Lake Ontario, the smallest of North America’s five Great Lakes, has a rippled surface that gives off a diamond-like glitter on sunny days.
It’s a quality peculiar to this lake. The Iroquois saw it a thousand years ago when they gathered on its pebbly shores during the summer months for recreation, as did their ancestors, ten thousand years before them, who migrated from the south in the wake of retreating glaciers after the last ice age. They named their fair-weather mistress “Ontario”. The word, thought to derive from the Huron tongue, means “beautiful waters”.
Toronto now lords it over these waters, a sprawling modern metropolis of glass and steel whose skyline is punctuated by the familiar CN Tower, the tallest free-standing structure in the Western Hemisphere. The city’s harbour is insulated from the cold open lake by a sandy island complex, which has a mini amusement park and petting zoo at one end, and a busy executive airport at the other.
Compared with its older American cousins to the south, Chicago and New York, this city has a relatively unremarkable history. But it has grown into one of the most ethnically diverse and dynamic cities in the world.
{module [106]} Toronto began as a British colonial settlement in 1793 called York. John Graves Simcoe, lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, built a wooden garrison (Fort York) in anticipation of war with the Americans whose recent revolution had separated them from King and Empire.
War didn’t come until 1812. In April, 1813, the United States’ navy landed 2,700 men and 85 cannon at York on 14 ships. The defending force of 700 stood little chance. After a pitched six-hour battle, the Americans sacked the garrison, looted some nearby homes and burned the Parliament Buildings and Government House. Then, after an occupation lasting only less than a week, they left.
The British dispatched a retaliatory army the next summer. It marched all the way to Washington and set fire to the Capitol and White House.
York expanded rapidly throughout the nineteenth century. It changed its name to Toronto in 1834, which in Huron means “place of meeting”. Over time it gained the nickname “Toronto the Good” for its restrained Victorian moral climate and its many churches, most of them Protestant.
In the summer of 1847, some thirty-eight thousand Irish refugees arrived, fleeing the devastation wrought by a severe potato famine back home. Toronto, which before “Black ‘47” had only 20,000 people, was ill-prepared to receive such a large influx. The city hastily built “emigrant sheds” near Reese’s Warf to house (and contain) the sick, and it constructed a new hospital on the site to treat the infectious. Nearly 1,100 would die here from starvation, typhus and cholera.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Toronto had come to rival Montreal as the country’s industrial, commercial and financial center. Its population swelled from 208,000 in 1901 to 667,500 in 1941. German, Italian and Jewish immigrants helped to bring the number over a million by the early 1950s.
Today, Toronto is home to 2.5 million people, or 5.5 million if you include the faster-growing satellite cities that amalgamated into the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) in 1997.
Every year urban sprawl eats up more and more surrounding farmland, some of the finest in Canada, displacing farmers of older European stock to make way for subdivisions catering largely to the city’s newer ethnic communities.
Demographic change has been part and parcel of Toronto’s story from the very beginning. Nearly half of the city’s residents are, once more, people who were born outside of Canada, and about half of these have lived in Canada for less than 15 years.
But never before has the city seen so much diversity. Canada’s latest wave of mass immigration has brought to the city more visible minorities: South Asians, Chinese, Blacks, Filipinos and Latin Americans. Together they are projected to become Toronto’s majority as early as 2017.
According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Toronto’s ethnic diversity ranks second only to Miami among the world’s largest cities. People from 200 distinct ethnic origins speaking 152 languages and dialects live here in a rich cultural mosaic, which is relatively harmonious and free from the jaundiced exclusionary policies that Chinese and Jewish newcomers experienced during the first half of the twentieth century.
Settlement patterns have changed, too. South Asian immigrants, those with origins in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, now gravitate to Mississauga and Brampton, connected cities that lie on Toronto’s western and north-western fringes where the cost of living is lower. Whereas Toronto in 1938 had only three Sikhs, Brampton today is home to well over 300,000, one of the largest Sikh populations outside of India.
Chinese immigrants have all but taken over the eastern and north-eastern suburbs of Scarborough and Markham, leaving the two older Chinese enclaves in downtown Toronto (one of which was a former Jewish district until the 1960s) to Vietnamese and Filipino newcomers.
South Asians and Chinese in consequence can avoid the “melting pot”, settling with relative ease into large, virtually self-contained suburban cultural communities. To some, it seems like a process of gradual colonization. Two decades ago, it was disconcerting. Today, it is considered emblematic of Toronto’s modernity, a model for the country and the wider world to follow.
But just as America’s “melting pot” model came into question during the 1970s, worries about multiculturalism’s future here are beginning to resonate with more Canadians. Some feel that the preponderance of Toronto’s ethnic communities—more than 40 percent of the country’s visible minorities live in Toronto—has divorced the city from the rest of Canada and widened the gulf between urban and rural communities, with the result that it is becoming harder to define a cohesive national identity.
Those who defend cultural pluralism say that diversity, racial tolerance and social inclusiveness are values that are at the very heart of a distinctive Canadian identity.
Still, more concrete problems are gaining urgency. Gaps in income, education and poverty levels between new immigrants and Toronto’s native-born seem to be widening. Many newcomers find themselves stuck in menial, dead-end jobs with little upward mobility, despite a federal immigration system that is set up to attract well-educated and skilled migrants to Canada. It is feared that large, concentrated ethnic communities are slowing productive integration and making it difficult for newcomers to overcome linguistic and social barriers. Some studies suggest that immigrants who arrived during the 1960s more successfully integrated into the labor market and ultimately experienced fewer inequalities because they had to assimilate quickly.
The real question, perhaps, is not whether or not multiculturalism is desirable but whether it has natural limits, socially and economically, in areas of high concentration. If so, it raises tricky substantive policy issues and new questions in the continuing debate on the future of multiculturalism as a practical concept or model.
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Toronto: A Very Cosmopolitan City
December 15, 2011
Lake Ontario, the smallest of North America’s five Great Lakes, has a rippled surface that gives off a diamond-like glitter on sunny days.
It’s a quality peculiar to this lake. The Iroquois saw it a thousand years ago when they gathered on its pebbly shores during the summer months for recreation, as did their ancestors, ten thousand years before them, who migrated from the south in the wake of retreating glaciers after the last ice age. They named their fair-weather mistress “Ontario”. The word, thought to derive from the Huron tongue, means “beautiful waters”.
Toronto now lords it over these waters, a sprawling modern metropolis of glass and steel whose skyline is punctuated by the familiar CN Tower, the tallest free-standing structure in the Western Hemisphere. The city’s harbour is insulated from the cold open lake by a sandy island complex, which has a mini amusement park and petting zoo at one end, and a busy executive airport at the other.
Compared with its older American cousins to the south, Chicago and New York, this city has a relatively unremarkable history. But it has grown into one of the most ethnically diverse and dynamic cities in the world.
{module [106]} Toronto began as a British colonial settlement in 1793 called York. John Graves Simcoe, lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, built a wooden garrison (Fort York) in anticipation of war with the Americans whose recent revolution had separated them from King and Empire.
War didn’t come until 1812. In April, 1813, the United States’ navy landed 2,700 men and 85 cannon at York on 14 ships. The defending force of 700 stood little chance. After a pitched six-hour battle, the Americans sacked the garrison, looted some nearby homes and burned the Parliament Buildings and Government House. Then, after an occupation lasting only less than a week, they left.
The British dispatched a retaliatory army the next summer. It marched all the way to Washington and set fire to the Capitol and White House.
York expanded rapidly throughout the nineteenth century. It changed its name to Toronto in 1834, which in Huron means “place of meeting”. Over time it gained the nickname “Toronto the Good” for its restrained Victorian moral climate and its many churches, most of them Protestant.
In the summer of 1847, some thirty-eight thousand Irish refugees arrived, fleeing the devastation wrought by a severe potato famine back home. Toronto, which before “Black ‘47” had only 20,000 people, was ill-prepared to receive such a large influx. The city hastily built “emigrant sheds” near Reese’s Warf to house (and contain) the sick, and it constructed a new hospital on the site to treat the infectious. Nearly 1,100 would die here from starvation, typhus and cholera.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Toronto had come to rival Montreal as the country’s industrial, commercial and financial center. Its population swelled from 208,000 in 1901 to 667,500 in 1941. German, Italian and Jewish immigrants helped to bring the number over a million by the early 1950s.
Today, Toronto is home to 2.5 million people, or 5.5 million if you include the faster-growing satellite cities that amalgamated into the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) in 1997.
Every year urban sprawl eats up more and more surrounding farmland, some of the finest in Canada, displacing farmers of older European stock to make way for subdivisions catering largely to the city’s newer ethnic communities.
Demographic change has been part and parcel of Toronto’s story from the very beginning. Nearly half of the city’s residents are, once more, people who were born outside of Canada, and about half of these have lived in Canada for less than 15 years.
But never before has the city seen so much diversity. Canada’s latest wave of mass immigration has brought to the city more visible minorities: South Asians, Chinese, Blacks, Filipinos and Latin Americans. Together they are projected to become Toronto’s majority as early as 2017.
According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Toronto’s ethnic diversity ranks second only to Miami among the world’s largest cities. People from 200 distinct ethnic origins speaking 152 languages and dialects live here in a rich cultural mosaic, which is relatively harmonious and free from the jaundiced exclusionary policies that Chinese and Jewish newcomers experienced during the first half of the twentieth century.
Settlement patterns have changed, too. South Asian immigrants, those with origins in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, now gravitate to Mississauga and Brampton, connected cities that lie on Toronto’s western and north-western fringes where the cost of living is lower. Whereas Toronto in 1938 had only three Sikhs, Brampton today is home to well over 300,000, one of the largest Sikh populations outside of India.
Chinese immigrants have all but taken over the eastern and north-eastern suburbs of Scarborough and Markham, leaving the two older Chinese enclaves in downtown Toronto (one of which was a former Jewish district until the 1960s) to Vietnamese and Filipino newcomers.
South Asians and Chinese in consequence can avoid the “melting pot”, settling with relative ease into large, virtually self-contained suburban cultural communities. To some, it seems like a process of gradual colonization. Two decades ago, it was disconcerting. Today, it is considered emblematic of Toronto’s modernity, a model for the country and the wider world to follow.
But just as America’s “melting pot” model came into question during the 1970s, worries about multiculturalism’s future here are beginning to resonate with more Canadians. Some feel that the preponderance of Toronto’s ethnic communities—more than 40 percent of the country’s visible minorities live in Toronto—has divorced the city from the rest of Canada and widened the gulf between urban and rural communities, with the result that it is becoming harder to define a cohesive national identity.
Those who defend cultural pluralism say that diversity, racial tolerance and social inclusiveness are values that are at the very heart of a distinctive Canadian identity.
Still, more concrete problems are gaining urgency. Gaps in income, education and poverty levels between new immigrants and Toronto’s native-born seem to be widening. Many newcomers find themselves stuck in menial, dead-end jobs with little upward mobility, despite a federal immigration system that is set up to attract well-educated and skilled migrants to Canada. It is feared that large, concentrated ethnic communities are slowing productive integration and making it difficult for newcomers to overcome linguistic and social barriers. Some studies suggest that immigrants who arrived during the 1960s more successfully integrated into the labor market and ultimately experienced fewer inequalities because they had to assimilate quickly.
The real question, perhaps, is not whether or not multiculturalism is desirable but whether it has natural limits, socially and economically, in areas of high concentration. If so, it raises tricky substantive policy issues and new questions in the continuing debate on the future of multiculturalism as a practical concept or model.
