There goes the Canada option
The Toronto Globe and Mail reports on its website that Canada is about to send back U.S. Army deserter Robin Long to face military justice in the United States. Long deserted and fled to Canada after concluding that the war in Iraq was wrong, for reasons that included the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
Canada sheltered close to 100,000 American draft resisters and perhaps a thousand deserters during the Vietnam War, in large part because Canadian Liberal Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau in 1969 opened the borders and didn't return otherwise law-abiding young Americans to the U.S. Although the two nations had a criminal extradition treaty, Trudeau found a loophole: Canada had no draft, so draft evasion was not a crime there. Border guards were instructed not to ask young American men about their draft status. He even went to Washington in 1969 and defended his decision in a news conference at the National Press Club, rubbing his thumb in President Nixon's eye.
So what has changed? For one thing, the current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is from the Conservative Party and is an ally of George W. Bush. Canada as part of NATO is engaged in a shooting war in Afghanistan and has had soldiers killed. And basicly, deserters don't find the same level of public sympathy that draft evaders did. I understand and appreciate Long's argument, that he signed up to defend his country, not to fight an illegal war of aggression in Iraq and participate, even indirectly, in the George Bush torture machine. But many people don't, harboring a mental image of someone running from the battlefield that really isn't very accurate. The military is the only industry where they can sell you a bill of goods to get you to take the job, and then you can't quit once you figure it out.
Over the past three decades, especially after Presidents Gerald Ford and especially Jimmy Carter allowed the evaders and deserters in Canada to come home without penalty, I can't tell you how many Americans have told me that if the draft was ever re-instituted, they would send their son to Canada. It was the great American mental escape hatch, and not just for military matters. If abortion was ever made flatly illegal in the U.S., well, there was always Canada. That escape hatch is still open as far as I know.
And perhaps it would be for draft evaders, too, if the U.S. ever managed to start drafting young men again and then sent them off to an unpopular war like Iraq. But maybe not. Pierre Trudeau was a rare and amazing leader. His like does not come along very often.