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rfmcdonaldThe 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.
You know that this is a massive shift, right?
Brian Ray observed in May 2002 for Migration Information that Canada's immigration policies were once quite restrictive.
This changed, however:
Previous waves of immigrants tended to be distributed more-or-less evenly across Canada, but the current wave of immigrants is concentrated in a handful of Canadian metropolises.
This helped accentuate serious problems in Canadian federalism, as the country finds itself divided between a collection of declining rural areas and booming urban areas which lack institutional structures. Again in 2002, Andrew Sancton, writing for Inroads, argued that needed to be included in federal and provincial government affairs, but how to do that? And in the background will be this remarkable demographic shift.
What makes this especially exciting is the experience I had on Labour Day, when, at a quarter to noon, I set forth on an eastward trip by foot down Queen Street West. I'd intended to take the streetcar, but I'd forgotten that a Labour Day prarade would proceed down that street. Before I got very far, I doubled back to pick up my forgotten Metropass and decided to walk north to Dundas Street to take that streetcar. Past Ossington, however, Dundas was gridlocked, and frustrated I disembarked and walked to St. Patrick.
That whole episode reminded me of how radically mass transit alters the fabric of Toronto. Toronto is, as is often said, a city of neighbourhoods, territorially or ethnically defined. Absent mass transit, Toronto's neighbourhoods--and Torontonians themselves--would be atomized, would constitute not a broad and heterogeneous community but simply an aggregate. By foot or by vehicle, unrelated people would go about their unrelated businesses in unrelated directions. The streetcars and buses which go west-east and north-south in the city’s heart, the subways which direct people from Toronto’s outskirts into the downtown and vice versa, the rapid-transit trains which make the city of Toronto the nucleus of the protoplasmic mass of the GTA--they go a wonderfully long way towards knotting a community into existence, pinching it into shape, forcing its components to mix mechanically.
Toronto is a locus. Imagine, if you would, that Canada sharply restricted immigration from the 1960s on to traditional immigrant sending countries, to western and northern Europe, to southern Europe out of Cold War solidarity, to central and eastern Europe out of Cold War sympathy, and perhaps to a further few countries of suitable ethnic and racial composition. There would have been no installation of vast South Asian or Chinese communities, comparatively insignificant Hindu or Muslim minorities. Canada's cities would still have needed labourers, of course. Likely, given past and present income disparities, these migrants would have come from Canada’s rural hinterlands--it might well have been the abundance of Asian and Caribbean immigrants in the past two generations which kept the Atlantic Canadian population from shrinking due to emigration. This Canada, and particularly this Toronto, would be whiter, more ethnically homogeneous by far, perhaps somewhat poorer. That didn't happen, though. Instead, we got a Canada plugged entirely into the networks of globalization.
I asked, in my second Arrival Day posting on Canada’s Jewish community, how, in the absence of persecution and in the presence of a carelessly agglutinative culture, any diasporic-type community could preserve the close social networks necessary for its existence. Judging by Canada’s past, it’s tremendously difficult to do that. My parents' generation can remember a time when the category of WASP didn’t exist, when English and Scottish and Irish and Catholic and Protestant and different types of Protestant each maintained their own stubborn internal solidarities. Ascherson argues quite cogently that multiculturalism is only an interim solution, suitable for the early stages of a community’s presence within a country’s borders but not for the later ones. Multiculturalism validates the presence of cultures lacking the perceived legitimacies of native acceptance, but it provides relatively poor solutions to the later stages of cultures’ presence, risking (as Bissoondath argued) the fetishizing of traditional cultures and the shoehorning of people into circumscribed boxes.
Toronto’s multiculturalism isn’t going to be static. Toronto is moving in some direction, something radically innovative. When I, someone who qualifies as almost painfully WASP, lives in a neighbourhood populated mainly by Portuguese and other Lusophones, with large Caribbean (Indo- and Afro- both), Vietnamese, and eastern European minorities, on top of the added complexities of sexual orientation, something’s happening. Something new will come about. Once in the 1970s, an unwise Franco-Ontarian activist condemned the migration of Ontario's Francophones from their demographic heartland in the rural and somewhat poor and unattractive north to the cities of southern Ontario. He called these cities, very imperfect places to maintain any closed or autonomous communities, fours crematories. Said activist is a git, of course, but he's right in the sense that Toronto's a very bad place to try to preserve a closed cultural tradition.
Sooner or later, fusion will happen, or rather, will happen more completely than it has now. I want to be here to see what emerges.
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?
Brian Ray observed in May 2002 for Migration Information that Canada's immigration policies were once quite restrictive.
Beginning in the late 19th century, Canada began to adopt policy measures to manage immigration. From relatively free entry between 1867 to 1895, a host of Orders-in-Council, the Immigration Acts of 1910, 1919 and 1952, and the Chinese Immigration Act (1923) formalized an immigration system and restricted admission to "white" British, European and American applicants to the exclusion of migrants from the rest of the world who could not trace their racial/ethnic origins to Europe.
This changed, however:
Beginning in 1962, regulatory changes were introduced that overturned the most blatantly racist dimensions of Canadian policy, while the completely rewritten Immigration Act of 1976 ushered in a new era in immigrant determination processes and officially made Canada a destination for all migrants. The 1976 Act was constructed around three pillars of admission: independent applicants assessed on the basis of points awarded for employment skills, education, and language abilities rather national or "racial" origin; sponsorship by close family members; and refugee status.
Previous waves of immigrants tended to be distributed more-or-less evenly across Canada, but the current wave of immigrants is concentrated in a handful of Canadian metropolises.
Immigration and ethnocultural diversity in many ways are metropolitan, rather than national, aspects of life in Canada. For instance, 42 percent of Toronto's population was born abroad, making it one of the most important sites of immigrant settlement in North America. Similarly, 35 percent of Vancouver's population and 18 percent of Montréal's was born outside of Canada, and in Québec, Montréal is truly the immigration metropolis -- almost 90 percent of all immigrants in the province live in metropolitan Montréal.
This helped accentuate serious problems in Canadian federalism, as the country finds itself divided between a collection of declining rural areas and booming urban areas which lack institutional structures. Again in 2002, Andrew Sancton, writing for Inroads, argued that needed to be included in federal and provincial government affairs, but how to do that? And in the background will be this remarkable demographic shift.
What makes this especially exciting is the experience I had on Labour Day, when, at a quarter to noon, I set forth on an eastward trip by foot down Queen Street West. I'd intended to take the streetcar, but I'd forgotten that a Labour Day prarade would proceed down that street. Before I got very far, I doubled back to pick up my forgotten Metropass and decided to walk north to Dundas Street to take that streetcar. Past Ossington, however, Dundas was gridlocked, and frustrated I disembarked and walked to St. Patrick.
That whole episode reminded me of how radically mass transit alters the fabric of Toronto. Toronto is, as is often said, a city of neighbourhoods, territorially or ethnically defined. Absent mass transit, Toronto's neighbourhoods--and Torontonians themselves--would be atomized, would constitute not a broad and heterogeneous community but simply an aggregate. By foot or by vehicle, unrelated people would go about their unrelated businesses in unrelated directions. The streetcars and buses which go west-east and north-south in the city’s heart, the subways which direct people from Toronto’s outskirts into the downtown and vice versa, the rapid-transit trains which make the city of Toronto the nucleus of the protoplasmic mass of the GTA--they go a wonderfully long way towards knotting a community into existence, pinching it into shape, forcing its components to mix mechanically.
Toronto is a locus. Imagine, if you would, that Canada sharply restricted immigration from the 1960s on to traditional immigrant sending countries, to western and northern Europe, to southern Europe out of Cold War solidarity, to central and eastern Europe out of Cold War sympathy, and perhaps to a further few countries of suitable ethnic and racial composition. There would have been no installation of vast South Asian or Chinese communities, comparatively insignificant Hindu or Muslim minorities. Canada's cities would still have needed labourers, of course. Likely, given past and present income disparities, these migrants would have come from Canada’s rural hinterlands--it might well have been the abundance of Asian and Caribbean immigrants in the past two generations which kept the Atlantic Canadian population from shrinking due to emigration. This Canada, and particularly this Toronto, would be whiter, more ethnically homogeneous by far, perhaps somewhat poorer. That didn't happen, though. Instead, we got a Canada plugged entirely into the networks of globalization.
I asked, in my second Arrival Day posting on Canada’s Jewish community, how, in the absence of persecution and in the presence of a carelessly agglutinative culture, any diasporic-type community could preserve the close social networks necessary for its existence. Judging by Canada’s past, it’s tremendously difficult to do that. My parents' generation can remember a time when the category of WASP didn’t exist, when English and Scottish and Irish and Catholic and Protestant and different types of Protestant each maintained their own stubborn internal solidarities. Ascherson argues quite cogently that multiculturalism is only an interim solution, suitable for the early stages of a community’s presence within a country’s borders but not for the later ones. Multiculturalism validates the presence of cultures lacking the perceived legitimacies of native acceptance, but it provides relatively poor solutions to the later stages of cultures’ presence, risking (as Bissoondath argued) the fetishizing of traditional cultures and the shoehorning of people into circumscribed boxes.
Toronto’s multiculturalism isn’t going to be static. Toronto is moving in some direction, something radically innovative. When I, someone who qualifies as almost painfully WASP, lives in a neighbourhood populated mainly by Portuguese and other Lusophones, with large Caribbean (Indo- and Afro- both), Vietnamese, and eastern European minorities, on top of the added complexities of sexual orientation, something’s happening. Something new will come about. Once in the 1970s, an unwise Franco-Ontarian activist condemned the migration of Ontario's Francophones from their demographic heartland in the rural and somewhat poor and unattractive north to the cities of southern Ontario. He called these cities, very imperfect places to maintain any closed or autonomous communities, fours crematories. Said activist is a git, of course, but he's right in the sense that Toronto's a very bad place to try to preserve a closed cultural tradition.
Sooner or later, fusion will happen, or rather, will happen more completely than it has now. I want to be here to see what emerges.
