FIRST READING: Another ‘elbows up’ celebrity swears allegiance to the U.S.

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In March, folk singer Joni Mitchell accepted her Juno lifetime achievement award with a speech that consisted mostly of praise for Prime Minister Mark Carney.

“We are so fortunate to have him,” she said of Carney, who stood alongside her on Hamilton’s TD Coliseum stage. The prime minister had presented her the award “on behalf of all Canadians.”

Gesturing to Carney, Mitchell, 82, added “we are so lucky” and referred to Carney as “our wonderful prime minister.”

“This man is a blessing; you guys are so fortunate,” she said.

Just six months later, Mitchell officially announced that she had finally obtained her U.S. citizenship.

“A journey that began 62 years ago,” wrote Mitchell against an image of her waving a tiny U.S. flag in a California office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday.

Although she remains a dual citizen, like all newly minted Americans, Mitchell would have cited an oath explicitly forswearing her birth country and its king.

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen,” reads the first line of the official U.S. citizenship oath.

In doing so, Mitchell joins a coterie of Canadian-born celebrities who are known to be loudly Canadian when politically convenient, but are otherwise taxpaying, full-time residents of the United States.

During the 2025 federal election, Scarborough-born comedian Mike Myers appeared in a campaign TV ad with Carney popularizing the term “elbows up.”

“I’ll always be Canadian,” he tells Carney on a set rigged to resemble the sidelines of a hockey game.

Myers has lived full-time in the U.S. since 1988, and it was as recently as 2022 that he became emotional in describing his new status as a U.S. citizen.

“I’m an American citizen now, gratefully so,” Myers said in an interview on the daytime program Live with Kelly and Mark.

Myers described giving a speech to his son about “what a great country this is,” and praised its “very strong ideals.”

“I don’t take it lightly at all; it’s a very, very important thing to me,” he said.

Singer-songwriter Neil Young issued an official endorsement of Carney in the 2025 election, describing him as the best hope for “our great country, Canada.”

“I believe you are the person our country needs to lead us through this crazy situation and bring us out the other side as a stronger, smarter, more resilient Canada, our core values of caring and fairness and generosity intact, along with our souls,” he wrote.

At the time, Young hadn’t lived full-time in Canada since 1966, save for a few lengthy stays at a vacation home outside Omemee, Ont., his childhood hometown.

Just five years prior, Young had taken the U.S. citizenship oath, posting an image of himself saluting the U.S. flag and including the caption “I’m happy to report I’m in.”

In an earlier era, it was hockey great Wayne Gretzky who was weighing in on the political situation of a country he hadn’t inhabited in several decades.

At a rally during the 2015 election, Gretzky described then prime minister Stephen Harper as an “unreal prime minister” who had “been wonderful to all the country.”

Gretzky hasn’t lived full-time in Canada since 1988, when he was traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the LA Kings. All five of his children were born in the U.S. and live there full time. Although, Gretzky himself has refused to obtain U.S. citizenship.

“I never became an American citizen. I’m Canadian,” Gretzky said in a podcast interview last November, at the height of controversy that he had attended U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

Which is not to say that there are not Canadian celebrities with large U.S. followings who have nevertheless decided to remain as full-time Canadian residents.

Rush frontman Geddy Lee recently weighed in on the Toronto mayoral election, endorsing Brad Bradford, the centre-right challenger to incumbent Olivia Chow.

Born in Toronto, Lee retains his primary residence in the city’s Rosedale neighbourhood. In his endorsement, Lee said Toronto was “changing, and not for the better.”

Novelist Margaret Atwood also remains a full-time Toronto resident, even if her most notable work, The Handmaid’s Tale, retains its largest audience in the U.S.

As does Drake; his $100-million Toronto mansion ranking as one of the most expensive private homes in the country.

Rocker Bryan Adams, like Joni Mitchell and Mike Myers, has similarly met with Carney; the two had coffee in Thunder Bay, Ont., last month and were seen visiting the Terry Fox Monument together. It came only a few months after Adams released “51st State,” his protest song against Trump’s musings about Canada annexation.

Although, unlike Carney’s other celebrity encounters, Adams didn’t have to cross the U.S. border for the occasion.

According to 2012 profile, the Kingston-born musician lived full time in the Chelsea neighbourhood of London, U.K. Although he’s since settled in Vancouver, citing Brexit as his reason for leaving England.

In a recent interview on CPAC, India’s High Commissioner to Canada, Dinesh Patnaik, casually threw out his rough plan to send about 15 million Indian nationals to Canada over the next 10 years.

This would easily represent the most disruptive demographic shift of modern times. Not just for Canada, but for any other Western nation. The only real equivalent would be scenarios in the 18th and 19th centuries when Indigenous populations were overwhelmed by waves of European settlement.

In short, Patnaik is describing an influx equivalent to 35 per cent of the current Canadian population.

For context, after more than 125 years of incremental growth and development in the four Western Canadian provinces (Alberta, Manitoba, B.C. and Saskatchewan), the region’s combined population comes to about 13 million – still two million short of the Patnaik figure.

Put another way, the United States could evacuate its 10 smallest states and resettle their populations on Canadian soil, and the influx still wouldn’t be as overwhelming as what Patnaik is describing.

As of the most recent figures, if the populations of Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming all decamped for Canada, the total migration would come to about 11.3 million.

Put still another way, the global rate of population growth is currently about 1.2 per cent per year. If Canada followed through with Patnaik’s proposal, Canadian population growth would spike to 3.6 per cent, triple the global average.

Patnaik arrived at his 15 million figure based on his formula that every billion dollars of investment creates 15,000 jobs. So, if Prime Minister Mark Carney makes good on his plan to attract $1 trillion of investment to Canada, according to Patnaik, this will necessarily require an extra 15 million workers.

“So 15 million people you’ll need.  You have 21 million workforce reducing every year by 186,000, so I don’t have to do the math for you,” he said. “Canada understands this. Prime Minister Carney’s team understands this.”’

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.