Deep in our history of struggle for freedom, Canada was the North Star. Thus, in 1967, did Martin Luther King Jnr recall Canada's role in the Underground Railway, the network of safe houses and secret routes that brought 30,000 runaway black slaves north to safety in the years before the US civil war. Canada has always been a sanctuary for the pursued, the disillusioned and the dispossessed. The North Star is as fitting a symbol of the country as the maple leaf - a beacon of safety for slaves, US draft dodgers, Vietnamese boat people and desperate Chinese mainlanders. Canada is the most refugee-friendly nation on Earth, a fact not lost on thousands of American citizens who today are despairing of their country in the wake of President George W. Bush's re-election. The day after the vote, the website for Canada's immigration and citizenship ministry reported 115,000 'hits' from the US - five times the daily average. A flood of applications for asylum has not started yet, but if people like Joe Auerbach are any indication, it may begin soon. Mr Auerbach, a 27-year-old systems analyst from Columbus, Ohio, has told friends he plans to move north. 'I don't want to be living in the US when China decides we are a threat and when George Bush starts drafting computer engineers into the army,' he said. There are people both north and south of the border who feel Canada is far too accommodating to refugees, especially those fleeing military service in the US. Most critics have little idea what kind of emotional and spiritual price these people pay. One of my closest friends in the early 1970s was an American named Jay. He was well educated, had a strong social conscience and loved his country. So much so that he enlisted in the army. But while in boot camp in California, he saw the headlines about the alarming casualties in Vietnam. The prospect of dying in the rice paddies of a faraway land so terrified him that he decided to flee. His father, a wealthy banker, financed his flight to Canada. He studied journalism, and became a highly regarded film critic. But Jay was damaged. The label 'deserter' tortured him. He had nightmares about friends killed in Vietnam - friends, he felt, who were dying in his stead. So when the US government declared an amnesty, he went home. But he was broken. Unlike Jay, more than half the estimated 125,000 draft dodgers and deserters in Canada ignored the amnesty and decided to make their homes here. Many have made significant contributions. But more than three decades later, all still carry the regret that their native country went morally astray. A generation later, that same emotion may spur another movement north.