THESIS MARKET

The Changing Faces of Toronto. With a drastic demographic shift on the horizon , will our diversity remain a badge or become a burden? by Joe Friesen

From Saturday's Globe and MailPublished on Friday, Mar. 12, 2010 8:59PM ESTLast updated on Saturday, Mar. 13, 2010 3:19AM EST

Toronto once used vagrancy laws to harass Italian immigrants who wanted to stand outdoors and chat. It balked at sidewalk cafés and erected signs that said “No dogs or Jews allowed on the beach.”It was known as the Belfast of Canada, a place where the Orange Order and the Anglo-Saxon establishment reigned supreme.But repressive, staid, boring Toronto is in the midst of a stunning transformation. Today, people from all corners of the globe live side by side. They compete for jobs and space and influence. And the city hums along with a minimum of fuss. But there are those who warn that all may not be as we hope. They talk of troubling signs. There are neighbourhoods – ethnic enclaves – where immigrants need never learn to speak English or French, where they could live entire lives and rarely encounter someone from outside their ethnic group, the doubters say.The economic downturn has so far been relatively mild, but recessions often lead to tension over immigration. If things fall apart, will the city's motto, “Diversity our strength,” hold true?

THE FIRST GENERATION.Toronto opened its arms to Raj Jhajj on the day he immigrated in 1991 and embraced him with the half-hearted enthusiasm of a city that had been through this before. The young man from the polluted, industrial heart of the Indian Punjab had only eight dollars in his pocket and, predictably, a dream of a better life.He had worked as a tool-and-die maker in India, a highly specialized manufacturing skill, but Toronto was wary. It was the height of the recession and hard for anyone to find work, let alone an immigrant stymied by the Catch-22 of having no Canadian experience. Toronto accommodated him among the South Asian diaspora on its western edge. He drove a cab. He worked lonely shifts as a security guard. He struggled. He survived.Four years into his Canadian sojourn, Toronto succumbed and offered him the job he dreamed of, working as a machinist at the Chrysler plant in Brampton. It gave him the stability to settle down and start a family. He's since taken an undergraduate and graduate degree by distance education. At 45, he's a pillar of his community who raised thousands of dollars for a new hospital and pressured governments to get it built. He's active in politics and narrowly missed winning a federal Liberal nomination.When he thinks of what he left behind, he can only chuckle at the luxurious lives his children lead.“I was living in poverty that was like hell,” he said. “I used to beg to eat. These guys, I have to force them to eat.”Now he almost takes for granted that his children will go to university, graduate to a profession and join the establishment.But if there's one thing that nags at Mr. Jhajj, it's the concern that his children aren't getting the full Canadian experience. When they moved into their Brampton neighbourhood, the area was what he calls “mainstream,” a more or less representative mix of the Canadian mosaic. But over the last dozen years, the mainstream has moved out, he said, and now the street is almost entirely South Asian. It brings many advantages, he said, but he'd prefer to see the visible minority population distributed more evenly across the country.“I think it bothers others Canadians, which I can feel,” he said. “I want to see a Canadian city as a Canadian city where people are all together. … If Brampton keeps going this way we won't see the difference between living in Brampton and living in Asia, and that I don't like.”

ESTABLISHING COMMUNITIES.Ethnic enclaves have been a part of Toronto's history from the outset, and they've always been a source of worry for the Anglo establishment. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney makes a regular point of discussing the need to ensure that Canada doesn't become a country of ethnic silos or parallel communities. The first large group of ethnic immigrants to establish themselves in Toronto were the Jews, who lived in the Ward neighbourhood that centred roughly on present-day City Hall. Ryerson professor Myer Siemiatycki said the Ward, which was demolished to make way for downtown, was typically treated as a grave threat to the norms of the city and condemned as a slum.The Italians who established themselves on College Street were treated with the same suspicion. As were the Chinese in Chinatown. Today, those former ethnic enclaves are celebrated as colourful, desirable parts of the city.“It shows how the concerns of the past fade,” said University of Toronto sociologist Jeffrey Reitz. “People who were foreigners or strangers are now ‘us,' and that makes you optimistic that those arriving today will down the road be considered ‘us' and we'll look at the enclaves, the Chinese, the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean, the way we now look at the Italian enclaves or the Jewish enclaves, as just historic remnants of immigration history.”As Prof. Reitz argues, there are sound reasons for communities to agglomerate in a certain area. There's comfort to be had among those who can easily understand one's language and experience, and there's also the ease of finding places of worship and familiar goods for sale.“The settlement of new immigrants is vastly facilitated by the presence of ethnic communities that perform all sorts of social-service functions which if they didn't exist would fall to governments to provide,” Prof. Reitz said. “This is really private citizens solving public-policy problems through market behaviour.”

THE INCOME DILEMMA.The market poses other policy problems, however, that bode ill for the Toronto of 2031.Don Drummond, chief economist at TD Bank, said the evidence is overwhelming that recent immigrants are not integrating into the labour market as well as their predecessors.“Within five years [of arrival] immigrants used to make more than the Canadian-born, and every generation of immigrants used to make more than the previous one. Since 1981, all of that stuff is just falling further and further away,” Mr. Drummond said. “Immigrants are never catching up to Canadian earnings … even though they're better educated.”What changed over that period is that, with the end of racial discrimination in immigration policy in the late 1960s, Asia became far and away the largest source of immigrants. Roughly 75 to 80 per cent of immigrants over that period were visible minorities.

THE SECOND GENERATION. Even the children of more recent immigrants, who in some cases outperform the Canadian-born in school and are more likely to go on to post-secondary education, also lagged the Canadian-born in earnings in one study led by Mr. Drummond.“You hate to say it's racism. You could say maybe they don't have the context other people have. But yeah, it's certainly there as a possible explanation,” he said.Prof. Siemiatycki also underlines the challenge of ensuring the second generation has a platform to prosperity.“Immigrants expect to encounter adversity. They tend to be very forgiving of the host society,” he said. “With the second generation, legitimately, they will be less forgiving than their parents. They were born here. They went to school here. They have every reason to believe they're full and equal Canadians. When their experience suggests otherwise, they will have a bigger fall than their parents.”A little more than a quarter of Toronto's population will be second-generation Canadians in 2031, and about half will be first generation (meaning they were born elsewhere), according to Statscan predictions.

THE NEW DIFFICULTY: BLENDING IN.What's different for the present wave of immigrants, as opposed to earlier generations, is that they and their children may not blend in as easily as “Canadians” even years after their arrival, or years after being born in Canada. The issue of race, raised by the very fact that counting visible minorities is considered a job for the national statistics agency, may be ever present in their lives.Shabnum Budhwani, an Indo-Canadian mother of two who immigrated a little more than a decade ago, likes the fact that visible minorities are counted, but she hates the term.“First, it refers to your colour. You're being referred to by your skin, instead of as a person. Second, you're a minority … so it creates a suggestion that there are two kinds of Canadians.”Her daughters, both university students, consider themselves entirely Canadian. The same is true for Mr. Jhajj's kids, who are still in the public-school system, which Mr. Jhajj raves about as the best aspect of life in Canada.Many experts say that the ties of tolerance and understanding that Toronto has more or less successfully nurtured are forged in the city's schools and on its playing fields.

COPING WITH BACKLASH.However, Mr. Jhajj said he worries though that, should the Canadian economy get considerably worse, there will be a backlash against visible minorities, whether they're immigrants or long-time Canadians.“As long as Canada is growing there won't be problems with immigration. As soon as we run into economic problems, people will be looking for scapegoats,” he said. From time to time, moments of tension arise. There were the attacks on Asian fishermen north of Toronto, and allegations of racial profiling of blacks by Toronto police. But polls show that Canadians are still very favourably disposed toward high levels of immigration and the agitation over Muslim dress has so far been largely contained to Quebec. On the question of how Toronto is coping so far, Prof. Siemiatycki sums it up as a series of successes and warning signs.

“In terms of day-to-day life, this is a very civil, harmonious and diverse city. The number of daily exchanges that cross boundaries of race, language, religion, nationality, et cetera, are nothing short of extraordinary,” he said. “In an age of border crossings, the world needs examples of cities that can make it work.”