National Settlement Conference 2
(Calgary - October 2-5, 2003)
Keynote Address
by
Haroon Siddiqui
Thank you for inviting me to this important conference.
I bring you greetings from Toronto, the centre of the universe. There,
last night, the centre of political gravity shifted back to the moderate
middle. I’ll have more to say later on what that might mean to your
work.
When I was asked to speak here, I wondered what I could tell you that
you already do not know working on the front lines of settling immigrants
and refugees, enhancing their contributions to Canada and encouraging
their active participation in the Canadian mainstream.
I also wondered what I could I say that would take us beyond the clichés,
the jargon and the empty rhetoric that comes from both sides of the spectrum:
from those who see racism under every rock, and those who are critics
of immigrants and immigration; some thoughtful people with constructive
criticism but also yahoos and those who have intellectualized their racism,
or bring to this topic a breathtaking double standard that they dare not
apply to any other public policy.
I think what I can say that’s new and, hopefully, useful, is this.
On the issue of immigration, immigrants and refugees, I sense that we
may be on the cusp of a new era in Canada.
Canada, the least racist nation in the world, is about to get better.
Let me explain.
We’ve come through a very rough decade.
There has been an irrefragable negativity in the public discourse about
immigration and immigrants. Refugees have been demonized as the equivalent
of the modern plague. There have been government cutbacks, especially
in Ontario, to programs and services of the kind you provide. There has
been steady whining by many municipal and provincial politicians about
the minor expenses that governments incur in legal aid and social services
for refugees and some immigrants, even while governments, at all levels,
have been raking in billions of dollars from hard-working immigrants in
taxes of all kinds, including house levies in new municipal sub-divisions.
There has also been an increasingly tragic disconnect between incoming
immigrants and the job market.
But now, I see the tide of public opinion and public policy shifting,
at last, for the better. I say that not merely because I am a congenitally
optimistic Canadian, but because of the following five reasons:
- The Ontario election. It may prove an important turning point for
your field of work. I say that not for partisan reasons but because
it does represent a profound political change in the second biggest
government in Canada.
- The changing demography of Canada.
- A new political awareness and activism on the part of some key immigrant
groups.
- The strength of Canada in avoiding the backlash against immigrants
generated by the right wing in Australia and much of Europe.
- The aftermath of the tragedy of September 11 terrorism. I believe
that despite all the horror and travails of that tragedy, 9/11 made
Canada more Canadian.
Let me augment my arguments.
The Ontario Election
In Ontario, as well as some other parts of the country, the conventional
wisdom of the 1990s was that people had become selfish, and that you could
win an election only by narrow casting to special interests.
Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals won by campaigning against tax cuts
and for spending money to fix health and education, social housing, etc.
More relevant to you, he campaigned on a platform of fixing the biggest
problem many immigrants face, namely, access to trades and professions.
He said he’d give the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons,
and other self-regulating bodies, one year to find ways to make use of
the talents of immigrants — doctors, engineers, nurses and others.
While we have talked about this issue for years—and how the nearly
400 regulatory agencies across Canada have been a hindrance rather than
a help—this is the first time a party has won power on such an explicit
platform, even if that promise lacks specifics.
That this has happened in Ontario is all the more significant, given
that Ontario is the biggest beneficiary of immigration and hence the biggest
loser of the talent bank that immigrants bring. For example, a study in
the year 2000 by the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities
found that only a quarter of the immigrants had found work in their field
of education and expertise.
The Liberal promise on access to trades and professions comes on the
heel of a recent announcement of the high-powered Regional Immigrant Employment
Council in Toronto, consisting of municipal, business and immigrant representatives.
It hopes to build, on a much larger scale, what the Manitoba Initiative
on Access has been attempting—for example, paying the licensing
fee for immigrants and easing their way into internship programs.
McGuinty also specifically spoke against the politics of division, of
pitting new immigrants against the old, and the foreign-born against the
Canadian-born. His platform was in sharp contrast to the Conservative
Party’s, which talked about immigration and immigrants under the
“crime and terrorism” section of its platform, and it spoke
about weeding out “bad” immigrants. It was good to hear federal
Immigration Minister Denis Coderre condemn such politicization of immigration
during an election.
The incoming Ontario government is also committed to negotiating an immigration
accord with the federal government. If this happens, it will be a big
step in the right direction for the settlement and integration of immigrants.
This is progress, regardless of your personal political affiliation.
It is now up to your constituents, and the people you serve, to ensure
that the new government at Queen’s Park lives up to its promises.
Changing Demography
I want to talk about seven key trends from the 2001 census.
A.
According to the United Nations, there are about 185 million people living
in countries other than where they were born.
Canada is in the forefront of this trend. Canada is the most immigrant-oriented
of Western nations.
One in 10 Americans is an immigrant. But one in five Canadians is. This
is the highest proportion of the foreign-born in Canada since 1931.
Immigrants are now the sole source of our demographic growth. They account
for 70 percent of the growth in our labour force. They will account for
100 percent by the year 2011.
B.
Principally because of immigration patterns, Canada has become one of
the most urban nations in the world. Nearly 70 percent of Canadians live
in cities, with 50 percent in just four urban centres: the Greater Toronto
Area, Vancouver, Montréal and the Calgary-Edmonton corridor.
This is good news. As we know, St. Augustine spoke of the City of God,
not the Farm of God, or the Rural Area of God but the City of God. He
was on to something.
But before I pursue that, we must acknowledge the importance of rural
Canada and what it represents; the Canadian love affair with wilderness
and the canoe, which is bred in our bone; and the need for encouraging
and enticing, not forcing, immigrants to smaller cities and the rural
areas, as Manitoba is doing.
Equally, there is no getting around the fact that cities generate wealth.
Our economic growth is increasingly centred in cities where the immigrants
are.
Cities also represent pluralism and cosmopolitan openness. Cities are
where the collective identity is the most fluid and evolving. The least
fixed that identity is, the easier it is for an immigrant to fit in. No
one need feel marginal. No one’s dignity need be trampled. Pierre
Trudeau said Canada has no fixed culture. Every culture is equally valid.
This is truer in cities than anywhere.
So, here’s my formulation: If we are a nation of immigrants who
are increasingly congregating in the cities, it is appropriate, then,
to say that metaphorically, Canada is one big city, open and welcoming
to new people, new cultures and new ideas—truly the world’s
most post-modern nation.
C.
Another significant demographic pattern is that the suburbs of Toronto
and Vancouver and Montréal are growing faster than the CMAs. And
they are growing because of immigration.
For example, Toronto CMA grew by 9.8 percent. The regions around Toronto
grew even more:
York region, 23.2 percent
Peel region, 16 percent
Durham region, 10.5 percent
Halton region, 10.4 percent.
Cities within those regions are also enjoying a population boom.
The same is true of the suburbs of Vancouver.
Whereas in previous generations, immigrants came to the cities and then
gravitated to the suburbs in the second or third generation, today’s
immigrants are going to suburbs within the first generation. That means,
first, that most of them are doing well economically, or at the very least,
bringing a sizable bank account with them into Canada, and secondly, that
your service areas are geographically bigger and your clientele is different,
as are the municipal governments that you must deal with.
D.
The Great White North is not so white anymore.
As of 2001, there are 4 million visible minorities. That’s more
than the population of every province except Ontario, Quebec and British
Columbia. There are more visible minorities than there are Albertans.
There are as many Chinese Canadians as there are Calgarians.
About 44 percent of Torontonians are visible minorities, by far the biggest
such quotient in the western world. The comparable figure for Miami, the
American city with the highest quotient of visible minorities, is only
40 percent. Vancouver has more visible minorities than Los Angeles, 31
percent, and New York, 24 percent.
The rise of visible minorities in the suburbs is even more remarkable.
Richmond, B.C., is 59 percent non-white. The Toronto suburb of Markham
is 55.5 percent; Richmond Hill, Ont., 40 percent; Brampton, 40 percent,
Mississauga, 40 percent, Pickering and Ajax, 25 percent.
The big picture that emerges is this. Our suburbia is becoming as diverse
as the big cities, which means they will no longer be insular. Secondly,
whereas the central feature of the American suburbia is that they have
been the refuge of the whites, the Canadian suburbia is moving exactly
in the opposite direction. We should rejoice in this development.
E.
Our religious pluralism also has undergone a remarkable transformation.
Muslims have more than doubled between 1991 and 2001. There are 580,000
of them as of 2001. Today, they must be well over 600,000. They are the
fourth largest religious group, after Catholics, Protestants and those
who describe themselves simply as Christians. There are more Muslims in
Canada than Greek, Ukrainian, Serb and Russian Orthodox combined (480,000);
more than Presbyterians (410,000); more than Pentecostals (369,000); more
than Jewish Canadians (330,000); and more than Buddhist Canadians (300,000).
In Ontario, there are more Muslims, 352,000, than there are Baptists,
289,000.
In the Toronto census metropolitan area, there are more Muslims, 254,000,
than Hindus, 191,000, or Orthodox Christians, 179,000.
Across Canada, there are significant pockets of Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists.
F.
There is also growing linguistic diversity. Chinese is now the third
most spoken language in Canada, after English and French, and much of
it is spoken in our suburbs.
All this represents a phenomenal transformation of Canada. Within one
generation, Canada has become the embodiment of Marshall McLuhan’s
global village.
Heterogeneity is one of our key defining features.
And this has taken place in a typically quiet Canada way, with peace
and harmony reigning in our neighbourhoods.
G.
The old Canadian immigration model has been turned on its head in another
way.
Not all immigrants fit the cliché of the hungry and destitute
fleeing the Iron Curtain or the potato famine of Ireland and the Ukraine
and the grinding poverty of Eastern Europe.
That is still partially true of our refugees, but not necessarily of
all immigrants.
Today’s immigrants are the most educated in our history, and more
qualified, and they are less willing to wait for a generation to achieve
equality, which is all the more reason to improve access to professions
and trades. Keeping them on the margins is not good, for them and for
us. As Prof. Jeff Reitz of the University of Toronto showed in a study,
the brain waste among newcomers is costing all Canadians about $15 billion
a year. Enlightened self-interest requires that we tap into this talent.
Talented immigrants are happy to come to Canada but they are not necessarily
forever grateful like the immigrants of yesterday. They trade their talents,
and often a hefty bank balance, for a place in a peaceful country, which
offers equality of opportunity for their children. It’s a contract
of mutual benefit.
The old saw that we are doing immigrants a favour by letting them in
is outdated. We bring immigrants not because we want to do them a favour.
We bring them because we need them.
An overwhelming majority of them settle seamlessly.
If we do not find them jobs commensurate with their education and work
experience and skills, then word will go back to those potential immigrants
who have a choice of migrating anywhere, and they will not come to Canada.
We will get the B team.
At the lower end, there’s high poverty among visible minorities.
The Canadian Council on Social Development, the United Way of Greater
Toronto and Prof. Michael Ornstein of York University have all quantified
the scandalous levels of poverty among Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Afghans,
Somalis, Tamils, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and other communities. Prof.
Ornstein showed how Eastern Europeans who arrived at roughly the same
time and with roughly the same skills and roughly the same lack of English
have done economically better—because they got the breaks that these
visible minorities didn’t.
The point about visible minorities facing discrimination was further
made in the StatsCan survey released this week. It showed that no matter
how long they have been in Canada, they continue to feel discriminated
against, especially in the workplace, in their dealings in the marketplace,
on the street and in interacting with the police.
So, we need to pay attention at both ends of the economic spectrum—with
better access to professions and trades, with access to lessons in English
and French as well as mentoring programs, and an all-out effort at combating
systemic racism, especially in the workplace.
If we don’t, it will have long-term consequences. The status quo
is bad for them. It is bad for Canada.
Growing Power of the Immigrant Vote Bank
It used to be that it took many ethnic minorities two or three generations
to work their way into full participation in the political process. Then,
it came to be that certain ethnic groups would get involved because of
“back home” politics—the English and the French to start
with, then the Irish, or Jewish Canadians after the creation of the state
of Israel, or, lately, the Sikhs because of what happened in the Punjab,
or the Tamils because of the politics of Sri Lanka. But, a new phenomenon
is afoot. The revolution of expectations let loose by multiculturalism
is leading to more and more groups engaging in the domestic political
process. Italian Canadians led the way, and then Chinese Canadians. Now
Muslims and Hindus and Iranians and several others are following them.
Many of these groups are relatively new to Canada. They came in the last
20 to 25 years. Yet they, and their children especially, are getting politically
engaged. Increasingly, they will no longer be satisfied with politicians
making an appearance at their picnics and dinners or posing for a photograph
with “the ethnics.”
These people are getting increasingly sophisticated in their political
demands. Muslims, for examples, are grilling politicians about racial
and religious profiling, about Muslims being held in secret in the name
of security, and about the protection of their rights when they cross
the border into the United States. MPs are going to be held accountable
in the next election over these and similar domestic issues.
The cases of Zahra Kazemi in Iran and Maher Arar being held in a Syrian
prison are not cases of the ethnic politics of native nations. They are
the cases of Canadians over which Ottawa is being criticized for not doing
enough.
We in the media are also increasingly under scrutiny by various groups,
who can see through our ignorance, our double standards and/or our neglect.
The letters-to–the-editor columns are crackling with complaints
from minority readers who are demanding equal time and fair coverage of
issues affecting minority Canadians.
These are all positive developments in the maturing of the Canadian polity.
Historian Desmond Morton has said that every generation of Canadians
feels compelled to change Canada in its own image. The opportunity to
change a country, for the better, is far greater in Canada than anywhere
else in the world. Immigrants are grasping that opportunity, more so now
than at any time in our history.
The Failure of the Right-Wing War on Immigrants
Despite the rise of neo-conservatism in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
the conservatives failed to turn Canadians against immigration and immigrants.
It is one of the unheralded triumphs of the Canadian pluralistic model
that Canadians have developed a visceral repugnance to the politics of
the far right when it comes to immigration issues.
When the Reform Party tried to advocate, albeit in coded language, for
whites-only immigration, it failed to win votes beyond its own narrow
western base. Ultimately, it gave up and opted for pluralism and a race-neutral
immigration policy.
No national anti-immigrant party can hope to do well in Canada, as happened
in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Italy and the
Netherlands.
Whereas anti-immigrant parties have done particularly well in urban European
centres, such as Rotterdam, Hamburg and Antwerp, exactly the opposite
is true in Canada. In Toronto, Vancouver, Montréal and even Calgary
and Edmonton, politicians are actively looking for minority votes. They
are trekking to mosques, gurudwaras and temples, as they once did to churches
and synagogues. But, as I said, mere attendance is not going to be sufficient.
No Canadian leader, or political party, is calling for a ban on hijab
or the yarmulke, as Jean-Marie LePen did in France last year and won 4.8
million votes in the first round of presidential elections. And now a
cabinet minister is trying to ban, or minimize, the use of the hijab in
French schools and public places. In Germany, the highest court has just
ruled in favour of the hijab but left a loophole that states can outlaw
it.
In Quebec, the recent decision of a Montréal secular private school,
Charlemagne College, to suspend a hijab-wearing girl has met with widespread
derision. Hopefully, the Quebec Human Rights Commission will find it as
unacceptable as it did the 1995 ban on hijab tried by some public schools.
In a similar vein, the Quebec Superior Court has held the right of Sikh
students to carry a kirpan so long as it is sheathed and concealed.
Unlike in Europe and Australia, where right-wing nativists lead public
opinion with immigrant baiting, in Canada it is the liberals who set the
tone of public debate and eventually public opinion. Canada has shown
that pluralistic nation states do best by confronting xenophobes, not
appeasing them.
Also Canada, unlike Great Britain and other parts of Europe, has resisted
all attempts to dilute the notion of equality between old citizens and
new citizens. This is why we have rejected, and should continue to reject,
the following ideas, however much merit they may have in isolation: 1)
Go on saying No to the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance proposal for the
use of the notwithstanding clause to suspend due process for refugees;
2) Say No to temporary work permits for people going to rural areas, permits
that may later be converted to full landed immigrant status; 3) Say No
to vouchers for refugees; and 4) Say No to a code of ethics for newcomers.
Immigrants should be served by the same tax pool as everyone else, and
we all should be governed by the same rule of law.
We don’t want to go down the slippery slope of diluting the core
Canadian value that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. There are
no second-class citizens in Canada.
Aftermath of September 11
9/11 made Canada more Canadian, despite our immediate and heartfelt sympathy
for and solidarity with Americans in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.
Despite the noisy efforts of the National Post, and a tiny minority of
right-wingers and those business people who must sing the tune of their
American corporate head offices, Canadians have veered sharply away from
the policies of the Bush administration, especially the war on Iraq.
All wars generate passions. We must respect the views of those who supported
the war and those who didn’t. A majority of Canadians did not. And
history will record that the decision of the Jean Chretien government
NOT to join the war was a bold and courageous move. In retrospect, the
decision is looking better by the day. The decision was made all the more
remarkable by the fact that it was managed without overly affecting our
bilateral economic relationship.
I raise the issue because Canadian opposition to the Bush administration’s
unilateralist foreign policy was led by immigrant groups and ethnic minorities—Arabs,
Afghans, Muslims and others who came to Canada from Asia and elsewhere.
What started out as an ethnic minority opinion became, with the help of
churches and other groups, a majority opinion. This is sociologically
and politically significant, and feeds into my previous points about the
positive effects of multiculturalism, the emergence of a new political
activism and the increasing internationalization of Canada.
There have been other positive signs.
Whereas it was said in the immediate aftermath of September 11 that some
of the 19 terrorists might have gone to the United States through Canada,
it did not prove to be true.
Those scapegoating Canada, more than the American government, were Canadian
right-wingers swept up by patriotism—American patriotism, that is—and
by their anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-multicultural biases. The
subtext of their narrative was that Canada had, somehow, made America
unsafe by letting in too many ethnics, too easily.
But the truth did prevail.
The Canadian border is NOT more porous than America’s. In fact,
Canada has also had a tighter perimeter than the United States; far fewer
illegal immigrants come here, proportionately, than there. People forget
that there are 5.9 million illegals in the U.S.
The American rate of deporting rejected refugees is no better than Canada’s.
There are 305,000 Americans against whom there are outstanding deportation
orders.
The American system of identification is worse than Canada’s. In
fact, it is far worse.
Other differences between Canada and the United States have come into
sharp focus in the last two years.
Whereas in the United States, the number of immigrants and refugees has
gone down dramatically since 9/11, this is not the case in Canada. In
fact, the flow of foreign students to Canada is being expedited. Despite
the National Post’s cry, Muslims are coming, Muslims are coming.
Whereas in theory, there’s greater constitutional separation of
church and state in the United States than in Canada, in practice, religion
and state are getting increasingly fused south of the border. The President
of the United States has been invoking God, a Christian God, to fight
what he calls Evil and is waging war with evangelical certainty. But the
prime minister of Canada is NOT engaged in any holy mission. And the attorney
general of Canada does not have a conflict of interest like Ayatollah
Ashcroft, a self-confessed re-born Christian who is on record as making
anti-Islamic statements, and who is engaged in the selective prosecution
of Muslims.
Whereas there has been mindless Muslim-bashing in the United States,
there have been no Canadian equivalents of Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham
and Pat Robertson.
Whereas the hallmark of a civilized society is that it does not lay collective
guilt on any group, the war on terrorism in America, according to the
American Civil Liberties Union, has become a war on immigrants in America,
almost exclusively Arabs and Muslims. Thousands of illegal immigrants
are being selectively prosecuted—jailed, mistreated and deported.
Most have been Pakistani illegals, 2,600 of whom have since come to Canada.
Hundreds of thousands of legal residents of America are being made the
victims of religious and ethnic profiling. Most of this work is being
done in secret.
This is has not happened in Canada, despite the sweeping anti-terrorism
act.
What has happened is that the Canadian Arab Federation has spoken of
the Arab community suffering from a sense of what it called “psychological
internment.”
Muslims have been complaining of racial profiling and discrimination
in housing, the workplace, in health and education. Doudou Diene, a special
envoy of the UN Commission on Human Rights, also reported this last week
after an 11-day visit to Canada that took him to Montréal, Ottawa,
Toronto, Halifax and Regina. We await his formal
report in March.
There is also the disturbing case of the 23 illegal students charged
with terrorism-related intent, seemingly on flimsy evidence and paranoiac
conclusions. Three have been released for lack of evidence. The case is
before the system and so we await the verdict.
Lest we forget, law-abiding Muslim or Arab Americans, law-abiding Muslim
or Arab Canadians are no more responsible for 9/11 than Japanese-Americans
and Japanese-Canadians were for Pearl Harbour. Or, Germanic Americans
or Germanic Canadians were for Nazism.
Just as in another era, we had to fight anti-Catholicism, and in another,
anti-Semitism, and in many ways, still must, surely the challenge of this
age is to battle anti-Islamism and Islamophobia. There certainly seems
a greater awareness of it in Canada than there.
Let me close by saying this:
Canada is a great nation but obviously not free of problems and challenges.
The battle of equality never ends. So, what’s the best way forward?
My own suggestion to you, implicit in what all I have said, is this.
The many strands of the immigration web are all inter-connected: government
policy making; public discourse in the political arena and the media,
which shape public opinion; and the policy implementation in its various
stages, including your settlement work for those who need help.
While you have to be focused on what you do, and you often do not have
the resources to do all that you want to do, you cannot be unaware of
what’s happening in the other spheres of the immigration debate.
You cannot just talk to yourself.
Nothing matters more than public opinion. There are signs that it is
changing for the better and creating a new awareness of the importance
of immigration and the need to bring some coherence to it. Increasingly,
politicians understand it. Canadians understand it.
It is imperative that you participate and engage in public discourse.
I am aware of the limitations on advocacy work. But your constituents
and supporters are not similarly constrained. Mobilize them. Recruit high-profile
spokespeople for your issues. Speak not the language of special interest
groups, but rather of the enlightened self-interest of all Canadians.
Democracy belongs to those who actively participate in it, rather than
watch from the sidelines.
There is no one Canadian race. There is no one fixed Canadian culture.
But there is the Canadian creed—that of the common good. Let’s
keep improving it.
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