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Jessica Squires, Building Sanctuary: The Movement to Support Vietnam War Resisters in Canada, 1965-73 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2013)
This year marks the fiftieth anni- versary of the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Lyndon Johnson's blank cheque to wage war in Southeast Asia. To commemorate America's long involvement in Vietnam, the Obama ad- ministration has allocated $65 million to the Department of Defense to over- see commemorative initiatives that will honour, in the words of the President, those who "(fought) heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans." It promises to be, some assert, "a panoply of Orwellian forgetfulness and faux-pa- triotism." (Peace History News, Fall 2013: 9-10). It is in this context that we must welcome Jessica Squires' timely and illu- minating Building Sanctuary.
Squires' work represents an important contribution to what is still a small body of scholarly literature on the anti-draft movement in Canada. David Sterling Surrey's 1982 Choice of Conscience (New York: Praeger, 1982) represented a start. In 2001 the subject witnessed some- thing of an explosion with the publica- tion of Frank Kusch's All American Boys (Westport: Praeger, 2001), John Hagan's Northern Passage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), and the comple- tion of David Churchill's PhD thesis "When Home Became Away." Squires contributes to this work in two significant ways. First, while Hagan and Churchill have focused on the Americans entering Canada, Building Sanctuary addresses the subject of the Canadians who sup- ported them. Secondly, Squires presents the story in a national context. Again, while the work of Hagan and Churchill is for the most part focused on Toronto, Squires' work includes individuals and organizations from across Canada.
Squires wisely distinguishes anti-draft activism from the antiwar movement. This is not a book about Canadian op- position to America's war in Vietnam, but rather the Canadians who supported those Americans who came to Canada rather than remain complicit in an im- moral war. She challenges what she calls the myth that Canada acted as "a refuge from militarism." In reality the Canadian state worked hard to keep many of these prospective immigrants out of the country. Squires argues that in...