Authors: Roy MacGregor
At one point she asked me if I noticed anything unusual about the many photographs set around the shrine.
I looked carefully. The sunglasses? No. The hats? No, but close. “What then?”
“You won't find a single one, even when she's on vacation, where she's not wearing a high collar.”
I looked, not sure what, if anything, that meant.
“It's deliberate,” Shirley said.
During the civil-war years little Lee Wo Soon Chan, who was tall and athletic, had been taken out of school and forced to run supplies between villages. She carried them tied to the ends of a strong wooden pole placed over her shoulders. She carried day and night, often under cover of darkness, and she did it so often it changed her appearance.
“It left her with a huge callous that never really went away,” Shirley explained, “and my mother didn't want anyone to see it.” As she spoke she rubbed the back of her own neck, as if the callous had somehow been passed on.
And of course it had, in the way all children of immigrants carry the past with them.
THERE ARE DISPLAYS at Pier 21, and even a short film featuring performers who enact the tears and joy of those who arrived here and were made welcome ⦠or
Willkomman
⦠once their ship reached Halifax. It would be wrong, though, to think of this place as entirely one of happy endings. A great many hopefuls were turned away for reasons that could be as trivial as eyesight. “Imbeciles,” prostitutes, and communists were all denied entry. After the Second World War began, five hundred to a thousand children from France, all with Jewish parents, should have been brought through here to safety, but the Canadian government dithered so long that when final approval came through it was already too late.
There are, indeed, also happy stories of babies being born here and of families being reunited, often with members they had given up for dead.
“I saw my first apple in Halifax,” a woman wrote. Others burst into tears at the sight of something as simple as an egg.
It is difficult, no impossible, for a Canadian born and raised here to comprehend what it was like for most of these landed immigrants. Their sense of alienation, of confusion, of fear even, would be so profound as to forever engrave the early days of arrival in memory. “Every act of immigration is like suffering a brain stroke,” Toronto psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff, himself an immigrant, once told Peter Newman. “One has to learn to walk again, to talk again, to move around the world again, and probably most difficult of all, to reestablish a sense of community.”
At Pier 21 you can see the photographed faces of such people; the shock and bewilderment undeniable. You can sit in a facsimile train car and, thanks to fake windows and video feeds, feel as if you're travelling across the country with those who left the pier for other parts, so uncertain of where they were headed or what would become of them. Their stories are as moving as the train is meant to feel.
Sitting in those small cars, watching video of the countryside flashing by and hearing the recorded thoughts of those who came through these gates only to move on through the rest of Canada, you quickly realize just how immigration has changed over the years. Not only the people, but the destination. The early arrivals all seemed headed into the countryside, but later, even by the time Pier 21 shut its doors in 1971, increasingly to the towns and cities. The business of immigration was shifting away from ports. Today's immigrants land at Dorval and Pearson and Vancouver international airports. And they head, almost exclusively, straight for the cities.
THE NOTION of the hyphenated Canadian has long been of concern to those who'd rather see the hyphen deleted. Richard Gwyn, one of the country's most astute political observers over the past forty years, has said that only one identifiable group, the British Canadians of long heritage, immediately considers itself as coming from one country known as Canada. Everyone else, it seems to Gwyn, has allegiance to two or more nations, whether it be the independent Quebec he fears coming or the old
countries whose hold never seems to loosen. In his recent book,
Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian,
he worries that Canada's sense of self is so weak it might just “slip away” one day, scarcely noticed.
The Liberal governments of the Trudeau era made multiculturalism a policy that overtly encouraged the sustaining of previous ties. No melting pot for Canada. Back in 1971, when visible minorities made up less than 1 percent of the population, the federal government began pushing bilingualism and multiculturalism in tandem. Prime Minister Trudeau said at the time, “National unity, if it is to mean anything in the deeply personal sense, must be founded on confidence in one's own individual society.” A fine sentiment, even if critics often argued that the true purpose of promoting multiculturalism was to build the Liberal base among newcomers. But now that visible minorities make up fully half the population of such large cities as Toronto, Gwyn and others warn that the small walls once encouraged by multiculturalism can quickly become tall and impenetrable, as evidenced by Great Britain and various European countries today. A 2006 report written for Statistics Canada by University of Toronto sociologist Jeffrey Reitz and doctoral student Rupa Banerjee confirmed that visible-minority immigrants feel more excluded than white immigrants; second-generation visible minorities also feel less identification with Canada than whites do.
And this, Gwyn argues, makes for an increasingly fragile political culture. Unless those walls come down over time, he fears, the “centre cannot hold.” “If we ceased to be a community,” he writes, “others would notice and would regret the passing of a distinctive idea about how different people can live together.”
In my experience, those who most readily see themselves as Canadians first live in the centre: Ontario. There's more demarcation between, say, those living in Newfoundland who think of themselves as Newfoundlanders first or those in Alberta who think of themselves as only Albertans than there is in generations who see themselves as Italian Canadians or Lebanese Canadians.
Perhaps that's just how the human mind handles Confederation. After all, history would seem to suggest, year in and year out and against better
logic, that the centre does hold. Those born in Canada to immigrant families might use a hyphen and others will often force a hyphen upon them, but it's worth remembering that the grammatical purpose of the hyphen is to join, not separate.
A few years ago I stood at the corner of Centre Street and 6th Avenue in Calgary on an early July day and watched the Stampede parade pass by. In a crowd estimated at 300,000 I found myself standing beside a young Sikh, Amritpal Singh, and we began discussing how they were managing to keep an air-filled, four-storey-high plastic bear from blowing clear of the parade in all the wind gusting between the office buildings.
I happened to say that it was the first time I'd ever been to the famous Stampede, which he found astonishing.
“This is the biggest religious celebration of the year,” he laughed. “This is my twenty-sixth parade. I'll be twenty-five at the end of the monthâ but I was at my first one two weeks before I was born. I never miss.”
ON ONE WALL at Pier 21 is a plaque to honour a very small baby who arrived here and grew up to become Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire. On another wall are testimonials from such landed immigrants as CBC commentator Joe Schlesinger and writers Denise Chong and Peter C. Newman.
Chong, author of
The Concubine's Children: Portrait of a Family Divided,
was born in Canada but has written about her ancestors who came here from South China at the turn of the nineteenth century. Her grandparents found Canada “inhospitable,” yet chose to stay. And for that, Chong considers herself most fortunate.
“In all our pasts are an immigrant beginning,” she once wrote in an essay, “a settler's accomplishments and setbacks, and the confidence of a common future. We all know the struggle and victory, the dreams and the lost hopes, the pride and the shame. When we tell our stories, we look in the mirror. I believe what we will see is that Canada is not lacking in heroes. Rather, the heroes are to be found within.”
In 1940 Peter C. Newman was among the very lucky, a ten-year-old member of a Jewish family who arrived here in late summer aboard the
Nova Scotia
. The Neumanns had fled the Nazi occupations of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the convoy they joined to cross the Atlantic was twice attacked by German U-boats.
Nearly a half century on he wrote about this experience in an essay for
Maclean's
magazine, vividly recalling the first sighting of Nova Scotia from the bow of the ship that carried the province's name. He remembered being tagged and herded into holding rooms with the same bureaucratic regimentation the family thought had been left behind. But it also struck him, as it can strike only the immigrant, how profoundly life had changed.
To get into Canada, his father had to promise the Canadian Pacific Railway that he'd take up a job he knew absolutely nothing about: farming. City dwellers, the Neumanns were headed into the Canadian countryside.
Another of the testimonials at Pier 21 was written by Nobel Laureate Gerhard Herzberg:
In 1935 I came to Canada, a refugee from Germany and the Nazis. I travelled by train across the Prairies on my way to Saskatoon. As we passed through small railway stations, I would see perhaps two or three houses, a grain elevator. Where were the people, I wondered.
But when I arrived in Saskatoon, I found them. These people were curious, kind and friendly, and they had time to listen to me, and my story. I settled into work at the University of Saskatchewan and found colleagues of considerable repute. Canada is really the country that saved me. I have a sort of hunch that Canada IS my country.
In 2006, 800,000 others around this troubled world wanted to do the same: make Canada
their
country. This is the backlog of immigrants hoping to cross through today's equivalent of Pier 21. The figure had risen by a hundred thousand in the previous year alone.
And the country is growing old so fast that, even with Canada surpassing its immigration targets year after yearâaround a quarter of a million have been arriving annually in recent yearsâlabour shortfalls
and retirement realities are on a collision course. The C.D. Howe Institute published a study calculating that the only way the country could keep its retirees-to-workers ratio at current levels would be to take in 2.6 million immigrants a year by 2020 and 7 million by the year 2050âat which point Canada's population would reach 165.4 million.
And though the doors closed on Pier 21 nearly forty years ago, over the next decades other doors are going to have to open as wide as they possibly can.
IN THE SPRING of 2006 I happened across a recent immigrant in what seemed, on first blush, to be a most unusual and isolated setting: Inuvik, Northwest Territories.
His name was Salah Malik, a forty-nine-year-old Sudanese. Like so many of Canada's recent immigrants, he and his wife, Amani, and their two children, five-year-old Mohammed and two-year-old Lana, were fleeing civil war. They had come to Inuvik by a convoluted route that included time in Toronto, Washington, D.C., and Edmonton. Once in Inuvik, Malik found work as a security guard at the local hospital and a second job pumping gas at an isolated station out toward the little airport.
It had been an extraordinary experience for the family. From hot sunshine to bitter cold and long winter days when the sun barely seemed to exist. From huge populations to hardly anyone at all. But also from civil war to civil peace.
They'd been in the Far North for three years, and it had taken some adjusting. But now there were eight Muslim familiesâSudanese, Saudi, Lebanese, Syrian, and Libyanâwho had created their own mosque in the town. When the CBC launched its comedy series
Little Mosque on the Prairie
it might just as well have been Little Mosque on the Tundra. The children were thriving in school, Malik was making fairly good money, and the family was adapting to the differences in lifestyle.
The greatest shock since they had arrived, Malik said, wasn't the cold, or the dark, or the lack of shopping, but the day his wife called him in a panic. Someone had dropped a caribou head off on the front porch of
their little home. They had no idea who had done so or what it meant. Some
Godfather
-type message to get out of town or else?
Worried, Malik contacted the authorities and asked about it, only to be met with smiles and giggles. His Inuvialuit neighbours had been lucky on their hunt. And in true northern fashion, they were sharing their bounty. The caribou head was considered the finest gift they could offer the quiet newcomers from Sudan.
“The people here,” Malik told me, “remind me of Africa.”
I laughed.
“No, I'm serious. They have the same culture of sharing, of helping out each other. In so many of those other places we lived, everybody was scared of each other. But not here. It reminds me of Africa.”
But as much as Malik liked the people of Inuvik and as much as their children were thriving, Amani had made it clear that she didn't wish to stay here much longer. As soon as they had enough money saved the family was heading back south, likely for Edmonton.
And if not Edmonton, another Canadian city.
Eleven
Prairie Ghosts
THERE HAD BEEN WHITEOUTS all along the Yellowhead Highway since I'd left Saskatoon earlier in the day, the small towns along No. 16âFloral, Clavet, Elstow, Colonsay, Viscount, Plunkett, Guernsey, Lanigan, Jansen, Dafoeâfading in and out like the first television set that came to town.
As I turned south on Highway 6 toward Regina, the little towns vanished completelyâthis time on the mapâuntil I reached the crossroads at No. 15, a secondary road that follows the old Canadian Pacific Railway line. When the rail went through this part of the Westâthe tracks that would carry human cargo from Pier 21 to delivery along the prairiesâthere were so many water stops and grain elevators that the builders evidently tired of looking for original names. Instead, they took to naming stops after the letters in the alphabet: Fenwood, Goodeve, Hubbard, Ituna, Jasmin, Kelleher, Lestock ⦠Punnichy, Quinton, Raymore, Semans â¦