The rain that came last week to California may have averted the beginning of a mass exodus to Canada. According to Richmond writer Giles Slade in his 2013 book, American Exodus: Climate Change and the Coming Flight for Survival, the changing climate in North America will inevitably create such horrible droughts that Americans and Mexicans by the hundreds of thousands will swarm into Canada, and there is nothing we can do about it. Thank goodness Mother Nature has temporarily postponed the exodus. Of course, Slade’s book is only one of a number of warnings about our neighbours to the south. Others have written that the need for water in California and elsewhere in the U.S. will create a reason for military invasion of Canada. Then there are those who say that increased gun violence, genetically modified food, class/race warfare, and/or fear of the zombie apocalypse will send Americans scurrying across our border, bringing with them all the Yankee propensities and characteristics that we love: celebrity worship, unlimited political campaign contributions and cheap cheese, among others.There would of course be a few benefits of such an invasion. Gullible foreign workers would no longer fall victim to vicious human traffickers. The Snakeheads and Coyotes who sell vulnerable men and women into virtual slavery would find themselves out of business. American and Mexican workers already work for almost nothing and therefore there would be no need to smuggle in cheaper labour into Canada. A related benefit for all the free enterprise conservatives would be the validation of their most deeply held belief. That is: The free market system, if allowed to work without restraint, leads to massive increases in wealth. Not for everyone, of course, but for the most worthy, a group that is easy to identify since in modern society one’s degree of worthiness corresponds almost exactly with the degree of extravagance with which one displays one’s wealth. Slade’s solution for Canadians is not to resist, but to go north and hide. Find a place to move the family and leave the south to the invaders. In this he sounds like many U.S. politicians in the 1840’s who wanted to annex almost all of what is now B.C to the United States under the concept of Manifest Destiny. “Fifty-four forty or fight!” was their cry, meaning that they wanted everything south of the 54° 40’ parallel or roughly Burns Lake. Lucky for us, the British didn’t give in. My neighbours homesteaded in Burns Lake 25 years ago; they tell me it’s nicer here. A better solution would be to build an eight lane super highway from Washington to Alaska with government subsidized fast food outlets every 10 miles and no exits until it reached Fairbanks. Pay Oprah’s network and Entertainment Tonight to advertise it, and, voilá, the invasion of Canada instantly becomes Sarah Palin’s problem.