US actress Sharon Gless is best known as Cagney in the vintage TV series Cagney and Lacey (for those of us who can remember back that far). Last weekend’s Globe and Mail included a more timely report on her current struggles to officially immigrate to Canada.

Ms. Gless does not want to be confused “with every American who’s coming in here because they don’t like Bush. I don’t like Bush, either, and you can write it down. But I started this two years ago.” However, her case was raised in parliament at Ottawa, shortly after its appearance in the self-proclaimed national newspaper. It has become an issue of sorts, on the first kinder and gentler most northerly shock waves of the 2004 US election.

The quick background is that Gless and her husband, producer Barney Rosenzweig, have been working in Toronto’s now somewhat high-dollar-damaged branch of Hollywood North for the past several years. (It also nicely fits the current crop of misleading media stereotypes that the main project involved is what Campbell Clark at the Globe calls “the edgy Showtime series Queer as Folk.”)

Having developed a “love affair with Toronto,” more than a year ago now Ms. Gless and Mr. Rosenzweig decided to formally immigrate and become Canadians, as everyone who loves Toronto ought to want to be. Yet as matters stand, their official applications still remain in a to-do pile at the offices of the Canadian consulate in Buffalo. And now that we’ve heard about it in the national news, more than a few Canadians are starting to wonder just what’s going on.

Campbell Clark’s piece in the Globe drew special attention to Canada’s current “business immigrant” program, under which Gless and Rosenzweig have applied. According to Vancouver immigration lawyer and newsletter publisher Richard Kurland, Ottawa has been slowing down the “processing of business immigrants,” hoping that the program will “wither on the vine.”

The federal government has been taking “criticism for allowing investors to buy their way into Canada” for as little as $100,000. There has also apparently been “little enforcement” of business immigration rules that “entrepreneurs” admitted under the program actually establish job-creating businesses in the country.

Canadians who monitor US television regularly (a substantial majority of English-speaking and quite a few French-speaking Canadians too?) might be seeing the Gless case in a somewhat broader context. Shortly after George W. Bush’s narrow but clear enough November 2 victory in the red states of the USA, e.g., CNN carried a short story about how very politically glum blue-state residents who were thinking about moving to Canada should maybe think again.

Canadian immigration officials, CNN reported, were stressing that US citizens couldn’t just move to Canada, and then more or less automatically become Canadian citizens. They had to submit their immigration applications to their local Canadian consulates and then wait in line, like everyone else in the global village.

(And, as the Gless case would seem to suggest, they could be waiting for quite a while – if they’re applying as business immigrants, at any rate. “Skilled workers,” especially with higher education, are apparently more favoured right now.)

No doubt, the most immediate and visceral reaction of perhaps even a great many Canadians themselves to all this nowadays is just why not? Why can’t US citizens who so choose just move to Canada, and then more or less automatically become Canadian citizens – and vice-versa for Canadian citizens who choose to move to the United States?

There probably ought to be something like an established residency period in the new country before the new citizenship takes effect. Two years, say. But beyond that what is the big problem?

Of course all good Canadians also want Canada to remain a separate and independent country forever, with its own (modest) armed forces, foreign policy, public health care, English and French languages, aboriginal peoples of Canada, and so forth. That is just the Canadian version of the casual North American cultural “arrogance” that a witty blue-state blogger has recently called the “cornerstone of what it means to be American.” (Or, in the early 1950s lexicon of the Canadian economic historian Harold Innis, who did so much to inspire Marshall McLuhan, “our common North American heritage.”)

Yet as Canadian business and other travelers en route from, say, Europe to the United States will tell you, some American international airports nowadays have two lines for processing incoming airline passengers: one for citizens of the United States and Canada, and one for everyone else. It is naturally much easier and more convenient to be in the first line. And there are of course no vast or even small protests from Canadians subjected to such indignities.

One of the key US-Canada border concerns at the moment, from Canada’s standpoint, is to ensure that Canadian citizens, unlike the citizens of every other country in the world that is legally separate from and independent of the United States, are not going to have to be finger-printed (or whatever it is), when they enter the United States.

Until quite recently, the idea that it is at least prudent for Canadians to take their passports along when they plan to cross the line into the USA was ludicrous. (In the old days of the truly undefended border, way back in the 1950s, if you just said you were born in some particular part of Canada, and had recently taken a shower and had your car washed, you did not need any form of written documentation at all to cross from Canada into the United States.)

In the immediate wake of the 2004 election especially, there is much Canadian family sympathy for US residents of all the blue states contiguous to Canada, or contiguous to other blue states that are eventually contiguous to Canada, in the true north, strong and free. If Canada actually were part of the United States – with the present 10 Canadian Provinces just added to the present 50 States of the Union – there is little doubt that John Kerry would have defeated George W. Bush handily enough in the 2004 election.

If you look deeply, there is a rather mild approximation of the red-state/blue-state divide inside Canada itself. But the real roots of Canada’s often quite strident variations on North American regionalist themes are rather different.

According to a Leger Marketing poll, taken in late September 2004, 56% of all Canadians would have voted for Kerry in the US election, 19% would have voted for Bush, and 25% didn’t know or wouldn’t answer. Quebec was the strongest Canadian blue-state bastion, so to speak, with 69% for Kerry and only 11% for Bush. Then came British Columbia on the Pacific Coast (58% Kerry, 19% Bush), followed by Ontario, just east of Michigan and north of New York State (53% Kerry, 19% Bush), the Atlantic Provinces (49% Kerry, 28% Bush), oil-rich Alberta (45% Kerry, 27% Bush), and the Prairie Provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan (43% Kerry, 30% Bush).

Way back in 1855, when the American Civil War was brewing, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, actually did tell William Lyon Mackenzie, English-speaking leader of the Canadian rebellions of 1837: “The time is coming when those states that persist in deifying slavery will secede from the Union and I am for letting them go peacefully … Then I would like to form a union with Canada and have a Great Free Republic, the strongest and truest in the world.”

A century and a half later, the Philadelphia Inquirer and others have raised similar prospects in the wake of the 2004 US election, with their tongues of course very firmly in their cheeks. The notion of a new “United States of Canada” – Canada’s three territories and 10 provinces, plus the 19 contiguous blue states (and the District of Columbia) that voted for Kerry in 2004, all set beside “Jesusland” in the remaining 31 US red states – has been warmly received by a great many people of Canada. (And who says North Americans lack a sense of history?)

However, none of this did happen back in the 19^th century. And it is not going to happen today either. History has decreed that Canada is a separate and independent country, and that the South remains united with the North in the USA, the now long-dead wishes of Horace Greeley from New York notwithstanding.

In the global-village nirvana of the future, towards which we should all no doubt somehow be working, the citizens of any country who choose to do so ought to be able to move to any other country, and then, after some suitable but not too long period of established residency, become citizens of that new country, without a great deal of official fuss and bother.

Alas, the history of the early 21^st century has been rather pointedly reminding all of us everywhere that the global village we actually live in remains seriously enough entangled in a state of original sin. Even among the historic brothers and sisters of the United States and Canada it is still not quite possible for US citizens who so choose to just move to Canada, and then more or less automatically become Canadian citizens – and vice-versa for Canadian citizens who choose to move to the United States. Even inside North America, we the huddled masses of humanity have not yet progressed to quite this degree.

To take just one case in point, George W. Bush is paying an official visit to Ottawa this November 30 and December 1. The visit may even be a sign that the second administration of Bush the Younger intends to treat the separate and independent country on its northern border with at least a little more official warmth and respect than the first one did.

(Granted that Canada can be annoying, and, though geographically somewhat larger than the USA, has somewhat fewer actual people than the present most populous US blue State of California.)

In any case, it really wouldn’t do for any elected or appointed Canadian official to simultaneously announce – to CNN and all other such big and small US media outlets – that the Government of Canada will be very warmly welcoming every last one of those US citizens who most bitterly voted against the president in the 2004 election.

(And who are so despondent about the election result that they now want to move to Canada, where, as a recent list of Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada has pointed out, it does get rather cold in the winter. You do have to be a bit tough to live in the far north.)

The red Republicans themselves might of course be secretly very happy to see as many as possible of such voters move to Canada – where they won’t be able to vote for Hilary Clinton, or whoever the blue Democrat candidate is, in 2008. Even so, it still wouldn’t be proper and right at all for the Government of Canada to in any way officially encourage such movement. That would be even more arrogantly contemptuous of both the duly elected President and Congress of the United States than the first Younger Bush administration has sometimes been of Canada.

Yet none of this is finally any excuse for what do seem to be the quite outrageous delays that have attended the official Canadian processing of the immigration applications of Sharon Gless and Barney Rosenzweig – at this moment still languishing in some filing cabinet in Buffalo.

If Canada’s current business immigrant program needs to be aggressively reformed or even abolished, so be it. But while the program lives all such potential immigrants deserve the free and democratic courtesy of having their applications dealt with fairly and expeditiously.

And, apart from all the technicalities and bureaucratic bafflegab, what could possibly be wrong with allowing such candidates as Ms. Gless and Mr. Rosenzweig to become Canadians as quickly as possible? They have apparently been waiting more than a year just to get in line.

As we Canadians are perhaps still too slow to recognize, there is an old and unattractive side to Canada, and perhaps especially some branches of Canadian officialdom, that can aggressively display just as much narrow-minded and parochial tunnel vision as Canadians (and some blue-state Americans) often like to criticize in (red-state) Americans.

It is an embarrassment to all of us who are already fortunate enough to be Canadian citizens – and something that the next Canada ought to be growing out of, and leaving behind. And as quickly as possible here too.

Though of course nothing merely human is ever perfect in the end, even in the world’s closest two nations, in North America north of the Rio Grande. And even this is not the real North America of the future any more.

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A second Campbell Clark story on similar themes appeared in the Globe and Mail the day after the first one.