Month: November 2022

How Did You Meet Your Spouse

November 12, 2022

That was the question at a celebration of a friend’s sixtieth wedding anniversary. We were looking at pictures of the couple’s past activities going back decades when someone popped the question. After the wife related how a “blind date” experience in Montreal led to an amazing sixty years of marriage, somebody spoke up and wanted to know how others, present at the celebration, met. I had no chance to relate my story; the conversation turned to how long it took from meeting your spouse to the wedding.

So here is my story. It started with my first car: a Peugeot 403 that I bought in Vancouver, in the early 1960s. I drove my car to North Carolina to attend graduate school in January 1965.

During the summer of 1965, I, along with two other graduate students studying city planning at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, had summer jobs in Washington, DC.

Ray rented a cheap apartment painted all black; it was unbearably hot with no AC. Another classmate, Alvaro, and I rented a room at Hartnett House off Dupont Circle. It was a bit of a flophouse. Our room had a window facing inwards onto a courtyard, with no air-conditioning and no fans.

If you know Washington’s weather during the summer, you know how steamy and hot it can be. Going to the beach one weekend was a wonderful idea, and since I was the only one with a car, I drove all of us to the beach in my Peugeot.

Alvaro invited Kathy to come with us to the beach. Kathy was a graduate student as well, studying economics and political science at UNC.

As soon as we arrived at the beach, Ray and Alvaro went to play the slot machines in the arcade. Kathy and I started talking about school life and hit it off immediately; we discovered we were both newcomers to North America and shared details of our growing up here. In those days we called stealing your friend’s date “birddogging”.

During the summer, Kathy and I got to know each other while discovering Rock Creek Park, going to nightclubs with blaring music, and eating at fish bistros along the Potomac. Our relationship hit a high point when her mother invited me for dinner. She was an experienced cook; the chicken meat just fell off the bones. I enjoyed the dinner and told her so. That pleased her. I was in.

I asked her to marry me three weeks after meeting her and bought her a skinny ring that I could afford from my meagre earnings that summer. But promised that I would replace the ring with a much larger ring as soon as I could buy one; I did so later when my job took me to the Yukon, where I bought her a wide gold ring.

The summer ended, and we had to go back to university. I suddenly got worried that if I spend so much time with Kathy, my studies will suffer. But as soon as we were back at school, we saw each other every day, starting with breakfast at Lenoir Hall, the student cafeteria.

We planned the church wedding for June 7, 1966, right after graduation, in Chapel Hill. But I had a suggestion; let us get married in a civil ceremony before the church wedding. We hustled off to South Carolina so that no one would know of our marriage and got married in the courthouse by a Justice of the Peace. I did not think the props in the courthouse measured up to the significance of the event; a couple of flowerpots did not provide the right background for taking a vow for life. But it was a marriage, and we had the certificate to prove it.

Our courthouse marriage burned an unforgettable memory in my mind; two grad students in a small South Carolina town, far from family, getting married, with nobody around who knew us, casually dressed, and making a contract for life. I thought it was surrealistic but deeply emotional and tremendously exciting.

This unique experience overwhelmed us, and nothing could break our spirits, not even when my faithful old car, the Peugeot 403, broke down on the drive back to Chapel Hill and we had to hitchhike back home. We just left the car on the highway; I took the license plates off it so people could not trace the car back to me. Disposal of the car was the last thing on my mind right after our union.

I cannot describe in words how excited and happy I felt being married, nobody knowing about it, not even my family, and going back to my dorm and Kathy going back to her dorm where she was a student councilor (her dorm students would have been flabbergasted to know what their advisor/councilor just did. This was in the sixties!).

The preparations for the church wedding took some other interesting turns; the pastor at the  Chapel of the Cross Episcopal Church who was to perform the wedding ceremony asked if religion would cause a problem for us. Kathy is Episcopal and I am Catholic. I assured the pastor that religion would not be an issue; I was a non-practicing Catholic and could not see myself launching into heavy arguments over religious doctrines.

Kathy’s brother Huw, whom I just met the day before the wedding, and my friend Ray, took me out for a few drinks; explaining that it was a custom to do so. On the day of the wedding, I got up a bit groggy and searched around for my formal clothing only to find I did not have a tie. I walked down the dorm corridor hall knocking on doors until I found a classmate happy to lend me one. I was ready to marry the second time.

My entire city planning class showed up for the wedding and had a great laugh when I tried to drive off in Kathy’s car. They put rocks in front and back of the tires, and I could not drive off until I got out of the car and cleared the rocks to the laughter of all. And when I drove off, a terrible racket came from the hubcaps; my friends put rocks into them as well. I drove off and stopped a block away to take the hubcaps off to get rid of the stones before driving off to our honeymoon.

Although I did not have the opportunity at the celebration to relate my story, I reflected on a marriage that lasted over sixty years. What I found more significant is that only one percent of couples in the U.S. can celebrate 60 years of marriage. I could not find similar statistics for Canada. I also found that an average marriage lasts fifteen years in Canada. So, a sixty-year marriage is an incredible achievement. Congratulations.

My Questions for the Canadian Immigration Minister

November 5, 2022

The Minister announced yesterday that Canada will welcome 500,000 immigrants annually. He said the country needs to move up immigration targets because of the low fertility rate and a million vacant jobs in Canada. But, Mr. Minister, have you fully considered the costs of a sudden surge in immigration, and the impacts on healthcare and housing in Canada?

Canada used to welcome a quarter million immigrants annually, ramping up to 300,000 recently. The number jumped to over 400,000 in 2001 and is likely to approach 500,000 this year.

Immigration policy in Canada has evolved. Initially, immigrants were invited in the 18th century to colonize the west, coming mostly from the British Isles. Central Europeans came early in the 20th century. People coming to work in Canada created the “economic class” of immigrants, and their families followed them (called the “family reunification” class of people). The “refugee” class of people was created under Prime Minister Diefenbaker, who welcomed 37,500 Hungarian refugees escaping their country after the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Sixty percent of immigrants today fall into the “economic” class. India is the source of 32% of today’s immigrants, followed by China at 8%.

Besides economic development, demographics have become a new policy issue for Canada because of our low fertility rate of 1.5%, the replacement rate is 2.1%. So, the question comes to mind: have we tried to influence fertility rates? Many countries have tried it with limited success (Russia, and France, for example). Changing behavior is difficult, so let’s bring more people into the country to boost our population.

But the devil is in the details. Of the two major sources of immigrants to Canada today, India’s fertility rate was 2.1% in 2021 and China’s 1.7%. If immigrants from these two countries continue to follow their culture, they may not help with Canadian fertility rates. But would this flow of immigrants help with the economy?

A target group for the Minister is the science, technology, engineering, and math people (STEM). Yes, we have a million vacant jobs, but most are in the service industries, the hospitality and retail industries, and not in STEM. So this group of immigrants may not help fill the vacant jobs we have in Canada, especially when technology people are being laid off these days (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter).

A related question I have for the Minister is: what do we do with the one million unemployed people in Canada and another half million people who stopped looking for work? We have one and one-half million people who could be employed. Retraining may make them employable. It may not be in the Immigration Minister’s mandate to solve labor shortages via retraining, but it begs the question: should we look at the unemployed and the stay-at-home people for filling vacant positions in Canada before filling these jobs with immigrants?

And the Minister has not talked about the cost of immigration, except for the benefits to the GDP and the income taxes immigrants will pay. But clearly, immigrants need services like healthcare and housing, provided by lower levels of government. We, the taxpayers, pay all government taxes – federal, provincial and local – so perhaps it is time to reflect on the costs of immigration.

At a time when healthcare is already breaking at the seams with doctors’ shortages and nurses retiring, an increase in immigration will put an additional load on the system. (Six million people in Canada do not have a family doctor. Some emergency rooms have closed due to a lack of nursing staff). You say that, of course, we should target doctors and nurses in the immigration program. Makes sense. But do you realize that both professions require certification by relevant authorities and the reality in Canada is that foreign doctors and nurses must qualify before they can practice?

For example, I had a technician perform an ”ultrasound” procedure on me and I found out that she was a medical doctor from Belarus and took all the Canadian exams to become a doctor but failed to get residency in a hospital required for certification and was forced to take a technician’s job.

Yes, Mr. Minister, we have a supply problem: we need more doctors and nurses and immigration will not provide a quick fix because of certification barriers.

And immigrants need housing. On average, 200,000 housing units are built in Canada annually. The half million immigrants coming to Canada each year could use a few hundred thousand units and drive-up housing prices, especially given the present housing shortage (for example, the Premier of Ontario recently announced a sweeping housing plan to ease the shortage of housing).

Preserving and increasing the value of current homeowners’ units may be good for the homeowners, but difficult for young Canadians who would like to get into the housing market. Has the Minister thought through how the half million immigrants coming into the country each year impact housing markets?

And my questions to the Minister would not be complete without asking about “absorption rates” for immigrants in Canada. Absorption refers to the ease with which immigrants assimilate or integrate into Canadian society: get a job, acquire housing, have their children in school, and become a part of their local community.

Ethnic groups like to settle near each other for comfort. When a large group of immigrants settles in an area – that often happens – ghettos may result and integration into Canadian society may take the back seat. Has the Minister studied how many immigrants can Canada absorb annually?

There are costly impacts on education and social services at the local level when immigrants arrive. Teaching the official languages of Canada to immigrants is a significant cost for school boards. For example, Quebec has 23% of Canada’s population and could take up to 117,000 of the 500,000 immigrants, but the Premier said their capacity to teach the French language is limited to 50,000 people annually. Has the Minister discussed how many immigrants each province would take?

I am for immigration; I was an immigrant myself and found my journey to assimilate into Canadian society has been challenging but tremendously satisfying (it never stops). But I ask the Minister whether he has thought about the impact immigrants will have on our healthcare system, our housing situation today, and our experience with integrating immigrants successfully into our society when suddenly we’ll receive a half million newcomers each year.