Media

Speech on the Occasion of the Opening Session of the Forum on "Migrants in the Metropolis"

Berlin, Thursday, October 25, 2001

Thank you very much Professor Hoerder, Mr. President, Mr. Φzdemir.

It is very interesting for me to participate in an academic conference at the renowned Humboldt University and to speak of an experience that is very personal and not at all intellectual or professional. The experience that you will be discussing all day is my own personal experience. Professor Hoerder mentioned that I was a child of refugees who left for Canada. In fact, I was not only the child of refugees, I was a refugee myself. That makes a difference, believe me.

At the age of three, I arrived in Canada with my parents and my brother, who was seven at the time. We came to this country during the war, in 1942, after an extraordinary journey from Hong Kong, encountering great dangers and being taken care of by the Red Cross. There remained for us numerous uncertainties linked to the fact that we were landing in a country that would eventually become our sanctuary, but in a country that nonetheless did not welcome immigrants or refugees who were not white. Because, at that time, our country – and that is what is interesting – was racist, in the sense that it excluded, as much as possible, people who were not white. And the definition of what "white" meant was changed from one decade to the next. Italians were not considered "white" at the beginning of the 20^th century, nor Slavic peoples either.

All the successive waves of immigration to Canada first started in earnest with the opening of the west in 1911. During that time, there was an extraordinary debate in Canada on the problem of accommodating Slavic people – people who came from Ukraine, Poland or other parts of Eastern Europe. In other words, people who were not of the French or English language and background.

We have had a history in which we redefined continually what we considered to be the "proper" immigrants to Canada. After a certain period in our history – coinciding, I would say, with the opening of the Canadian west and the building of the trans-Canada railway between 1871 and 1885 – there was never any question that we had a very large country and needed to fill it up. We tried to bring as many original Canadians as possible from the East who would come out west. We gave them land, everybody became a landowner.

But we also tried to welcome people who would be "like us", as we say. And the people who were like us were not people who spoke Slavic languages or Yiddish or Italian. Germans were always welcomed, because they were considered part of our Anglo-Saxon heritage. And, of course, we had received something like 10,000 people of German origin after the American Revolution, stemming mainly from the some 30,000 Hessian soldiers who fought on the British side. Indeed, in 1820 – a fascinating fact – 70% of our population in Upper Canada, which is now Ontario, was of German origin.

The evolution of our ability to accept and receive immigrants has not been without its bumps. At the time of the creation of the railway, workers were needed and Chinese coolies were recruited from China. There were other needs. The Japanese, through a separate contract with the Emperor of Japan, were brought to Canada to be fishermen on the West Coast. But there was always the idea that the Chinese coolies and Japanese fishermen would be contained within their work and that they would not have families accompanying them, nor would they be integrated into what was British North America at that time.

And that idea continued – Canada as a European, not Asian, immigration place – until 1960. So, for forty-odd years now, we have been engaged in another kind of experiment. Previous to 1960, we accepted an enormous number of Central and East Europeans as a result of the upheaval of the Second World War. When I was a small child – six or seven years old – what we called "displaced persons" began arriving. The initials "DP" were not complimentary usually. Such people, who had no country, were accepted into Canada under certain regulations, one of which was that they had to work for one year on a farm or as a domestic servant.

Now as Canada was a country that had few domestic servants, as we are democratic in almost every possible way, this was a curious category which implied indentured servitude. I remember, in Ottawa, the city in which I grew up, my mother coming home from a cocktail party in a very nice house and saying that she had been served by a very attractive woman who turned out to be a ballet dancer from Hungary. I had friends who were of the royal family of Romania whohad come to live on a pig farm in northern Alberta. Such exotic tales were relatively commonplace in those days, and many interesting memoirs have been written by such accomplished and civilized people who came to Canada as "displaced persons".

So we in Canada have that kind of immigrant background, and it is an important and fundamental aspect of the way that we have evolved as a society. And evolved relatively rapidly over what was really only a handful of generations, when the waves of immigration were at their peaks. We accepted the world that landed on our shores. And today, we understand that all of this is an essential part of our Canadian fabric.

Canada evolved progressively as a country that was less a punishing society than a forgiving society. A society where the physical effort to survive in a difficult climate forced people to depend on one another. All across Canada, diverse communities evolved through a sense of caring for others.

Everyone who came to Canada had a different identity. And this fact touches the very foundation of our country. Everyone who immigrated to Canada landed in a country where, right from the beginning – that is, when Jacques Cartier arrived in the early sixteenth century – the Aboriginals had always lived and had put in place a well-organized society which they shared with the Europeans.

That is a very interesting fact, because, at that time, there wasn't much of a difference between the Aboriginals and the Europeans newcomers. After all, this was a rough and demanding land, where few people washed or had much more than the clothing on their backs. Where there was no advanced technology to make tools, which the Indians did not possess either. I think that, at the time when they first met, they had a feeling that a contact was being established between two different societies, and not that the Europeans considered themselves superior to the Aboriginals.

This idea that we were not that superior to our native peoples is something which has had its ups and downs in our society. But we cannot ignore it, because that is the truth that lies behind the history of the fur trade and the waterway routes that had a huge impact in opening the enormous interior of Canada. These routes and the wealth that was generated by the fur trade, depended upon the Aboriginal peoples helping the French to penetrate the continent through the great rivers. It depended upon the Aboriginal peoples helping the French to learn how to use canoes, how to manage the wilderness, how to live in the wilderness.

The term "coureur de bois", which you may have heard before, is a noble term in our eyes, a concept that means that the Europeans, and not only the French, knew how to live in the woods. They knew this because of the Aboriginals, who passed freely their knowledge of the land and how to live it to the white-skinned newcomers. This was extremely important in the early history and subsequent evolution of our Canadian society. It is why we say that our society has been built on a triangular base by the Aboriginals, the Francophones and the Anglophones and the influence of these three on each other. Everyone else came after.

It is important also to realize that the Francophone part of our society basically descends from about 10,000 French settlers who came to Canada – what later became Canada – in the 17^th and early 18^th centuries. Today, there are, I believe, about 6½ million francophones. But apart from these early settlers and fur traders, there was never a considerable, sustained immigration of French people.

So, for Canadians and for the francophones in particular, we have to talk about a survival of language, dating from the mid-18^th century when the British took over all of that part which we now consider Canada. The francophone communities have had to struggle hard to ensure that they could continue their society and their culture, to live as Catholics mainly, and to preserve the French language. This is what is at heart in the complex relationship between the older French Canadian communities of long descent from the days of New France and the rest of Canada, many of whom arrived afterwards in other parts of Canada and took on English as their new language.

Now, that's just a little bit of background to Canada's history as an immigrant society, and we could spend all day talking about it. However, it is very important to know this background before we go on to the idea of what kind of society we have created. And why Canadians give each other a great deal of space to live in – space both in the physical sense and in the societal sense.

The other reason is that we are used to dealing with the fact of complexity already. We are used to dealing with, and always have since the foundation of our country, two major world languages and two religions, which in the western tradition are "the" major world religions. This has given us the basis of a complex identity, but one which makes it possible for us to accept what has come afterwards in the form of a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society. The ideals of our country are closely bound up with this idea of complex identity. For us, identity is therefore not a concept which says that "I am here, I am Canadian, therefore you can't be". Instead, identity is evolving into, and closely connected with, an idea of a society where many people can take their place. But where they are expected to become, and want to become, citizens.

The word "immigrant" to us in Canada therefore has a different connotation than it does in Europe. The word "immigrant" means in Canada somebody who is coming to Canada and who will be accepted to live in Canada and become a Canadian citizen within usually three to five years, provided they fulfill certain criteria which have to do with a points system of education, language and so on. Also, we try to unite families if one member has immigrated and settled in Canada. And then, of course, there is a separate category of refugees. We have, I'm sure as you do, a whole series of refugee boards and people who hear refugee cases and seek to determine whether their claims are valid or not.

One of the things that make me the proudest in being a Canadian is citizenship ceremonies. Before becoming Governor General, I presided over several citizenship ceremonies in my capacity as a member of the Order of Canada. I did this in the city of Toronto, where, according to the last census, at least 33% of people said that they had four ethnic origins. In a citizenship ceremony, there would be forty-five people from almost thirty different countries, and they all want to be Canadians. They are very happy to accept and support the values of our democratic system which we have developed in Canada.

But it is by no means a "melting pot", and we have never thought of ourselves as a melting pot. Rather, we've thought of ourselves as being able to accept differences of people. We have what one of our great writers said – that is, the ability to feel in our hearts "the reality of the other". And I think that this is one of the things that we in Canada can really show the world – that we understand the reality of the other. And therefore the question of integration versus assimilation do not really apply in the same way that they would in a monolithic nation state with a defined, and not very large, territory.

Our delegation, if you have had a chance to look at them as a whole, say in a class picture, does not look like a delegation from probably any other country. Let me mention just one member – Monica Heller – whose mother was a German-Jew who escaped during the nineteen-thirties. Monica has not really returned that often to Germany, nor is she particularly involved with German history. She's a French-English socio-linguist based in Toronto. Yesterday, she said to me that "being here in Germany is so amazing, because I'm among all kinds of people that I look like."

In Canada, we are among people whom we do not look like. I used to take the subway to work in Toronto when I was in television. I always had fun in the morning identifying the people in the subway car. There would be seventeen of them, of whom maybe seven were white people and the other ten, well, I couldn't really tell what they were. They would be originally Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, Chinese, Korean – I mean, Toronto subway cars did not look like most other subway cars in the world.

Much of this ability to accept a multi-cultural society and ethnic complexity can be attributed to the very strong form of parliamentary democracy that we have in Canada. And we have an embedded bilingualism which has evolved considerably over the last thirty years. Stιphane Dion, our Minister in charge of official languages who is also Inter-Governmental Affairs Minister, is here in this audience. He can tell us more on how important this official bilingualism is in our kind of federal structure.

Perhaps I should just cite from my own experience – a person with a Chinese background living in anglophone Ontario, but wanting to learn French. Why did I learn French? Well, my father and I decided when I was five years old that French was a very exciting language. He also saw that, in the federal government in Ottawa, where he had a very small job when we first came to Canada, there were all these people who spoke French. And he thought that it would be a very interesting thing for me to do as well. And so I learned French – a little bit ahead of the larger rush of people who learned French in order to take their place in our federal system of government. By taking their place in government, these people – politicians, bureaucrats, administrators – have had a very important role in helping to make our country as bilingual as possible.

Where do we learn this? Where do we, as Canadians, learn what it is to be Canadian.

It is in public education. Without public education – bearing in mind the mix of all children who come to this country with their parents or who are from the first generation born of immigrant parents – we cannot have a cohesive society of immigrants. When we speak of the immigrant society, we speak of people who will take their place in society.

But this is not a one-way street. It's a two-way street. It is up to the well-established society to make sure that there are no barriers for people who come to be included – in the very most profound sense of the word. And it is up to such a society to welcome them. All that is true. But it is also up to the people who come here to respect the values of their new society and to learn the civic and political principles on which such values are founded.

It is also very important that those who arrive should not be afraid that they will be marginalized, that they will be victims of prejudice and bigotry, or that they will be prevented from pursuing their own lives. We have a history of waves of immigrants who have come under different conditions. At the time of the Vietnamese boat people, which was about 15 years ago, a group of citizens decided to organize themselves – mainly through their church groups and synagogues – to launch "Operational Lifeline". This was because the Canadian government hadn't quite made up its mind how it was going to accept the enormous number of Vietnamese boat people who wanted to come to Canada – some fifty or sixty thousands, all within a year or six months. So individual families adopted the individual families of the boat people, looked after them and helped them acculturate. They would take the children of the Vietnamese refugees and teach them to skate or to ski or to help them get to school.

This is part of a long tradition in Canada of established people helping the newcomers in an informal way. When my family and I first came to Canada, our first friends were the neighbourhood pharmacist and his family – they were a Jewish family – and then we were also looked after by some French-Canadians because we lived in a French-Canadian neighbourhood and the French-Canadian people taught my mother how to make things like tourtiθre, which is a national dish, and helped us with everyday life. We were also helped by some people whom I now realize were old Anglo-Canadian, whose daughter walked us to school every day. Now I had the chance to do the same for the boat people. And 15 years later, they are no long "boat people". They have all got their own businesses, they pay taxes, their children go to school, they join all kinds of organizations, they are part of our society, they are in the police, they are teachers, nurses, doctors. It has been a very great success story for a simple reason – because established citizens took an individual interest in them. And that, of course, has changed our society enormously and changed a city like Toronto.

In Canada, I'm not at all used to people asking me if I am Chinese. The question just doesn't arise that much. People will say "oh yes, they're Chinese-Canadian" or Armenian-Canadian or whatever. But we don't get defined that way, and there's a very subtle and important difference in that. When I went to the University of Toronto, the fact that I was of Chinese origin was just one of the many parts of my personality, and this was accepted as a kind of sous-entendu for other people.

I'm not saying that Canadian society is perfect. It is by no means perfect. And there are still many people who like to find reasons to dislike people, rather than like them. We are only human beings. But I believe our structures have evolved in such a way that we have been more, rather than less, helpful to newcomers to Canada. Nevertheless, all immigrants experience displacement when they arrive in a new country. All immigrants, even when they become citizens, still have a feeling of what they left behind – and what they might have left behind. So when they return to visit the country from which they originally came, perplexing questions arise for them. They ask themselves: "Why do I not really feel that I still belong in this original country?" "Why do I feel I belong more in Canada?" Such questions reflect the displacement they experience. But it can be a very positive reaction, having to do with the new freedoms that they now enjoy in their new home. It has to do with the possibilities before them in Canada, as compared with the situation they left behind.

There's a man called Walter Bauer – I don't know if any of you know of him. He was a German from Saxony, born in 1904. He was very successful in the 'thirties already as a writer and poet and had his books published. Then the Nazis came. They banned his works. He wasn't Jewish, he was German. And he fought in the Second World War in the German army because he was conscripted into it. He was captured and made a prisoner of war, which was horrible for him. After the war, he decided that he didn't want to stay in Germany and moved to Canada in 1952, where he became a Canadian citizen. And he lived a kind of life of being a stranger in both countries, his native land of Germany and in his new home, Canada. As he'd become an immigrant late in life, he felt a strangeness of both being here and there. I think he has great insight into what people leave behind and what they bring with them. And it shows in his poetry, which he continued to write in German. Here he talks about the city of Toronto, where he eventually became a very well-known professor of literature.

"Years ago, when I came to this big city
All I knew was its name, the rest was alien.
I only knew its location on a big continent.
When does the city where you live become your home?
When you have loved there and said farewell,
And when you stay although you know the living there are dead.
...
This city, like any other, will never know
That I was here, that I am gone;
And yet I wish it luck and that its luck may last–
I underline last, because the city's loud voice frightens me.
Experience has taught me that all cities too can die,
Quickly, unexpectedly – or have we forgotten already?
It's but a few years ago."

"Toronto means meeting-place,
It's derived from an Indian word.
Here I met myself
When I was looking for myself as for a stranger."

It is this relationship of stranger to place and to home that is, I think, the most interesting of what Walter Bauer and other immigrants have to say about Canada. It is something that we hold in a kind of delicate balance. Something that we will hold more and more as we re-imagine our society – re-imagine it not as a society composed exclusively of the two founding peoples, French and English, but as a complex and ethnically diverse society with peoples from virtually every corner of the globe. As a society whose culture is so influenced by immigration, we are called upon constantly to re-imagine our identity – as individuals and as a country.

The other day in Dresden we had a seminar on modern identities. Identities in Canada are not fixed. If you start out as a Chinese-Canadian, or a French-Canadian, or a native Canadian, you don't have to stay there. If you want to, of course you can. But, in my opinion, it is not as enriching as being able to take various aspects of what other people have brought to our country, something that one of our writers has called "the impossible sum" of our traditions, of everybody's traditions, and being able to absorb them and make them part of you. You can admire people whose lives and ancestors were different. You can model yourself after them.

When I was a student, my mentor was a high school English teacher who had the greatest single influence on me of anybody except my parents. And it was due to him, and not my parents, that I went to the greatest English-speaking university in Canada, because he said to me: "This is where you should go. This is where I went." In other words, he was saying you can do what I do. And he was a very interesting man – of Scottish or English background, I suppose – who saw in me something which he thought could be awakened as an intellectual, as a person, whatever, who did not see me as a small immigrant child, who saw me as somebody who could evolve and who gave me a model of what I could do.

One of the most fascinating things about which we Canadians can tell the world is our sense that identity is not fixed, either as a country or as individuals. To fix your identity is to say that it cannot change and that others must approach you vis-ΰ-vis that identity and only that identity. I think most of us believe that we should not be that way.

Thomson Highway, who is with us, is a Cree Indian from Northern Manitoba, speaks French, English, and has his plays performed in Germany, Japan and all over the world. Thomson said to me the other night at dinner: "I just want to be whatever I want to be. Nobody has to tell me what I'm supposed to be. I accept the fact that somebody is going to say 'Oh, you're a Cree playwright' but so what? It's only one of the ways I am. I'm also gay. I also come from a family of twelve children. This and that have happened to me."

This is a most important aspect of what we are as Canadians. And it has to do with our idea of citizenship. Our idea of citizenship is of people commonly accepting what it is to participate in their democracy, the kind of democracy that we have created in Canada. We have basically felt that we can bring the world into a country like Canada and that we can help that world that comes to Canada understand what it's like to have a different concept of identity, of participation, and of being fully what that human being can be and give to what should be an increasingly human world. After all, that's what it all comes down to in the end.

Thank you.