Help! from Canada: A grassroots Immigration Service

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We felt that such a program was necessary because the rural areas of Ontario (Canada's second biggest province) are rapidly becoming depopulated. Here, as everywhere else, too many young people are leaving the land for the big city. The situation can be summed up as "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the farm?" We really need a goodly number of Mother Earth's children to keep small-scale agriculture alive in parts of this region . . . so we set out to bring them here. Little did we realize the enormousness of the project we were undertaking, or the range of joys and disappointments it had in store for us.

Our first move was to place the following notice in the Positions & Situations column back in MOTHER NO. 18:

I'll help sincere, strong chicks who want to leave the rat race to find work and accommodation on Ontario farms, to start spring of '73 or earlier. No charge, no strings. Must be willing to adapt to primitive lifestyle, to learn and to remain for the entire season. My object: to bring alternatives-oriented people to Canada, hoping they'll stay. Write a letter about yourself to me.

Jim Bannister
Box 509
Bolton, Ontario
Canada

You may be wondering why we directed our ad to persons of the female persuasion (that word "chicks" got us a couple of pretty snarly letters from the liberationists). Our reasoning right or wrong was that women were (11 more needed, [2] less likely to get up and go without a little encouragement and [31 more apt to need our help if they did want to immigrate. We got replies from men and couples too, however, and did what we could for all who wrote.

The first and toughest hang-up was created by our own federal government. Politics rears its ugly head even in Canada, and around the time our P & S notice appeared the incumbent party had just about lost a national election. In case you can't imagine what connection that fact had to do with our project, the picture was something like this: Before the election, if you wanted to live in Canada, you did. You came, settled . . . and then at some point applied for what is called "landed immigrant status". And lots of Americans were doing just that.

Trouble is, the influx from the States took place at a time of increasing unemployment (a condition which generally leads to political disaster, and did in this case). The politicians' answer was simple: Blame the work shortage on the immigrants . . . they're not established here and can't complain.

The federal government therefore decided-about three days after the election-that you couldn't just walk into this country, that you had to apply for landed immigrant status from outside Canada and that you couldn't cross the border for more than a three-month visit without such status (or at least a work permit, which also had to be obtained before entry).