500,000 Americans : Canada’s Unseen Wave of Immigrants

For Margaret Genovese, Canada is a country where opportunity and a delightful life style mesh to create “a terribly wonderful place to live.”

As planning director of the Canadian Opera Company, she is, she says, “very grateful to have been allowed to come here.”

To John Maxwell, owner of two of Toronto’s most successful restaurants, however, “Canada is a pleasant place to do business--but I hate pleasant. “

Genovese and Maxwell are opposite poles in the largest American community outside the United States, about 500,000 people. Americans here form one of the most significant and successful immigrant groups in Canada, one that makes a notable contribution to Canadian society.

Hidden Strength

Yet, in a country that promotes its multicultural makeup with a constant stream of national days, parades and money, the strength and size of the U.S. community here are largely unknown, even hidden.

“It’s in my own interest to keep my identity secret,” Maxwell said in an interview. “They (Canadians) don’t like Americans.”

Maxwell’s severe assessment is not shared by everyone--Barton Myers, a world renowned architect who moved from Philadelphia to Toronto 19 years ago, says, for instance, that “I’ve never run into prejudice”--but it is evident that Canada and the Americans here generally want their presence played down.

There are no large American societies in Canada, as there is for almost every ethnic group, no community centers or organizations to promote the interests of Americans living here.

“We don’t get together and sing songs from the old country,” says Jeff Sallot, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, who is the Toronto Globe and Mail’s bureau chief in Ottawa, the capital city.

Low-Key Celebrations

Even the Fourth of July celebrations at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa and the various American consulates are low-key, nearly private affairs with more Canadians invited than Americans.

The Canadian government encourages ethnic and national groups to maintain their separate identities, giving them millions of dollars each year to promote their activities. But it officially ignores the Americans.

Rather than count immigrants from south of the border by nationality, the government’s census office, Census Canada, lists them by their original ethnic or national background, usually on the basis of their family names. Thus, Massachusetts-born Genovese is officially listed as an Italian, even though her only connection with that group is through her paternal grandfather.

No government official would comment on this policy, but Canada has long been sensitive to what is seen here as a near-overwhelming cultural, social and economic influence from south of the border. Intensifying this attitude may be the reluctance of Americans to play a full part in the society.

According to government estimates, only about half of the immigrants from the south take up Canadian citizenship. The rest hold some sort of resident or working permit, and even those that do become Canadian citizens rarely give up their U.S. passports.

“It’s the best of all possible worlds,” architect Myers said in an interview. “I’ve got dual citizenship in the two best nations in the world.”

Operates L.A. Firm

Myers operates a major firm in Los Angeles, where he lives part of the year. He, like many Americans living in Canada, sends his children to college in the United States.

It is not much acknowledged that, despite their reluctance to give up their connections back home, Americans play an important role within Canada’s borders.

For example, besides Genovese, the Canadian Opera Company, one of the mainstays in the country’s nationalistic artistic community, employs Americans in several key positions, including those of artistic director and business director.

The McDonald’s fast-food chain here is owned by an American, 40,000 of Alberta’s farmers are Americans and the nation’s universities are full of professors hired from the United States. In addition, since more than half of major Canadian businesses are owned by Americans, many industrial managers are from the United States.

Successful Reporters

Like Sallot, who won the Pulitzer Prize when he worked for the Akron, Ohio, Beacon-Journal, many of the most successful Canadian newspaper reporters are American. They include Diane Francis, the Toronto Star’s leading economic writer, and Alan Abel, a widely admired former Globe and Mail foreign correspondent and now a television commentator.

Americans are among the key managers even in the publishing industry, probably the most nationalistic of Canada’s culture-related businesses.

And the Canadian Football League is so dominated by Americans that it set up a separate Most Valuable Player category for Canadian players because “imports” would otherwise always win.

It has always been this way. The first large wave of immigrants to Canada were the 40,000 Americans who crossed the border after the American Revolution because they opposed the new nation.

American blacks entered Canada by the thousands on the Underground Railway that brought them out of slavery, and up to 80,000 American war resisters or draft evaders fled to Canada in the 1960s and 1970s during the Vietnam War.

Liked Life Style

But many came for less dramatic reasons. They married Canadians, or they saw economic opportunities, or they like the clean, safe and lower-key life style of Canada’s cities.

Whatever the reasons, the flow has been steady. Altogether, the Canadian Encyclopedia estimates, 3 million Americans have emigrated to Canada since the mid-18th Century, 2 million of them since 1900.

And they have always played an important part in the nation’s development. Even though Canadians and their history books are generally quiet about the American contribution to their country, some have commented on the issue.

The Canadian Encyclopedia, which is edited by an ultranationalist and strong critic of most things American, complains first about the transient nature of Americans who come here, but then says:

“Many Americans, though, have put in much more than ‘a tour of garrison duty’ in Canada. American industrial founders helped establish the potteries and forges of early Quebec and Ontario and some helped create whole towns. . . . Less tangible but no less real are legacies such as the brain-mapping carried out by Wilder Penfield in Montreal (development of neurosurgery for treating epilepsy) and the shaping of modern liberalism by C.D. Howe.”

Powerful Politician

Howe, a civil engineer who became a cabinet minister and one of Ottawa’s most powerful political figures, and the architect of the nation’s post-World War II economic success, was born in Waltham, Mass. and educated in New York.

The second premier of British Columbia, who was born plain William Smith but changed his name to Amor de Cosmos, was an immigrant from California.

The nation’s first transcontinental railroad was largely financed and engineered by Americans.

Jane Jacobs, already famous in the United States as an urban critic, has played a major part in making Toronto a world class city.

Indeed, Americans seem to make their mark whatever they do in Canada. In the 10 years since they moved to Toronto from Florida, Stanley and Nancy Colbert have become the nation’s major literary agents, representing 260 writers around the world.

Filling a Gap

Stanley Colbert, claiming that he and his wife were the first real literary agents in the nation, suggested that Americans are frequently successful here because Canada often lags far behind developments in the United States.

“Canada is 20 years behind,” he said, “so we seemed omniscient, unerring predictors of truth” when he and Nancy used business approaches unheard of in Canada.

“It was like introducing the wheel to the writers,” he said, noting that even now there are only four serious literary agents in the country.

“What we really have here is a gold mine for Americans,” Nancy Colbert said of the general business climate.

Maxwell agrees. “The restaurant and liquor business here was years behind,” he said. “They wanted good places with good food and good wine. We give that to them.”

Finds Canada Boring

But, he went on, “I didn’t pick Canada except as a place to do business. . . . I won’t stay here. My first impression was that life was exceptionally boring and I haven’t changed my mind.”

Yet while some Americans in Canada agree that Canada is less than dynamic and exciting, conversations over the last 2 1/2 years with dozens of Americans here indicate a general satisfaction with life.

Canadians are the ones that seem to think their country is dull, the Americans say.

“They are the most self-denigrating people I’ve ever met,” said Nancy Colbert.

An American reporter was recently interviewed by a local television correspondent. The first question was “How do you like Canada?”

“Fine,” was the answer, “Canada seems like a pleasant place.”

“What you really mean, don’t you,” the interviewer shot back, “is that Canada is boring.”

Feel Safer

But for the most part, Americans seem to like the country because, as Genovese put it, “You can live downtown and walk the streets at night without looking over your shoulder. You don’t have the fear level you have in Houston, where I came from, or other American cities. You can enjoy urban pleasures.”

The Americans interviewed all praised the cleanliness of the streets, the civility of the people and the cooperative spirit.

“It’s like New York in the 1950s,” Stanley Colbert said.

Myers, who originally came to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto, was immediately drawn into the innovative and extensive urban renewal that was sweeping Toronto in the 1970s.

“My experience in the renewal of the city was so exciting and the cooperation between the government and the designers so close that I thought it was a modern, republican version of a Greek city-state. From a urban designer’s side, Toronto has been spectacular.”

Aggressive Approach

Many Americans attributed their success in Canada to the aggressive and dynamic approach that they bring from the United States--a willingness, according to Nancy Colbert, “to ignore past conventions and just do the job.”

In her own field, Genovese said she has been successful in improving the health of the opera company because she is not as reluctant to raise money as Canadians, who are more used to their government providing large subsidies for the arts.

“The American arts are always dependent on marketing and fund-raising so we don’t accept the stigma that marks raising money here,” she said.

If aggressiveness is what makes Americans successful, it also is what makes them self-conscious and breeds Canadian resentment.

“Canadians are suspicious of aggressiveness,” Myers said, “and Americans are generally more aggressive.”

‘Power Bothers Canadians’

In Stanley Colbert’s view, “Americans want power and power bothers the Canadians. . . . It makes them uncomfortable. If an American works at a fast pace, it is seen as aggressiveness, persistence is seen as aggressiveness and a desire to expand is considered greed.”

Not all Canadians see Americans this way, but conversations with many over the last 2 1/2 years give Colbert’s assessment some validity, a general perception that Americans are loud, pushy and aggressive.

Norman Snider, a Toronto columnist and political commentator, said in an interview that Americans as individuals are often civil and caring, but “they assume they know what they want and know how to get it. Pushing to get what they want is a virtue to them, but sometimes it is unseemly to us.

“Almost all the Americans I know here share two things: they are all confident and they don’t hesitate to say what they think and to go for what they want.”

Advise Low Profile

The Colberts, who hold dual citizenship, said all this means that “you must keep it at a low profile.” Nevertheless, background will out, even for those who think they are indistinguishable from Canadians.

“You can always tell the Americans on the streets,” said Donald Polsun, a Canadian lawyer in Toronto. “They walk faster and always seem to be single-mindedly going somewhere. Canadians stroll aimlessly.”

“I think it is my broad accent, my vowels, that give me away,” Genovese said, but “once when I took at class at the university, the professor told me at the end of the course that she knew I was an American from the first day because of the way I walked into the classroom.”

One American, who asked not to be identified, said American male drivers are easy to spot amid the sometimes slow-moving Canadian traffic: “They are the ones shouting and waving their arms while their wives sit next to them hiding their faces.”