[URBAN NOTE] A Good Friday Procession

I find it mildly amusing that, in the three months that I've been dating the boyfriend, I've attended more Mass and other religious functions than I had in the previous three years. At least, I find it more amusing that while I was standing on College Street, east of Ossington in the heart of Little Italy, waiting for St. Francis of Assisi Church's Good Friday Via Dolorosa procession, I saw a poster advertising the similarly blood-obsessed Istvan Kantor (this one) plastered on a traffic metre.

It was an interesting event to watch, not only from the religious point of view. The participants in the procession circled a significant chunk of Little Italy, beginning and ending with St. Francis of Assisi Church, engaging in a Certeau-like inscription of religious faith onto the grey cold urban geography of west-central downtown Toronto. Participation was organized around confraternities and social clubs, each apparently organized around villages, towns or districts of origin for the first generation of Toronto's Italian-Canadians. One Italian artwork, apparently imported to Canada by an Italian government ministry concerned with the diaspora, was led down the street. There were possible signs that the procession was failing to serve as a bastion for Italian-Canadian group solidarity past the first generation.

• The procession included one Portuguese confraternity


• Most of the signage was in the English language.


• Most of the participants were at least middle-aged, though this might just mean that marching positions are reserved for the aged.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Our Multicultural Toronto

The picture on the front page of the Wednesday edition of The Globe and Mail was fairly familiar to me, a shot of a crowded streetcar. The headline above the title? "Visible majority by 2017." Jill Mahoney's article, referencing a recent Statistics Canada report, points out that things will be changing remarkably for the ethnic makeup of the Canadian population.

Statistics Canada said much of the country's population growth will be driven by visible minorities -- defined as 10 groups, including Chinese, South Asians, blacks, Filipinos and Latin Americans -- through immigration and higher fertility rates.

Using five different scenarios -- ranging from low to high immigration and fertility assumptions -- analysts project Canada will have 6.3 million to 8.5 million people of visible minorities in 2017, representing an increase of between 56 per cent and 111 per cent from 2001 levels, when they were estimated at four million.

By contrast, the rest of the population is expected to increase only by between 1 per cent and 7 per cent between 2001 and 2017.

Under the so-called reference scenario, which was modelled on patterns similar to those observed in 2001, immigrants would account for 22 per cent of the population by 2017. In 2001, when the last census was taken, immigrants comprised about 18 per cent.

In 2017, almost 75 per cent of visible minorities will live in Canada's three largest cities: Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, a situation similar to 2001.

Visible minorities would form more than half the population of greater Toronto -- already Canada's most multicultural city -- in 2017 in four of the five projections developed by Statscan.

In these scenarios, the estimated population of the Toronto metropolitan area census, which includes the city itself and some adjacent communities, lies between 6.3 million and 7.1 million, including anywhere from 3.2 million to 3.9 million non-whites.

You know that this is a massive shift, right?

( Want to know how massive? )