Life in the Rear-view Mirror

Immigration and its Effects

In the last chapter I discussed how the feminist revolution helped reduce population growth in wealthy countries, and concluded that the same thing is needed in poor ones. I also discussed how it affected migration from poor to wealthy countries. Here I discuss how this migration wave affected the place I lived in, and still do.

Toronto of today bears little resemblance to that of fifty years ago, when it had a population of about 1.5 million. Now it’s a sprawling metropolitan centre of about three million people, making it the fourth largest in North America, after Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles. Life in those days was tough, especially for new immigrants, but it was also calmer, and people were more sociable. People lived in row housing, semidetached, or fully detached houses. Those who couldn’t afford a house rented a flat or a room from those who could. It was only the year after we arrived that they started constructing a large apartment building in our neighbourhood – it’s still standing today. That was a sign of things to come.

Two trends became immediately noticeable in those days: the migration to the suburbs and apartment living. Toronto was destined to grow in leaps and bounds and become Canada's biggest metropolis. Until the advent of the separatist movement in Quebec, led by the Parti Québécois, Toronto was the second largest city, after Montreal. The threat of separation and the passage of the French Language Law unnerved corporate Canada, causing many large companies, particularly in the financial sector, to move their head offices to Toronto. Since then it has been the largest city in Canada, forever attracting people from all over the world to work and live there. Immigration more than compensated for the decline in fertility rate. Without it, population growth would have been negative during the last decades of the twentieth century, rather than the actual one percent annual increase.

The migration to the suburbs, where middle class families bought mostly bungalows and split-level houses, was fairly rapid. They bought beautiful new homes with all the modern comforts, and large front and back yards for the children to play, not to mention an adequate supply of parks and green spaces that were in short supply in the city. Once they were filled to capacity, the only way Toronto’s population could keep growing was to expand upwards; and that’s when the construction of apartment buildings and condominiums really took off. The city has now reached a population density of 3,000 per square kilometre. Nobody could have imagined it fifty years ago!

The Golden Horseshoe, the strip of land around the western tip of Lake Ontario, starting from Oshawa and stretching to Niagara Falls and Fort Erie, has a population of about 9 million. Its major population centres are Oshawa, Whitby, Toronto, Mississauga, Burlington, Hamilton, St. Catharines, and Niagara Falls. In 1950, when the population of Metropolitan Toronto was about one million, its population was near the one and a half million mark. In just over sixty years, while Toronto’s population almost tripled, that of the Golden Horseshoe Area sextupled!

While, in 1950, the majority of the land in the Golden Horseshoe Area was farmland, and people earned an income from farming, or renting farmland, now it’s mostly urbanized. There has also been a significant shift in wealth, from ownership of farmland to ownership of real estate (residential, commercial and industrial) and other property, such as factories. Much of the income generated in the area now comes from non-farm activities. Imagine entire farms being converted each year to urban areas, changing the whole concept of living and personal wealth. More importantly, however, Ontario is no longer self-sufficient in food supply!

Before 1950, it was rare for people to own their home. Most people rented from the wealthy families that had the capital to build houses. Afterwards, when Italian immigrants started arriving, home ownership became a priority; and the home became people’s biggest financial asset. As prosperity grew, so did the size of the houses. Ironically, prosperity came from the conversion of farmland to factories, increasing the area’s gross domestic product. I say ironically because we now pay the health price for the environmental contamination that those factories brought us. Prosperity is a double-edged sword!

Before the wave of Italian immigration began at the end of WWII, Toronto was largely a White Anglo Saxon Protestant community. There had been a previous wave of Italian immigration at the end of the nineteenth century, but the numbers were relatively small. The number of Canadians of Italian ancestry in Toronto before the war was about 16,000. The post-war wave was huge, in comparison. By the time it tapered off in the 1980s, about 300,000 Italians had arrived, mostly from southern Italy. The majority arrived in the 1950s and 60s.

After the First World War, when Italy was part of the British/French alliance, Italians had been welcomed to Canada, but when Mussolini took power and became friendly with Hitler, all Italians were painted as fascists, and thus became undesirable immigrants. It was only out of sheer economic necessity that the Canadian government reversed its prewar policy and allowed Italians to enter after the second war. In the early days, however, we were looked upon with suspicion. On numerous occasions, if we stood at street corners to talk to fellow immigrants, the police were quick to disperse us for fear that we would foment unrest. This was the era of McCarthyism, when immigrants were looked at upon as potential communists, even at elementary school level, when I had no idea what fascists and communists were.

The population of Toronto was then under 2 million; so, 300,000 Italians represented 15% of the population – a significant chunk. We had arrived, and we could no longer be ignored. Italian culture started to spread from the Italian enclave, initially an area bounded by Queen street in the south, College street in the north, Bathurst street in the east, and Lansdowne street in the west, but as the numbers grew it expanded northwards. Gelato, espresso, and pizza where at first available only in a few places inside the enclave: now they are available throughout the city. Italian restaurants are everywhere in the city and cater more to the tastes of British Canadians than those of Italian origin. Italian is now the fourth most spoken language in Toronto, after English, French, and Chinese. Portuguese is number five.

When Italian immigration began to dry up in the 1970s, the Canadian government facilitated immigration from Greece and Portugal, and up to the late 1980s all immigrants were Caucasian. That would soon change. When cheap labour from Europe was exhausted, Canada had no choice but to look east and south. Soon, about 60% of immigrants were coming from Asia, and the remaining mostly from the Caribbean. In 1997, the British colony of Hong Kong reverted to China. But before that happened, there was a mass exodus of wealthy Chinese who hedged their bets by taking up Canadian citizenship. Toronto’s small Chinese community swelled to become its largest ethnic group, numbering about half a million. The most rapidly growing groups of immigrants are now West Asians, Koreans, and Arabs. We have witnessed these trends in our very own West-Toronto community.

Recent immigration has changed the face of Toronto. Half of its population is now visible minorities – non-whites. That is a far cry from Toronto of 50 years ago! Immigration has made it a truly cosmopolitan city, where one can hear many different languages spoken, and taste the food and drinks of almost every region of the world. It is a much more interesting and colourful place then the one we found. For example, during FIFA’s World Cup playoffs in Brazil, Toronto’s streets came to life with colourful flags from every part of the world. Cars paraded up the down the streets carrying at least one flag from the rear window, and some had two or more. Everyone cheered the soccer teams along ethnic lines. The cars with two flags were an indication of mixed marriages. My neighbour up the street, for example, is an Italian immigrant, but his wife is Canadian with English and Irish ancestry. Their car flew the Italian flag, the Irish flag, and the English football team flag. With all the flags parading the streets, one might have thought that the games were being played in Toronto.

Toronto has become a truly multiethnic society. When I go for my morning walks to the park, I regularly meet people from Eastern Europe and Russia, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Colombia, and other Latin American countries, including Cuba.

To a lesser extent, what’s happened in Toronto has happened in the rest of Canada. As a country, we have helped to reduce the overpopulation burden of other countries. Though, it hasn’t always been for altruistic reasons. Self-interest has played a big role. But what has Canada, or North America for that matter, done to help address the global population issue?  Sadly, not very much. Canada of the 1960s and 70s was a leader in promoting dialogue between rich and poor countries. Pierre Elliot Trudeau was a champion for the cause of alleviating poverty in poor countries. Perhaps he knew what the rest of us didn’t: helping them was the most effective way of saving the planet from potential self-destruction! Today’s right-wing policies are not the solution to relentless global population growth. To the extent that those policies are creating further wealth concentration, they are actually counterproductive!