Oh, say can you see all the ambitious, talented Canadians filtering relentlessly across the 49th parallel, leaving behind a shrivelled husk of a country?

Well, the picture is not quite that dramatic, and not nearly so simplistic. Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson was born an American, but has lived most of his life in Canada as a Canadian citizen, and has maintained an interest in comparing the two countries. For this book Simpson has interviewed a great many of the Canucks who’ve surged south in search of a larger, more lucrative stage on which to strut their stuff. Star-Spangled Canadians presents Canadians pursuing careers in health, academia, business, entertainment, and journalism in the U.S. Simpson devotes chapters to the history of cross-border migration, differences between Americans and Canadians, and the long history of Quebecois emigration.

In one of his weaker forays, he also looks at Canadians pursuing lives of crime in the U.S., using the chapter as a thinly disguised soapbox for predictable, conservative views about the criminal justice system. However, aside from Simpson’s over-enthusiastic application of qualitative research, and his annoyingly relentless use of the phrase “star-spangled Canadians,” this is an informative and timely book that combines both economic and cultural analysis.

In “Brain Drain,” one of his best chapters, Simpson shows that more Canadians actually emigrated to the States three or four decades ago than have done so recently – even though the last half of the 1990s saw a “sharp upsurge in public debate about … the loss of professionally qualified people” to the U.S. Simpson feels public perception has been skewed, in part because politicians, business groups, and medical associations have deployed the statistics to their own ends. He reminds us that Canada also experiences a considerable “brain gain” via “immigration of talent from abroad.”

Still, Star-Spangled Canadians may prove a useful primer to globalized young Canucks for whom fame/fortune ranks above simple (they would say naive) allegiance to birthplace.