Making Canada home

OLGA LIVSHIN

Ellie O'Day, former United States citizen Ellie Claitman, became a Canadian because she disagreed with the Vietnam War. Her road to Canada started in Pittsburgh, Penn., where she grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. "I always had a feeling that I was born in a wrong place. I never felt an American," she confessed. "Even at school, I never sang 'The Star-Spangled Banner' during assembly. It's a war song – too violent."

With her strong positions on freedom and equality, O'Day couldn't accept racism, which permeated American society in those times. From the age of 12, she volunteered for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "I had a real sense of social justice while very young," she recalled. Martin Luther King Jr. was her knight and inspiration.

After she enrolled in the University of Wisconsin in 1967, she started getting a more global view of what was going on in the world. Widening her knowledge, she participated in every political rally on campus. When the Vietnam War came to her attention, she picked it up as her main cause. She couldn't condone the war and couldn't stomach the draft, so she sought out ways to assist draft evaders.

Her search resulted in her joining the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "Our main function was counselling young men, mostly male students, how to avoid being drafted," she said. The group met often to discuss their strategies and some of the solutions they had come up with were really bizarre. For example, one young man had a tattoo on his shoulder, which in essence was a curse of the American army, using swear words. The medical commission rejected him because of this tattoo, which was the desired outcome.

O'Day and her like-minded colleagues at the ACLU also advised young men on how to obtain student deferment from the military or get conscientious objector status. Other oft-used methods involved failing a physical exam or faking mental illness. Some desperate young men fasted for weeks before the physical. And every man who escaped the draft was considered a small victory for O'Day and her friends.

Although working for the ACLU was rewarding, it demanded courage. Not everyone in America opposed the war and more conservative members of the American society regarded draft evaders as cowards and traitors. By association, these Americans also despised O'Day and her ACLU comrades for their actions.

By her final year in university, the young woman had had enough. She wanted to leave the country for good. Having received her bachelor of arts in anthropology, she applied for a graduate position in several Canadian universities and was accepted by the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

For her, Canada, with its charismatic and cosmopolitan leader of the time, Pierre Trudeau, represented liberalism, and she wanted to be part of it. Unfortunately, her student visa was for only one year, and she needed an excuse to stay and work in the country for much longer, ideally, forever.

At the advice of her ACLU friends, O'Day drove across the border after midnight, assuming the night guards would be mellower. She had a letter of employment as a university teaching assistant in her hands. Her friends had been right: it took her only an hour to convince the border guards to upgrade her visa from student to work. Six weeks later, she received her landed immigrant status and, six months after that, renounced her American citizenship. "I had to live by my principles," she said.

In 1978, when she started working for a major Vancouver radio station as a host of her own music program, O'Day shed her last tie to America, changing her name from Claitman to O'Day. "My decision was purely for marketing," she explained. "It sounded better: 'Listen to Ellie O'Day all night on CKLG.' No one ever remembered my real last name later; it just didn't stick."

Fiercely loyal to her adopted land, O'Day is still uncomfortable with the U.S. government position on various political, economical and ethical issues. An ardent advocate of everything Canadian, she has worked behind the scenes to promote Canadian arts and culture: first as a radio DJ, then as the executive director of the Pacific Music Industry Association and a music columnist for the Georgia Straight and now as a publicist. For her, Canada is the place where she was supposed to be from the beginning.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

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