Journeys to the “North Country Fair”: exploring the American Vietnam War migration to Vancouver

This thesis explores the American Vietnam War migration to Canada through the lives of eight men and women who moved to Vancouver, British Columbia between 1967 and 1973. Using oral history, it challenges prevailing conceptions of this migration by examining the broader composition of migrants, the circumstances that informed their decisions to leave the United States, and the welcome they received in Canada. Active participants in the democratic struggles for change that marked this period in American history, their experiences indicate that migration to Canada was an expression of a profound alienation from American society that went beyond opposition to the Vietnam War. Once in Vancouver, the intersection of the class bias of the Canadian Immigration Act and authorities’ antipathy towards the city’s burgeoning youth counterculture created a climate of hostility that complicated the image of Canada as a “refuge from militarism” and the haven that it promised.