The Current

Post Trump win, Don Sawyer is moving back to Canada

Many Americans — both celebrities and everyday citizens — have vowed to move to Canada if Donald Trump won the election. But how many really will now that the Trump White House is imminent? Duel-citizen Don Sawyer is booking his flight right away.
Canadian Don Sawyer who lives in Alabama says the election results are sending him back home. (Courtesy of Don Sawyer)

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Canadian Don Sawyer has lived in Alabama for three years as a dual-citizen.

After the election results, he says he can't live with Trump as president and is heading home.

"I'm looking for flights right away," Sawyer tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.

"I probably will be flying up to Toronto in the next week."

Sawyer says after enduring hateful rhetoric, bigotry and demagoguery over the last eight months, the news that Trump won "was like being kicked in the stomach."  
Trump received 65 per cent of the vote in Alabama. (Winnipeg Free Press)

"We've lived in Canada for 40 years and it's been hard to deal with a society particularly in the deep south where racism and bigotry ... is just below the surface."

He tells Tremonti that Fairhope, where he lives, is not what he anticipated.

"We had hoped that we'd be moving into a community ... where blacks and whites would be living in ... real harmony and it's just not happening."

The neighbourhood is so clearly, racially divided that there are even separate churches and separate graveyards.

"In one case, a good friend of mine, it was the first time he'd been downtown  — he's 69 years old — since he was 16."

"I mean you're living in an apartheid society that I'm not accustomed to. It's not Canadian."

While Sawyer says he will miss the wonderful friends he has made, he's happy to create some space from what he's leaving behind.

"You can't run away from it but at least you can put a little distance between you and the worst of it."

Listen to the full conversation.

This segment was produced by The Current's Ines Colabrese.