Is Canada really the multicultural mosaic we want to believe it is? Well yes and no.
I moved to Toronto ten years ago from the UK. And there it’s true. My dentist is an Asian from the Caribbean. In my daughters’ elementary school the majority of children didn’t have English as their first language – their friends came from Latvia, Jamaica, Sri Lanka amongst many others. Locally I have a choice of food from anywhere from Poland to Ethiopia. We celebrate the Ukrainian Festival, Caribbana, the Taste of the Danforth. According to the 2006 Census 43% of the population belongs to a visible minority.
But I also have a cottage in Haliburton. There, according to the Census, there are 165 people who belong to a visible minority, or 1% of the population. Yes 1% vs. 43%. As they say, you don’t see too many black faces on the dock. But don’t get me wrong. The people of Haliburton are not unsophisticated – there has been an explosion of high quality restaurants; the local radio station, if sometimes delightfully amateur, is more intelligent than most Toronto alternatives; there is a thriving local arts scene.
But it is not multicultural. Ethnic food is hard to find. The artists are mostly white. You rarely hear other languages spoken.
The fact is there are two Canadas. Not French speaking vs. English. Montreal has its own thriving multiculturalism, albeit not as pronounced as Toronto or Vancouver. The Laurentians are ethnically as white as Haliburton.
The real split is cities vs. rural Canada.
One, the cities, where the majority of the media live, where 96% of all visible minorities live, where the great multiculturalism experiment is happening; and the other, rural Canada, where 2% of the population is a visible minority, where the media visit but don’t live, where non-white people stand out as different.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we shouldn’t believe our own mythology about Canada being the great cultural mosaic.
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