Terri Clark has deep American roots but is so passionate about an independent Canada that this week she got the Kerrisdale BIA to haul 30 Canadian flags out of storage and hang them up on the streets
Terri Clark has deep American roots. She had ancestors who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower in 1620. One of her ancestors signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
“He’s the only one who put his address on,” she explains. “Charles Carroll. Everybody said, ‘Why did you put your address on?’ He said, ‘You know what? There are so many Carrolls in Maryland and Virginia, I want the King to know where to get my head, not anybody else’s.”
She still owns property in Connecticut, and votes in American elections. But she has lived in Vancouver since 1973, when she came north to marry Peter Clark, an Englishman she met in Mexico.
She has been civically engaged since she arrived in Canada. For many years, she was the head of communications for the Vancouver park board. She currently runs the Kerrisdale business improvement association.
Clark has never bothered to become a Canadian citizen, partly because she has such deep American roots.
But U.S. President Donald Trump’s taunts and threats to make Canada the 51st state have ticked her off so much that she has finally applied for Canadian citizenship, 52 years after moving to Vancouver.
“Trump has driven me to become a Canadian,” states Clark. “The irony is, if we lose this battle, I’ll be an American again. But you know what? We’re not going to lose the battle. We’re not going to lose it.”
It sounds like a speech out of the movie classic Casablanca. She is so passionate about Canada retaining its independence from the U.S. that this week she got the Kerrisdale BIA to haul 30 Canadian flags out of storage and hang them up on the streets.
“I feel so strongly about it,” she said, while dismissing the 51st state talk as “ridiculous.”
“He’s after our minerals. He’s after our access to the Arctic. He’s after our water. I’ve said right from the start that’s what he’s after.”
She has submitted the forms to become a Canadian citizen and hopes she meets the grade for citizenship. But she also plans to stay an American citizen.
“I’m not denouncing my U.S. citizenship. I file income tax every year,” she said. “But my loyalty is to Canada, and I will treasure the right to vote.”
Clark was born in Danbury, Connecticut, and grew up in Patterson, New York, whose claim to fame was it was home to actors Robert Montgomery and his daughter Elizabeth (of the TV show Bewitched).
Clark went to American University in Washington, D.C.
“I really wanted to go into diplomacy,” she relates. “But we found out really early on that they didn’t really want women in diplomacy at that point.”
So she switched to communications. On a photography trip to Mexico, she got access inside Santa Prisca Cathedral in Taxco, where she met her future husband.
“This really good-looking guy and good-looking woman come to the door (of the cathedral),” she said. “They’re standing at a sign that says, in Spanish, ‘Your women have to cover their heads.’ So we yelled over, ‘That just means that your wife has to cover her head.’ And he said, ‘This isn’t my wife.’
“We all said, ‘Well, hello.’ Anyway, long story short, I married that guy. He was English, living in Canada.”
She applied to come to Canada to join him, but was rejected before her father (“a small-time politician in New York”) phoned Jacob Javits, the senator from New York, and got her in.
She came to Vancouver on her 23rd birthday on March 30, 1973. She hopes to celebrate her 75th birthday as a Canadian citizen, but it will probably take a few months longer.
