Today’s Toronto Star front page feature on “The Rainbow City”, its report on this year’s census data, was of huge interest to me. It’s pretty amazing that just under half of our city’s population was born outside of Canada.
Of course, this is something most of us experience every day. Each time we walk along a downtown (or suburban) street, or enter a classroom, crowded streetcar, or shopping mall, we know this reality. I personally love that I am no longer part a “visible minority” (who knew that in Toronto, people of colour would become the majority?).
We celebrate this diversity, and we should. Toronto is an incredibly wonderful and interesting place. And yet, there is another side to this complicated story. We often forget about the realities that new immigrants and people of colour face: underemployment, racism, not having qualifications and expertise valued, to name a few.
I was captivated by the story and photo on the Star’s page A6. There is the Ayyoub family from Jordan, sitting beside a decorated Christmas tree. Nisreen is a former high school teacher, and her husband Majdi, commutes three hours a day to “recertify” so that he may work as a pharmacist. They live in Brampton because they couldn’t find affordable housing in Toronto. Nisreen is optimistic, saying “All immigrants find it difficult at first, but life will get better.”
Their situation doesn’t sound so different from the fictional Paperwala family in Stealing Nasreen. It was this reality that inspired the novel. As I became increasingly aware of the surgeon taxi drivers and engineer janitors and teacher food service workers all around me, Shaffiq and Salma Paperwala formed in my mind and I strove to depict, though fiction, what it might be like to be part of that 49.9 percent of Torontonians who have changed the face of this city.
I often wonder what it will take for things to be different here. Will the point system become fairer? Will queer refugees one day stop having to prove they are queer? Will accreditation bodies quit faulty and racist perceptions and recognize skilled workers?
This is our Toronto, the most multiracial city on the planet. I wish the Ayyoubs much luck.