National Post (National Edition)
So now ravines are racist, too
OUR PRIME MINISTER HAS CALLED HIS OWN COUNTRY A GENOCIDE STATE. — JONATHAN KAY
I'm getting vaccinated on May 5, a milestone that I regard (at least symbolically) as marking the beginning of my slow return to pre-pandemic life. But even when the lockdowns are over, my daily routines will remain permanently altered.
Prior to the pandemic, I spent almost my entire life indoors. I'd wile away the days staring at a computer, sitting in a car, and working out in a gym. I didn't even like outdoor restaurant patios because I always had anxiety about whether there'd be an inside table available if it suddenly rained. Plus, allergies.
Then the pandemic hit, and the only restaurant seat available was in my car, on the back end of a drive thru. To stay active, I spent a lot of time on my bike, exploring Toronto's parks and learning disc golf — one of the few sports we've (mostly) been allowed to play. In the process, I discovered a vast network of wooded paths that I'd never known about, despite living in this city for two decades.
Many of my excursions have taken me through Toronto's ravine system. As I explored northward from my own neighbourhood, I'd encounter all sorts of secluded fields and shore spots. Sometimes I'll take my dog and kids as well. It's completely free, easy to get to, and massive: Toronto boasts the largest urban ravine system in the world. In all, it's 11,000 square kilometres — 3,000 times the size of Central Park in New York.
A relaxing visit to the ravine shouldn't be a political experience. But of late, it's been hard for me to ignore how much the reality I observe there conflicts with progressive received wisdom that presents Canada as a seething hive of systemic racism.
If you live in Toronto, take a bike ride upstream from Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park, low-income neighbourhoods that happen to feature high concentrations of (respectively) South Asian Muslim immigrants and Black families. These are areas that abut my favourite disc-golf course. (The raised eastern end of Thorncliffe Park's main commercial drag, Overlea Boulevard, literally overlooks the sixth hole.) You'll pass a set of volleyball nets where you'll often see Farsi-speaking players going back and forth between games and picnic meals. There's a path-side copse where East Asian women of a certain age always seem to be on the hunt for a particular kind of mushroom or flower (someone identified it for me once, but I forget what it is). The bike paths themselves often feature groups of hijabbed (and, yes, sometimes niqabbed) women out walking in groups with strollers, enjoying the sunshine.
I've been all over this city over the past year. On weekends, certain parks in Scarborough seem to resemble a gigantic Tamil potluck, while at Centennial Park in Etobicoke, I'm more likely to hear Russian and Filipino. When discing in the woods near the Don Valley, I've twice observed the same group of Japanese-Canadian mountain bikers (four men and one woman) wearing matching red outfits that look like something out of a science-fiction TV series. There is also a spot where, after dark, I see Sikh or Hindu teenagers (I'll admit that I can't tell the two languages apart) having socially distanced parties featuring loud music broadcast out of SUV sound systems. Riverdale Park East is a complete multicultural mishmash. Up at Sunnybrook Park and Wilket Creek, meanwhile, it's mostly just boring old WASPs. But I guess they need somewhere to go, too.
It's one big ethno-rama, in other words. And in a whole year of going up and down these trails, the only time I ever saw racial strife of any kind was the time in March when a bunch of dudes built a bonfire and had a hookah party on the 14th hole of the disc golf course that sits directly behind the Ontario Science Centre. They didn't move, even when we waited on the tee-off pad and asked politely. So in the end we just threw our discs over their heads. Racial Armageddon averted.
It's often in the moments after I've been on these outings — when I look at my phone for the first time in hours, and scroll through the day's ludicrous shrieking contests (“No, YOU'RE the racist!”) — that I realize how much our information environment pollutes our understanding of race relations. The multicultural reality I see every day is idyllic, but also badly out of step with Critical Race Theory. Our prime minister has called his own country a genocide state, and his government is now set to spend hundreds of millions of dollars indoctrinating civil servants with imported American materials so they can learn how racist they are. What you see in the Toronto ravine system (and at thousands of similar nature areas across Canada, for that matter) is inconveniently off-message: There simply isn't enough racism.
So how do journalists resolve this conflict between reality and ideology? Behold the Globe & Mail's recent double-bylined feature arguing that non-white people face “barriers” when they try to access Toronto's ravine system. By way of evidence, the two reporters offer the account of a Black woman who said she worried that a white person might see her near the ravine and “call the police.” The woman is an experienced hiker, yet offered no evidence that she'd witnessed anything close to this kind of treatment. Just the opposite: the only interactions she detailed to the Globe were encounters in which “perfectly polite” park-goers tried to help her, on the mistaken possibility that she might need directions.
As I read the article, I wondered how two Globe & Mail journalists — one of them being an “Urban Affairs Reporter,” no less — could visit Toronto's ravine system and come away with this kind of narrative. But then I re-read the thing and realized that my premise had been faulty: Nothing in the text suggests that either journalist (both of them as white as can be, by the way) had actually visited the ravine as part of their reporting, let alone interviewed anyone they'd met there.
Over 22 paragraphs, all the quoted interviewees were either activists, bloggers, academics or government officials. The Globe & Mail offices sit literally three blocks from a bike trail that goes up along the Don River into the heart of the ravine system that these two journalists purported to describe. In the amount of time it took them to speak with a “doctoral student who researches the engagement of recent immigrants with the urban forest” (as one interviewee is described) these reporters could have walked to the ravine and engaged with a whole bunch of real live immigrants themselves. Crazy, right?
These reporters weren't wrong to conclude that some people face “barriers” in accessing Toronto's ravine system. They're the same barriers that held me back for 20 years: ignorance of my natural surroundings, force of habit, and an unwillingness to venture outside my climate-controlled comfort zone. And it's a pity that I only started enjoying this “Toronto treasure” (as the Globe rightly calls the ravine system in the headline) after the pandemic knocked me out of my rut. Once that happened, the actual business of physically getting to the ravine was easy. Anyone can go — even Globe & Mail reporters.
A RELAXING VISIT TO THE RAVINE SHOULDN'T BE A POLITICAL EXPERIENCE.