For the past four years, Canada has been voted the best country in the world to live in. I’m not sure who is doing all this voting. Nobody really asked me, although I probably would have agreed.
But lately, I have started to hear rumblings about life in several of Canada’s large cities where the overwhelming majority of the people live, and where many of the people emigrating to this country choose to live.
We are probably, along with the US, one of the more ethnically diverse countries in the world. That has its upsides because many of the people who emigrated here voluntarily brought parts of their culture with them, and that made for a more colourful country.
But there is a downside in that people who come here from other places generally move into neighbourhoods that have people they have a lot in common with ethnically.
I grew up in a small town on the Niagara River called Erie. Then by way of Ottawa for a couple of years, I spent the next fifty years in Toronto. During that time, we were always aware of the different cultural influences, but these influences always felt quite benign. There weren’t too many areas of Toronto that you could visit and feel threatened in any way. In short, everything felt like Toronto. Even the people who didn’t speak English all that well understood it and everybody seemed to get along.
Sure we had gangs. Most of them were tongs, which was a kind of suburban thing, and it certainly didn’t have any adverse effect on people who lived down in the city.
Every so often you would hear about break-ins and assaults by these gangs. A lot of us just wrote it to living in a large city. Sooner or later this stuff was bound to occur. But as Toronto grew and expanded, the frequency of these crimes and the level of racism started to grow right along with it.
When we left, almost eight years ago now, to move to the other side of the lake, (St Catharines), all of this stuff was in its infancy and the city we left was very much like the city I arrived in fifty years earlier albeit quite a bit larger.
Over the last several years, however, there has been a new influx of people, especially from the Middle East and Eastern Europe. These people have been displaced by wars and probably would have stayed in their countries if there had been peace. They are not the kinds of immigrants we are used to; those who planned their move had relatives to sponsor them and had a pretty good idea of what they would do to be productive citizens when they got here.
This new migration is a whole different kettle of fish and it’s causing problems in many different communities. It’s also putting a huge financial strain on our government. which, I believe, wanted to do the right thing from a humanitarian aid point of view.
And now here we are with more cultural unrest than we are used to. And it’s hardest in the bigger cities because the opportunities for working-class refugees are much harder to come by than they were for the professional and entrepreneurial immigrants in the past.
Eventually, if this continues and the major countries of the world stop feuding with each other in that Cold War soup they all swim in, some peace could be restored and a period of reconstruction could begin.
If that were to happen I would not at all be surprised if a great many refugees would want to go back home and help put their countries back together.
But this is not the best of all possible worlds these days, even though Canada is still one of the best places in the world to live. And we are far from the only progressive and peaceful country to be experiencing problems from this relatively recent wave of immigration.
But we’re all human beings here, and frankly, most of us in North America have no idea what it’s like to live right smack in the middle of a war zone.
A little compassion in this regard would go a long way.
