By Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun | Link to Article
Canada has millions of people with some sort of American connection; U.S. tax laws have many of them burying or even formally giving up their American roots
By Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun | Link to Article
Canada has millions of people with some sort of American connection; U.S. tax laws have many of them burying or even formally giving up their American roots
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.
“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.