As President Obama was attacking Mitt Romney for supposedly “outsourcing” jobs when he ran Bain Capital (a charge disputed by The Washington Post’s fact checker), tens of thousands of Americans were fleeing the Obama economy to find work in Canada.

“Skilled U.S. workers are coming to Canada in ever greater numbers, driven out by high unemployment at home, and tempted in by job shortages in key sectors like Alberta’s growing energy sector,” Reuters reported last week.

“Government figures show that Canada issued 34,185 temporary work permits to Americans last year, just shy of the record 35,060 handed out in 2010, and officials expect that number to keep growing.”

Why will it keep growing? Because the U.S. job market is not growing, while Canada’s is.

In the Obama economy, according to news reports this year, blue-collar Americans are fleeing north by the thousands to find work, Mexican immigrants are returning to their home country to find work because the prospects are so bad here, and more of America’s wealthiest are fleeing to Asia to protect their assets from the reach of the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, consumer confidence is down for the second straight month.

“The greatest concern to consumers is that wage and job growth will remain depressed over the foreseeable future, and that these meager gains are likely to be further diminished in the years ahead by rising taxes and benefit cutbacks,” Richard Curtin, who directed the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of consumers, said last week.

President Obama offers nothing that will reverse these trends and bring employment and investment back to the United States. So he tries to distract the people by calling Romney an outsourcer. The irony is that America will continue losing jobs and workers to other countries, with no end in sight, if Obama’s trick works.