Soccer, identity and our history of diversity
FAIR POINT A dancer takes part in the Carifiesta Parade in downtown Montreal on Saturday. The annual parade celebrates Caribbean culture.
While the two-week hiatus this column enjoyed was due to the long weekends, I must admit that it was very conveniently timed. I’ve spent much of the last month enjoying what has been an absolutely mind-boggling World Cup.
Most days, I’ve watched from Café Olimpico, a bastion of soccer, yes, but also of diversity, with people from all walks of life stopping in to cheer on their native countries or the teams they’ve adopted. I’ve watched games with a young Iranian man who recently came to Canada, a Colombian family, Peruvian Canadians, a Mauritian Canadian and countless others.
It’s been a poignant reminder, at a time when immigration is a buzzword worldwide, that Montreal and Canada are at their best when they are at their most diverse. The Canada of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations was a country whose reputation was staked on welcoming those who sought refuge, from Vietnamese Boat People to Bosnians and Kosovars. In 1986, the United Nations recognized Canada’s “outstanding humanitarian tradition of settling refugees,” and there is a page of the federal government’s website called “Canada: A History of Refuge.”
But that was then and this is now. We, Canadians, collectively, tend to look down on what’s happening south of the border, criticizing the United States for taking a hard line on immigration, separating families and, at least until a recent court decision, detaining most refugee-claimants pending their hearings. But, while we may not be as bad as our neighbours, we certainly aren’t faultless ourselves.
Canada, it seems, has some of its own shortcomings to address when it comes to our detention practices vis-à-vis migrant children. We’re also coming to grips with the fact that alt-right, antiimmigration, white-supremacist ideology is present in our own backyard, and not just in Europe and the United States.
On a much less sinister level, one of the province’s mainstream parties, Coalition Avenir Québec, is campaigning on a platform that includes reducing immigration by 10,000 people a year and implementing a so-called values test. Such a policy would go against the spirit of Quebec sharing responsibility for immigration with the federal government. Quebec is supposed to take in immigrants proportionally to the province’s population, which means Quebec should be taking in about 20 to 25 per cent of all immigrants who come to Canada.
Saying no to 10,000 people would reduce Quebec’s intake by roughly 20 per cent and would bring our proportional immigration rate down to 15 per cent, well below the target range. And, at a time where some regions in the province are struggling to find workers, it’s hard to use the economy to justify it.
Quebec has also been given the power to put in place its own points system, which prioritizes some things more than the federal system does — francophones, for example, are more likely to end up in Quebec.
Try as they may to defend the policy and distance themselves from the words nationalism and racism, the CAQ has done itself no favours by alluding to similar policies in Austria, a country where a far-right anti-immigration party, Freedom Party, is part of the government.
But I digress because this isn’t about one party’s policies.
Instead, it’s about our collective identity and beliefs because we live in a country where, luckily, policies are put into place by the will of the people who elect governments. Canada has always been a place where people from other countries have felt welcomed, and we have been a country made better and stronger because of those who choose to come here.
It’s also about the fact that most of the people in decisionmaking positions are immigrants or descendants of immigrants themselves, whether that’s one generation or six generations ago. We shouldn’t ignore that, nor should we turn our backs on those who are trying to do the same thing earlier generations of migrants did by coming here; the one difference is that they are largely trying to do so within the confines of the law, whereas the first Europeans came here by force.
“But that was then and this is now,” some will argue. Be that as it may, it’s important to acknowledge and remember our collective history. Ours is one where, for decades, we welcomed people from all walks of life and all countries with open arms, eager to have them discover Canada and add something to it.
I was expecting to take a mental break during the twoweek hiatus and enjoy the World Cup, but I’ve been sitting in an Italian café thinking about how people from diverse backgrounds watching the games alongside me truly represent what it means to be Canadian.