obtain free farmland, open businesses or work in the oil industry.

What’s more, Ameri-Canadians usually integrate easily into the country since they are invariably well-versed in English and often lack distinguishable accents, unlike people from Britain, Australia or New Zealand. In the 21st century, Jedwab said, just one-quarter of American newcomers to Canada are visible minorities.

I’m one of those who virtually never thinks about my American heritage.

My paternal grandfather, George Stanley Todd, was a First World War veteran and log scaler who came from United Empire Loyalist stock, which means his ancestors had to escape zealous Yankee rebels in the Boston area in the late 1700s to find refuge in Eastern Canada.

But, except for writing this column, I basically never think of myself as having American origins. If someone asks about my ethnic background, I tend to emphasize my roots in England, Ireland and Wales.

As a result of all these cultural forces downplaying what The Canadian Encyclopedia calls “overt displays of American consciousness,” many don’t realize some of the most influential Canadians were born in the United States.

They include economist C.D. Howe, CP Rail tycoon William Van Horne, White Spot founder Nat Bailey, fiction writers William Gibson, Robert Munsch and Jane Rule, journalists Barbara Frum, Jack Todd and Jeffrey Simpson, politicians Diane Ablonczy, Jim Green, Stanley Knowles and Elizabeth May, political commentator Tom Flanagan, scholar Jane Jacobs, athletes Donald Brashear and Jarome Iginla and actors Lauren Holly, Robin Thicke, Matt Frewer and Colm Feore.

Now — with FATCA causing investigators to scour the globe to hunt down more than seven million broadly defined “U.S. persons” it claims should be paying taxes to Uncle Sam — even more people in Canada with U.S. connections are finding another reason to bury their American identities.

Instead of just trying to be sensitive to fellow Canadians’ “vague hostility” towards the U.S., many Ameri-Canadians are experiencing an increase in their fury toward Uncle Sam.