IF CANADA WAS SOUTH OF US…

Boy, my beloved hit it right on the nose. Full facial. Spot on. Nailed it.

She doesn’t have any use for our president. Nor do I.

He was elected. I know. I got that memo.

He lost the popular vote by…well, on December 22, 2016 Huffpost’s Nick Wing updated a report stating it was by 3 million ballots cast, give or take.

With 50-state certification and including Washington, D.C., Hil won 65,844,610 votes or 48.2% and the Donald won 62,979,636 votes or 46.1%. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman substantiated those numbers as well as these: there were 7,804,213 official ballots cast for others, or roughly 5.7% of the popular vote.

Then there is this, or was.

The electoral vote.

Donald J. Trump won the Electoral College with 306 votes to Clinton’s 232; 270 votes are needed to secure the victory.

Seven electors, the most ever, voted for someone other than their party’s nominee. Actually, of 306 electors pledged to vote for Trump, 304 voted for him and 2 voted for someone else. Of 232 electors pledged to vote for Clinton, 227 voted for her and 5 voted for someone else.

A breakdown of the seven protesting electors — who incidentally are not bound by the Constitution to vote for a particular candidate though their pledge-breaking dissent can result in a fine or their replacement — shows that in Washington — pledged to Clinton — 3 of the state’s 12 electoral votes went to former Republican Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and 1 was cast for Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American leader and chairwoman of the Yankton (S.D.) Sioux Tribe’s treaty council.

(The last time an elector voted for a candidate from another party was in 1972, when a Republican from Virginia voted for Libertarian candidate John Hospers rather than for eventual winner, Richard Milhous Nixon).

One Democratic elector in Hawaii voted for Bernie Sanders and two Texas electors voted for different Republican politicians: Governor John Kasich of Ohio and former Texas congressman Ron Paul.

Some six months after Trump made regrettable history the wounds are still open and raw, understandably. Wounds do not heal when salt is constantly applied, minute by minute; hour by hour; day to day. Gaping holes can not close this way.

What to do?

Canada, long thought to be a safe haven for those oppressed and mistreated in either reality or perception, has a rich history generally and surely in this particular context.

And the river runs both ways.

History informs us, as USA TODAY’s David Massell ably points out, that not only did “nearly 1 million French Canadians [seek] work in an industrializing New England between 1840 and 1930, for example…[but] since the 1920’s, an occasional ‘brain drain’ of knowledge workers, from physicians to engineers to entertainers, has drifted south.”

The reverse course has been charted since the American Revolution and the Loyalists.

The Loyalists after the war fled to British Canada — to the tune of roughly 40,000 — in an effort to escape violence, persecution, the denial of civil rights and (wrongful?) imprisonment perpetrated on American soil. The Iroquois went to Ontario, the Black Loyalists to the Canadian Maritimes. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act mandated that all captured slaves in the northern free states be returned to their southern masters and Canada became the favored landing spot.

Then Sitting Bull was front and center, as in Lakota Chief Sitting Bull.

During the Indian Wars on the Great Plains the chief fled with his people to Canada — which he dubbed, “Grandmother’s country” in homage to Queen Victoria — to break free from harassment by the U.S. Army.

The stay was short and upon their return to the United States, Sitting Bull was murdered and his people were impounded on the Standing Rock reservation in the Dakotas.

And resistance to the Vietnam War brought tens of thousands of draft dodgers across the international border where humanitarian organizations popped up right and left in cities from Vancouver to Montreal to welcome with open arms those who decided to journey north.

Massell concludes by noting that for more than 200 years “Americans who have felt persecuted have fled north to what they view as a more welcoming and tolerant democracy [and] today, we may be witnessing another chapter in that sad history.”

As long as Canadians are not tempted to build their own border wall, we should be alright.

Although as my beloved has observed — begrudgingly conceding that you can’t have everything — warmer climes wouldn’t be so horrible either.

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in May 2017.]