Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Chinese community stirring the melting pot



Email Address: pkuitenbrouwer@nationalpost.com

 

As an event planner in Hong Kong in the 1980s, Mimi Yeung spoke English for 10 hours every day. Then in 1987, she moved to Toronto. Today, enveloped in Toronto's huge Chinese community, she is frustrated to find that she is losing her English.

"I don't need to speak English!" says Ms. Yeung, who now works part-time as a publicist.

"My accountant, lawyer, driving instructor, doctor, dentist - everybody is Chinese.

"My English has gotten worse. I have no way of getting interaction with the mainstream."

Increasingly, in Toronto at least, Ms. Yeung is the mainstream. New census data released yesterday by Statistics Canada shows that close to half of the five-million people in the Toronto census metropolitan area, or 2.3-million people, were born outside of Canada.

The biggest chunk, 1.3-million, come from Asia, including 190,000 from main land China and another 103,000 from Hong Kong, plus 62,000 from what Statistics Canada calls "other East Asia." About 3% of Canadians now list Chinese as their mother tongue, behind French (22%) and English (58%).

Toronto's touristic Chinatown, just west of the city's business district, today seems like a simple children's toy compared to the vast, splashy Chinese malls that have grown in the city's northeast; places like the Pacific Mall that bulge with the freshest of Chinese medicines, newsstands displaying Toronto's four Chinese-language daily newspapers, plasma television screens and pirated copies of the latest Hollywood movies.

About 400,000 people in Toronto list Mandarin, Cantonese or "other Chinese" as their mother tongue, compared with 2.8-million English-speakers, 185,000 Italians and 72,000 French.

But the Chinese are only one group whose numbers are rapidly swelling in Toronto, which remains easily the favoured destination for Canada's new immigrants.

Of the 1.6-million people who moved to Canada in the past five years, almost a third, or a whopping 430,000 people, moved to greater Toronto, adding up to 9.2% population growth.

"Every time I take the subway or the streetcar, I always wonder, 'Where have all the real Canadians gone?' " says Ms. Yeung. "I see red people, black people, yellow people - all the ethnicities."

Increasingly, those are the "real" Canadians, whose arrival here has sparked a local building boom.

Everywhere there are cranes, building condominium towers not just in downtown, but in the large sprawling suburbs of Mississauga and Markham, too.

The bulk of Toronto's newcomers, 59.8%, live in the city of Toronto, but the data is increasingly showing they may be on the move.

While just 21.4% of new immigrants lived in surrounding municipalities, such as Mississauga, Brampton and Vaughan in the last census in 2001, today 28.8% of recent immigrants live in those cities, Statistics Canada reports.

Naseer Ahmad led a movement among Toronto's Ahmadiyya Muslims, a faith from Pakistan, to build a mosque and an Islamic subdivision in Vaughan, a suburb in Toronto's north.

"The future of Canada is reflected in Toronto," he says. "Immigrants come here because the cultural communities have established a network of facilities."

But he says governments must do more to spread migrants around: his people are moving in greater numbers to small centres such as Saskatoon, where the Ahmadiyya have already bought a piece of land and have plans for he calls "a big mosque on the prairie.

"Canada is a huge vast land, full of resources, why would you want to concentrate everyone in one place?" he asks.

Even so, the waves of migrants continue to arrive here, and for many in Toronto's English-language majority, there is just one thing to do: Adapt. Chris Mathers, whose Toronto company helps major firms control fraud and risk, grew up among the Chinese in Montreal, he says, and embraces that culture today in Markham, where he lived for many years.

"I give people the red envelope on Chinese New Years," he says, explaining that, by tradition, one gives "lucky money" to those who are younger and unmarried. "In Markham, I straighten out the waiters, the kitchen staff. I have many Asian friends, so you make sure you straighten out their kids.

"It's the way the world is going, it's the natural progression," he says of all the immigration.

"The only difference between these people and my grandfather is that he came from Ireland.

"His English wasn't very good either."

Nancy Lam, a painter who immigrated to Markham from Hong Kong 40 years ago, says that for immigrants, the appeal is simple.

"I like Canada," she says. "You have freedom of speech and the air quality is good. And the people are so friendly here."