OUR FIELD OF SACRIFICE
McCall Holbrook, 13, was among 300 volunteers who helped set up the Field of Crosses memorial on the weekend as the annual tribute attracts thousands of Calgarians to pay their respects to southern Alberta’s fallen soldiers and civilians.
From his refuge in Lebanon after fleeing Syria’s civil war, Mohamed El Daher weighed his immigration options by the click of a mouse.
After perusing a host of Canadian cities, he settled on Calgary.
“Here, there are many jobs in the future,” said vegetable farmer El Daher, 40, who arrived in the spring of 2016 with his wife and three children. “Calgary looked very, very nice.”
A brother also settled in Calgary, lured by the same qualities, said the man from Hama, Syria, adding he’d advise others to follow in his footsteps.
But El Daher might just as well have been following the advice of more than 200,000 other immigrants who’ve made Calgary their home since 2001.
According to Statistics Canada census data released this week, the immigrant count in the Calgary metropolitan area grew from 197,175 in 2001 to 404,700 last year.
That’s increased the immigrant percentage of Calgary’s population from 20.9 to 29.4 per cent.
In 1959, one out of 350 Calgarians was a visible minority; today that number is one in three compared to a national average of one in five.
The profusion of ethnic festivals in the city and the explosion of diversity in its eateries are only two outward signs of the city’s multihued transformation.
Leading the way in immigration from 2011 to 2016 are those hailing from the Philippines, followed by India, China, Pakistan, then Nigeria. Native Filipinos are now the most numerous immigrant group in the city, more recently supplanting south Asians and Chinese.
In his office strategically located in the Pacific Place Mall, a multiethnic hub of culture and commerce in Calgary’s northeast, David Hohol scans his own agency’s numbers that dovetail with Statistics Canada’s.
“We’ve jumped three or four years ago from serving 7,000 people a year to 10-12,000,” said Hohol, manager of community relations for the Calgary Centre for Newcomers, which helps immigrants settle in the city.
“Our growth is expanding past our funding.”
For now, the most numerous of the centre’s clients originate from Eritrea, said Hohol, which is in keeping the national census showing Africans are now the second-most numerous immigrants to Canada, eclipsed only by Asians.
“We’ve heard a lot about Syrian refugees lately, but they’re not even in the top list,” he said.
Much of the growing attraction of Prairie cities to immigrants is economic and the maturing faces of those urban areas driven partly by the newcomers themselves, said Hohol.
“Even a place like Saskatoon is very attractive. It’s growing and becoming more modern, and Calgary is even more so,” he said.
Those newcomers turn increasingly to extensive online research of prospective adopted cities, and what that often tells them is that places like Calgary offer more affordable homes than traditional newcomer magnets like Vancouver and Toronto, said Hohol.
One indication of that could be figures showing that, for the first time in memory, Alberta attracted more immigrants last year than B.C.
From 2011 to 2016, the province took in 17.1 per cent of the country’s immigrants compared to 6.1 per cent in 2001.
Amid that influx, said Hohol, Calgary now has five full-time immigrant settlement agencies to ensure newcomers’ absorption runs relatively smoothly.
“The vast majority of these people feel very welcome and they’ll tell you that,” he said.
El Daher enthusiastically echoes that sentiment, praising his new neighbours as vital to his family’s progress.
“The Canadian people here are very nice, they help me with everything,” said El Daher, who lives in the Ranchlands area.
In the coming weeks, his wife, Nahiama, will give birth to the couple’s fourth child, their first in Canada, completing a circle of immigrant destiny.
“We’ll have a Canadian citizen,” said El Daher.