THAT CANADIAN FEELING
How this country becomes home
Shabana Baig says she’s always surprised when people ask her where she is from.
“I say Ottawa. And they say ‘no, I mean back home.’”
Baig is originally from Pakistan, but has lived in Ottawa for 21 years. She raised her four children here.
“In my heart, I am Canadian,” she says. “I always think, why are they asking me this question?
“My kids grew up here, they went to the school here, we worked in the community. But still they ask.”
She softens the query with the peal of gentle laughter that punctuates many of her stories about life in Canada, including the tough times.
It would be hard to find a more kind-hearted or patriotic Canadian. When the first planeload of Syrian refugees arrived in Ottawa in 2015, Baig and her family showed up at the airport to welcome them, handing out Canadian flags and stuffed teddy bears.
Like many immigrants, her attachment to this country grew over time. Baig says she didn’t feel truly settled until she sponsored her parents in 2002 to join the family in Ottawa.
“It’s peace of mind now. I was always calling back to find out, ‘How are you doing?’ I would worry about them.
“When they were close to me here in Canada, that is when I started to feel Canadian.”
Baig said she was surprised at the difficulty she encountered carving out a career as a young woman who arrived with an engineering degree.
She took her first job doing production work at a high-tech company when her son was a toddler and her daughter was four months old.
She took care of them during the day while her husband went to his day job, then worked a night shift. After two more children arrived, Baig ran a home daycare. Then she headed back to school, earning a master’s degree from Carleton University in biomedical engineering.
“Still I didn’t get a job. I was struggling because I’m qualified but I have no experience.
“You need contacts, a network, to get someplace.”
Baig ended up taking another production job at a high-tech company.
Now in her 50s, she is back in school again, this time at Algonquin College studying computer programming. Maybe she’ll have better luck finding a job in that field, Baig says. “I will try to find some job if I can,” she says cheerily. “My mind is working. That is the main thing.”
Her children belong to Canada, says Baig. Their only childhood memories are of growing up in Kanata, although they learned early the possibility of exploring other countries and cultures. Baig relates a story about what her son, Abdullah, said when he was a toddler. “He said, ‘Mommy you lived in Pakistan, and in Canada. When I grow up, I’ll live in China!”
Pakistan will always be part of her, of course, and Baig has mixed feelings when she visits. It’s wonderful to see family. “And I feel good there because everybody looks like me.”
But at the same time, she explains, “Everything is strange for me. Everything is changed.
“My friends have moved away, except one. I don’t know where they’ve gone. I think I belong here now more than back home.”
Baig says her only regret about moving to Canada is that her children didn’t grow up in the huge, extended family she did in Pakistan.
“No aunts, no uncles, no cousins. Only friends. … That’s the only regret I have.”
From Scotland to Old Ottawa South: Roddy Christie
If Canada played Scotland in a rugby match, Roddy Christie says he’d cheer for the Scottish team.
He arrived in Canada in 1993, and loves his life in Ottawa, but Christie says ties to his homeland in Scotland will never be severed. He didn’t arrive in Ottawa until his mid 20s, he notes.
“I don’t think you can just change overnight and say ‘I’m ( just a) Canadian.” He carries two passports.
However, Christie added quickly with a laugh, if Canada ever played the U.S. in rugby, he would cheer for the Canadian team.
The sports analogy is apt for a former phys-ed teacher and outdoor enthusiast who worked for many years at Mountain Equipment Co-op in Ottawa.
Like many immigrants, Christie straddles two cultures. “Because I’ve lived here for 20-odd years, culturally I’m a Canadian when I live here. When I go back home, I very quickly adapt.”
That includes his Scottish accent, which instantly intensifies when he sets foot in Scotland, he says.
“My friends used to say it was hard to understand me at the best of times because of my accent, but when I went back home for a few weeks in the summer, my accent was like ‘Whoa! Come and talk to me when you adjust again.’
“Yet when I talk to my sister and my parents (in Scotland), they would be ‘Wow, you sound Canadian. It’s weird.”
Culturally, Scotland and Canada may seem similar, but there are big differences, says Christie, from the humour — he grew up with Monty Python and Fawlty Towers — to the centuries-old cultural and political traditions in his homeland.
He and his then-partner chose Canada over New Zealand, where she was doing her medical training, because they thought it would be a good place to raise children. She was Canadian.
It was the right choice, he says. “It’s a fantastic community to raise kids, and Canada is just a fantastic country.”
Christie said he made sure he and his two kids participated in typically Canadian activities. They learned to skate, he started crosscountry skiing.
“I believe you should adapt. I believe that very strongly. You are living in a country that is a great place to live, and I strongly believe you should join into that country.”
Christie also embraced bilingualism as a great opportunity. Both children — one is currently in university and the other just finished — took French immersion in Ottawa schools. “We are so poor in Britain at speaking a second language. We just get everyone to speak English.”
But he still considers himself Scottish, too.
“I have this discussion with friends at work. They say ‘ Well, are you Canadian or are you Scottish?
“If you left Canada at 26 and moved to, say, Thailand to live, would you regard yourself as Thai person or a Canadian?” Christie asks rhetorically.
And is it necessary to choose? He likes Canadian celebrations such as July 1, says Christie. “But does that mean you jettison your own? No. I still celebrate (Scottish poet) Robbie Burns Day with my friends here, and I still love going back home to visit my parents and my older sister, still in Scotland. They still live in the same house I grew up in. It’s great to go back and see the place. It feels like home because that’s the house you were brought up in.”
From Ghana to Canada: Sheila
South
When Sheila South was a Grade 2 student in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, she remembers her teacher abruptly telling her she had to leave. She walked several miles home.
The reason? Her school fees had not been paid. “If you didn’t pay, you’d just get kicked out of school,” she explains.
Today South is 22, a Canadian citizen and Carleton University student who plans to become a teacher herself.
And when she considers the things she values about being Canadian, South immediately names the school system. It’s free and universal. “That just wouldn’t happen here,” she says. “They can’t just send a child out of school.”
Education is also the reason South left Ghana at age 10. A woman working at the British High Commission who was friendly with South’s family asked if Sheila wanted to move to Canada with her.
“It was quite a significant thing for my mom to let someone take her daughter,” says South. But her mother wanted to give her the chance for an education, a sacrifice that South appreciates. “I think she was really thinking about my future when she said yes. She only had two kids. After I left it must have been lonely.”
South knew the woman who became her adoptive Canadian mom quite well, as she had visited her house and played with the woman’s daughter — now South’s sister — almost daily.
“I’m 10. I just knew I was going somewhere new. Lots of people were saying ‘It’s cold there.’”
South arrived in Calgary in November, met by her adoptive grandparents at the airport with parkas for her and her sister. “They were so long and shiny.”
South said she had a happy time in Calgary, but went through a rough patch when the family moved to Newfoundland when she was in Grade 11. She found adjusting to a new school, one not as culturally diverse, difficult. “I was not happy there.”
She came to Ottawa to live with her adoptive grandmother and finish high school.
South is going into her third year of a BA in child studies at Carleton, then hopes to attend teacher’s college. That may allow her one day to teach overseas, perhaps in Kenya or Ghana, she says. “A big thing for me is access to education for everyone.”
After living just more than half her life in the country, “I feel I’m pretty Canadian,” South says.
“But at the same time, I hold my culture.”
She still loves to eat jollof, rice simmered in a tomato sauce with spices that are difficult to find in Ottawa. She’s learned to make a delicious version herself, using a recipe she found on YouTube.
And on Canada Day, South and her friends will head to Parliament Hill. “Canada Day always makes you feel like a Canadian. You are here, you are celebrating.
“It just comes naturally after you’ve been living here awhile.”