CULTURE-CANADA: Multicultural Toronto Showing Signs of Division

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Oct 28 2002 (IPS) - Is Toronto’s experiment in multiculturalism fraying seriously at the edges? The local Star newspaper this month has used police arrest statistics to expose how members of the black minority are singled out for harsher treatment at the hands of officers in Canada’s largest city.

Those articles led the police chief to cut short an overseas trip last week and return home to announce an independent inquiry into his force.

Also, a series of Toronto school board programmes – including English as a second language, international languages, youth counsellors and educational assistants – that help to integrate immigrant children into the mainstream population are on the chopping block as part of a budget streamlining process undertaken by the Ontario provincial government.

At the same time, a series of recent academic studies indicate that Toronto’s non-European residents or visible minorities face discrimination in terms of employment and rental housing.

Many of the leading cities in North America and western Europe are taking on an increasingly multicultural character because of immigration. But few of them have reached the stage of cultural diversity that Toronto has, where at least 100 different nationalities are represented amidst a population of three million people.

Of the three major Canadian cities that have received the vast majority of immigrants in the past 50 years, Toronto remains the most popular destination – so popular that people with non-European backgrounds are expected to make up the majority of the population here soon.

So far, relations among the various groups are generally harmonious.

But Tam Goossen, a former Toronto school board trustee and past president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, sees danger signs ahead, including increased racial division and youth alienation if school board programmes developed in consultation with immigrant parents in the mid-1980s are eliminated.

”If all of these programmes and infrastructure for connecting with communities are cut, I think the schools are going to be very isolated. Our teachers will be very isolated, wholly overburdened with the problems that new people coming into the system will face.”

”I just can’t imagine what the school is going to be like. It is going to be a very troublesome place, rather than a good place for kids to learn,” Goossen told IPS.

About 20,000 Toronto school children attend two and a half hours of heritage language classes a week, either on Saturday or as part of the regular school day. The majority are immigrants learning their mother tongue, but Canadian born students are permitted to attend.

”The elimination of heritage language programmes is of great concern to issues of social cohesion in this country because public school is where we all stop becoming immigrants and start becoming Canadians,” says Ratna Omidvar, executive director of the Maytree Foundation.

Pedagogical studies demonstrate that learning another language in addition to comprehending English – one of Canada’s official languages, the other is French – benefits all students, says James Cummins, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

”Their reading comprehension and academic skills are improved with heritage language programmes,” continues Cummins.

In today’s global economy, unilingual adults are at a greater disadvantage in the job market, and it is well documented that children unable to maintain their original language as they get older become more alienated from their immigrant parents, he adds.

Immigrant parents, many of whom are highly educated themselves, end up in low wage manufacturing and service industry jobs because their skills have not been recognised by the bodies of the self-governing professions, including the various medical specialties in Canada

”People give up fairly stable lives to come here and are not able to practise or able to realise their potential. And in many cases are not able to go back because they have pulled up roots,” says Omidvar.

Social divisions in Toronto are increasingly based on ethnic and racial differences, she adds.

In jobs where non-Europeans can apply their skills they are paid 20 per cent less, on average, than their Canadian born co-workers, says Jeffrey Reitz, a University of Toronto sociology professor. He estimates the loss from this wage discrimination at about eight billion U.S. dollars a year.

The author of various studies on the employment experiences of ethnic and immigrant people in Canada, Reitz has found that on paper 35 per cent of immigrants have university degrees compared to close to 20 per cent of native-born Canadians.

Yet, new Canadians are less likely to be promoted to a management or a supervisory position across all job categories, including manufacturing and the sales and services sector.

”I haven’t looked at an occupation where there wasn’t a statistical disadvantage in earnings for every immigrant group and especially for immigrants from non-European origin,” says Reitz.

Despite these disparities, so far Toronto has avoided the kind of social tension witnessed in other major urban centres in the affluent north.

”The fact of relatively little conflict is definitely true and it is something that may well reflect the Canadian character, way of handling problems,” continues Reitz.

At the same time, ethnic community associations funded by the Canadian government as part of its official multiculturalism policy could have been the vehicles for the mobilisation of public opinion against discriminatory practices, the sociologist suggests.

But Ottawa embarked upon cutting support to these organisations in response to a backlash against official multiculturalism in Canada during the mid-1990s.

In his influential 1994 book, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, Neil Bissoondath, a Canadian author of Trinidadian origin, attacked federal government funding of multicultural groups and cultural activities as a political tool devised by former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to help deliver immigrant votes to the ruling Liberal party.

Also, the gutting of employment equity legislation in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, following the victory of the Conservative party in a 1995 provincial election that had ”racial” overtones, has since made raising the matter of redressing job inequalities politically difficult, says Reitz.

Nevertheless, employment equity is still a relevant issue in the Toronto of the 21st century says Omidvar. She points to the lack of brown and black faces at the top of the city, and nation’s, power structure.

”My biggest concern (is that) our public institutions are really the mirror of our society,” she says.

CULTURE-CANADA: Multicultural Toronto Showing Signs of Division

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Oct 28 2002 (IPS) - Is Toronto’s experiment in multiculturalism fraying seriously at the edges? The local Star newspaper this month has used police arrest statistics to expose how members of the black minority are singled out for harsher treatment at the hands of officers in Canada’s largest city.
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