Tag: canada

The Surge of Asylum Seekers: Impact on Canadian Society

November 19, 2024

Dueling demonstrations took place yesterday. At the old Nepean City Hall, a small crowd celebrated the proposed construction of a “temporary” welcome center for asylum seekers. Another group protested against the welcome center at its proposed location, the Nepean Sportsplex. Of the one thousand asylum seekers in Ottawa, six hundred find shelter in community centers, like hockey arenas, while others find refuge with volunteer social organizations.

With expectations of a further surge in asylum seekers, the city hired consultants to evaluate the suitability of over a hundred sites for constructing the welcome center. One site in Barrhaven met vociferous opposition, although nobody owned up to NIMBY. The Sportsplex site is a mile from the nearest shopping center and has an infrequent bus service.


I took some time to gain a deeper understanding of the proposal; I discovered that the city plans to erect “Sprung” buildings, a design from the Sprung family company. The company erected over a thousand such buildings globally. I checked out one built on the Embarcadero in San Francisco and found it is an unappealing tent-like building. But it requires simple construction and is economical and fast to erect.

According to city officials, asylum seekers are mostly young single people. The current arrangement is for these people to stay for three months in these welcome centers, receiving help from officials in finding jobs and housing in addition to filling out papers to become residents of Canada.

How did we reach this point with the number of asylum seekers surging during the past couple of years? And would there be more in the future, given President-elect Trump’s intention to deport millions of illegals just south of our border?

Politicians often create and resolve crises to boost their public image. Prime Minister Trudeau has created an immigration crisis in Canada by increasing the inflow of immigration substantially subsequent to the pandemic and is now trying to solve it by reducing the number of arrivals. Naturally, he denies creating a crisis and blames private interests for misusing immigration policies. 

The surge in immigration has triggered a housing shortage, a healthcare problem, and a challenge to the education system. The capacity for housing construction in Canada is no more than 250,000 units per year. Over the past couple of years alone, the rate of a million people a year arriving in Canada would require the entire annual production of housing units, assuming four people per unit. Hospital emergency rooms boast a waiting time of over ten hours; people without family doctors visit emergency rooms for consultations. Teachers have struggled with teaching children who speak dozens of different languages at home and bringing with them their cultures.

Statistics indicate there are eight million “permanent residents’ in Canada, waiting to become citizens (it takes three years of residency to qualify for citizenship). Furthermore, there are three million “temporary residents,” which include foreign students, seasonal workers, and immigrants. Asylum seekers are immigrants, numbering 250,000 across Canada today.

Interestingly, eleven million of the forty-one million Canadians—temporary and permanent residents combined—cannot vote; one must be a citizen to vote. It is also noteworthy that although the federal government created the asylum seekers crisis, local levels of government shoulder the burden of welcoming and assisting newcomers to fit into Canadian society.

A ninety-day stay in a shelter for a young newcomer to Canada can be a cheerful affair, especially during the cold Canadian winters. I assume that clothing and food are also provided. But what is most important for a newcomer to Canada? I suggest speaking English is vital unless the newcomer already knows the language. I speak from my lived experience. As a genuine refugee arriving in Canada, learning English was crucial for navigating life, securing employment, and resuming my education.

Now, language training takes more than ninety days. I’m wondering, what experience do government officials have dealing with the current wave of asylum seekers? Are they turfing out people in ninety days from their shelters now? Or do the newcomers stay longer, and how much longer? This thought takes me back to the original concept of city officials claiming that the proposed welcome center would be temporary.

The stated temporariness of the “Sprung” structures energized many people who doubted the buildings would ever be demolished. When not required any further for asylum seekers, the public imagined these buildings would be repurposed to house the homeless. Couple with the challenge of sheltering asylum seekers, Ottawa is facing a significant rise in its homeless population. It has become quite unpleasant to walk in central parts of the city at night, with homeless people sleeping in doorways and on the streets.

The government’s recent announcement lowering immigration targets will reduce the number of asylum seekers, freeing up welcome centers to house the homeless. The most significant impact of this issue for me was that I noticed a shifting public attitude towards immigrants in the news media, questioning immigration’s worth to Canada. I blame the federal government for this snafu for acting without a proper impact study of what a significant increase in immigration to Canada would entail.

The Coffee Klatch: Why Canadians Compare Themselves to Americans

November 16, 2024

When I sat down for coffee, my friend asked, “Will your children return to Canada?” I understood he was talking about Trump’s presidential victory in the US and its impact on people. Trump’s win caused widespread consternation among my friends.

I said no. Why would my children return when they have good jobs, own their houses, and are growing families in the USA? I said that I do not talk with them much about politics; we talk about their families. Besides, a new government would not make any difference to them, at least in the short term.

His question upset me because it steered our conversation immediately toward US politics. Why are we Canadians so preoccupied with US matters? Yes, the US is our largest trading partner; most of us visit and travel to the US. But don’t we have our own political issues to talk about?

I find scant news about Canada despite watching Canadian TV channels. Two recent provincial elections were hardly covered on the national TV channels. Ontario’s big news recently was that the Premier ordered municipalities to remove bicycle lanes on major roads to ease traffic jams. I agree with him; on some major roads in Ottawa, the bike lanes take up space, making for dangerous driving while watching for cyclists right next to you. And, of course, one cannot park along the curb to visit stores because of the bike lanes. Beyond the bike lanes issue, what comes to my mind is the Premier’s promise to give every Ontarian $200, anticipating an election next spring. These news items produce no excitement in me.

Although local news has had sparse coverage, US news of the election was shown in detail on Canadian national TV channels every night. Canadians have a love-hate relationship with Americans. They like to winter and shop in Florida and Arizona. However, they often express critical views of life there, mentioning rampant crime and an expensive healthcare system compared to Canada.

You’ll be surprised how often you read a thread on Quora (a social network) about universal Canadian healthcare and its superiority to American healthcare. It is also cheaper, according to the threads. Perhaps. However, the subject is more complex; only eight percent of Americans are without health insurance today, and we should also compare the quality of healthcare in the two countries before drawing simplistic conclusions. Two-thirds of Americans with private insurance have better healthcare quality than in Canada; for example, access to a family doctor is much faster than in Canada, and waiting times for hip replacements are shorter.

Also, in Quora threads, many Canadians think Americans are ignorant; I remember the popularity of Rick Mercer’s TV show (This Hour Has 22 Minutes) when he presented fake situations and asked people to respond, for example, when he said the Canadian parliament building is made of ice. Is that Canadian humor? It was a silly statement and demeaning to the people he interviewed. In one episode, he interviewed Mike Huckabee when he was governor of Arkansas, embarrassing him: Huckabee congratulated Canada on having a “National Igloo” in response to Mercer’s prompt. I think American comedians could come to Canada and emulate Mercer’s performance in the US, showing how ignorant Canadians are.

I went to graduate school, worked in the US in the 1960s, and have fond memories of my life there. That was after I lived in Vancouver, Canada, where people, particularly the British people, wanted to learn about your pedigree before befriending you. I found them class-conscious, and the Brits still considered themselves living in the colonies. In contrast, the Americans asked what I could do and what my skills were, not dwelling on my background.

In my experience, Americans work harder and longer hours than Canadians, which may also lead to higher stress levels. I remember when my brother, who traveled a lot, told me that it was always calming to fly into Canada; the atmosphere was just more relaxed at Canadian airports compared to US ones.

The conversation with my friend over coffee made me think of why Canadians spend so much time comparing themselves to the US, and always in a favorable light. I do not have an answer, but I cannot help wondering whether this results from an inferiority complex, justified or not.

The Evolving Ethnic Character

November 5, 2024

During the late 1950s, I worked alongside Steve as a draftsman at the Buildings and Grounds Department of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Although we were recent Hungarian immigrants, we differed in our behavior in the office; he used to bring his breakfast to work unlike me, I ate at home. He spread some grease paper on his drafting table and ate his breakfast of smelly, garlicky sausage with a thick slice of brown bread. The powerful smell permeating the room bothered the rest of us working there, but nobody wanted to tell him to eat his breakfast at home and save us from the unpleasant smells. Eating a smelly breakfast at work was not Canadian, and still is not. I am not sure if that behavior was Hungarian. However, I heard Steve became a successful architect and integrated into Canadian society in a few years.

In contrast to Steve, some individuals never assimilate into the local culture and instead choose to return home. A Hungarian friend’s mother embraced women’s freedom in Canada and entered the workforce. Her husband was not as successful, and he felt he had lost his masculine dominance in the household, so he returned to Hungary, but the wife stayed in Canada with the children.

I do not know how others in Vancouver perceived my ethnicity when I arrived in Canada in the late 1950s, except that they noticed my English language skills and accent. I improved in record time and assimilated into local culture in many other ways.

One strategy I used was always to try to fit in and go with the flow; for example, I acquired a taste for beer when I drank with my classmates while finishing architectural projects at all-night sessions at the UBC School of Architecture.  I was not too fond of beer then, but drinking with my classmates led me to develop a taste for it.

Other opportunities for cultural assimilation arose when I attended concerts with Elvis Presley at the PNE and Dave Brubeck at the old Georgia Auditorium in Vancouver. Later on, I acquired a taste for rock music. My father could not understand why I listened to The Grateful Dead, The Bachman Turner Overdrive, Credence Clearwater Revival, and their ilk; he thought music was only classical.  

I further embraced local culture when we started camping and canoeing after marriage. Later, we traveled widely in a tent trailer across Canada with our children and a dog. After getting tired of hauling a tent trailer, we bought a cottage. And cottaging is a Canadian thing; only a couple of immigrants own cottages out of a hundred neighbors where our cottage is (I realize immigrants may not have the money for a cottage).

While I have been in North America since 1957 and consider myself part of North American culture, I am always intrigued when I hear Hungarian being spoken. My language abilities in Hungarian are equivalent to that of a sixteen-year-old, the age I was when I departed the country. While traveling in France last summer, I heard a group talking in Hungarian in Arles. I introduced myself to them, and we spoke about Hungary today compared to the one I left. I had to search for some words since my fluency in Hungarian was spotty, but it was a satisfying conversation.

A recent event drew me back to my ethnic background. Kathy met a Hungarian woman at a grocery store who recommended that we join the Hungarian Community Center in Ottawa.  I followed up and decided to attend a social event celebrating the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. I hoped to listen to conversations in Hungarian and perhaps meet some people from Sopron from where we fled, so I looked forward to the event. I was somewhat fearful of how I would react to my countrymen and whether I could intelligently converse with them, limited by my sparse vocabulary and lack of practice speaking the language.

Upon entering the building, nobody welcomed us. We found our way to take a couple of seats and looked around. All age groups were there, from children to grey hairs, and they all seemed to know each other. And I heard only Hungarian spoken. There was a celebratory feeling in the air; some people were informally dressed, while others wore pin-striped suits. Nobody showed interest in us.

The MC asked the Hungarian Ambassador to Canada to speak. She spoke in Hungarian, and I whispered to Kathy and explained what was happening.

Although we were in Canada, curiously, there was absolutely no French or English spoken, and there was no acknowledgment of land rights by the Indigenous people of Canada, a custom in all public events now. That made me think that the Hungarians have a thousand-year history occupying the land of Hungary. The Ottomans took over the land at one time and the Germans at another time, but there had never been an acknowledgment of previous land ownership and compensation for taking the land. To my knowledge, the concept of compensation to earlier landowners has no currency in Hungarian thought. That made me think of how people interpret history in different parts of the world.

After the Ambassador’s speech, we enjoyed some poetry and dancing by third-generation Candaian-Hungarians, indicating that some families kept their culture intact. When the Ambassador asked people who came to Canada after the 1956 Revolution to stand up, I counted half a dozen out of fifty, including myself. So, most of these people were second—and third-generation Hungarians who maintained their native culture.

One of the celebration’s highlights was serving “langos,” a Hungarian breakfast food similar to doughnuts, fried dough covered with cheese, cinnamon, and/or garlic. I lined up to get a couple of langos and limited by my language skills, I ended up with two plain ones. There is not much taste to plain ones, so I returned for another one with cheese and garlic to enhance its flavor. I put on too much garlic that burned our mouths, and we took it home, not wanting to throw it away in front of the Hungarian crowd, showing our dislike of it.

Frankly, the event disappointed me because nobody welcomed or showed interest in us while we sat in the audience. Of course, we could have approached people, but they all seemed either to know and talk with each other or to be occupied with moving chairs around and other official matters.

The people were not unfriendly; they seemed to accept and ignore us. For some reason, I felt quite at home, understanding the language, although Kathy felt ignored. I felt as if I was on an island with my old countrymen. When I lined up for our langos at the kitchen, I heard the women working there talking to each other; one kneading the dough and cutting portions to fry, another frying, and the third putting the cheese and/or cinnamon on and serving it. The entire atmosphere felt homey. Based on our strange experience with this celebration, we decided to try again and attend a party next week with dinner, a concert, and dancing. I hope we won’t. be disappointed.

The Flag Raising

October 25 2024

I had mixed feelings about going. It would evoke nostalgic memories—neither negative nor positive, just neutral emotions. I may meet people with my ethnic background. Ethnic individuals tend to display increasingly ethnic behavior as they age. I was not one of those people; I escaped Hungary because there was no future for me there, or at least, that is what my parents thought.

Upon learning about the flag-raising ceremony at Ottawa City Hall to commemorate the 68th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, I decided to go downtown and see what it was all about. Perhaps I’ll encounter elderly and weathered Hungarians, eavesdrop on Hungarian conversations, and cross paths with someone from Sopron, a small town close to the Austrian border where we lived and from where I walked to Vienna shortly after the October 23, 1956, Revolution.
At the base of a flagpole, I spotted the Hungarian flag and approached a clutch of people congregating. Speaking in English, I asked a bald and paunchy character if he was Hungarian. He said no, mentioning that he was part of a Member of Parliament’s staff from Wascana, Saskatchewan. He also informed me that the MP would speak briefly during the presentation. Ok. And then the Liberal MP from Wascana, seeing me talking to his staff, came over, shook hands, and explained that he was one-quarter Hungarian. I responded that I am 100 percent Hungarian. I inquired about his absence from the caucus meeting this morning, where numerous MPs were anticipated to call for the Prime Minister’s resignation as head of the Liberal Party. I cannot recall his answer, but he was a nice young fellow, and we exchanged a few words about the beauty of his province.

Turning around, a blonde woman in a business suit introduced herself as the Commercial Attaché for the Hungarian Embassy. We switched to speaking Hungarian, and suddenly, I noticed that all the people were well-dressed: the women wore business attire, and the men wore suits. I realized I was underdressed, I wore a red windbreaker, jeans, running shoes, and a baseball cap. If only I had shaved and dressed more formally this morning. Come to think of it, it is a major annual event to celebrate the Hungarian heroes who fought Russian tanks with handguns and risked their lives.

In just a few days and the weeks that followed the uprising in Budapest, the Russian tanks arrived and crushed the Revolution. Three thousand individuals perished, and 200,000 fled to foreign nations as refugees. Thirty-five thousand Hungarian refugees came to Canada after the Revolution.

We were greeted and addressed by the Deputy Mayor of Ottawa. As we sat down, I noticed at least fifty people had attended the event. I felt I was in a multicultural milieu already – Canadian and Hungarian –  especially after the Deputy Mayor started his speech by thanking the Anishinaabe people for using their unceded land, a standard introduction for public events in Canada recently. It is a small token for reconciling the injustices Canadians meted out to the Indigenous people in the past. I find this practice gratuitous, odious, and dishonest; I never heard that we Canadians would ever return the lands to the indigenous people. So, what is the purpose of this note of thanks? And, of course, it had nothing to do with the Hungarian Revolution half a world away, sixty-eight years ago.

The two MPs spoke next before the Hungarian Ambassador to Canada talked about the Revolution. She mentioned a few Hungarian Canadians who had become famous internationally, including Alanna Morrisette, whose grandfather came to Canada after the Revolution, and John Polanyi of the University of Toronto, a Nobel Prize winner who attended high school in Toronto in the early 1940s, when his parents sent him to Canada for safety during the rise of Nazi Germany.

The other curious thing was that the Ambassador spoke in English and French, Canada’s official languages, but not in Hungarian. I am sure there must be some protocol for speaking in public in Canada, but this was a Hungarian event celebrating a historical event, so I thought she could have given a trilingual presentation greeting us.

While listening to the anthems of Hungary and Canada, the Ambassador raised the flag, and that was it. I looked around for some kindred souls but saw mostly suited men and well-dressed women. If they were Hungarians, they were the second generation following the Revolution.  A clutch of embassy people spoke in Hungarian next to me when I noticed three scruffy looking, wizened old folks who turned out to be Hungarians. They all knew each other, and their facial expressions seemed to exude some impatience with all these well-dredded folks, all the officials present without direct experience of the Revolution.

The irony of this celebration did not escape me: Victor Orban, the current Prime Minister of Hungary, is friendly with Putin’s Russia, while here we are celebrating the freedom fight against the Russians sixty years ago.

I was in grade eleven in 1956, when the Uprising broke out. Our small town had no news except that trouble was brewing in Budapest. It was big trouble, it turned out, and my parents worried about my older brother Peter, a first-year medical student in Budapest. Not having cell phones, we had no news of Peter. It took three or four days, I cannot recall exactly, when Peter showed up at the apartment house where we lived, dirty and tired after walking from Budapest to Sopron, a distance of some two hundred kilometers (circa 120 miles).

As soon as Peter showed up, our mother prepared a couple of sandwiches and ordered us to walk to Vienna with the name of a Jesuit priest who had been a classmate of my uncle at the University of Vienna. We were obedient boys, and Peter and I started walking on the highway to Vienna, where we joined an exodus of wall-to-wall people escaping the country. It was a time when my brain did not seem to function with understanding; I felt like a robot, without thinking, a state of mind that saved my sanity. We had no idea where our journey would take us and what we would do when we arrived. So yes, the flag-raising event did stir up some memories, which had faded over time. The walk to Vienna was a significant event in my life and made me think about what could have happened if we had stayed back home in Hungary. I recall a film I saw once that tracked the lives of people who made a career decision and compared their lives to what could have happened if they had made another career decision. In real life, one cannot return and take another fork in the road. My immigrant story has been a challenging but highly satisfying experience. I would not have missed it if I had a choice.

What You Learn on a Bike Ride

September 9 2024

I put the bikes on the Thule rack to drive to one of the parking lots along the Ottawa River Parkway. Although we could have cycled from our house to get there, whenever possible I avoid riding on city streets with all the traffic on them.  But when we arrived at the Parkway, we found the two lanes with access to the parking lots closed to car traffic; they were reserved for cyclists on this Saturday. So, we decided to park on a vacant government parking lot nearby, hoping that there would be no monitoring of these lots on a Saturday (by the way, the remote work policy mandates the civil service to work two days per week in the office, so most parking lots for them are nearly empty).

Riding over to the Parkway, we noticed a giant sign indicating the Saturday cycling only sign on the “Kichi Zibi Mekan,” the new name for the Parkway. Let me provide a little history. We used to call this road the “Western Parkway” or the “Ottawa River Parkway”. Both names were geographically suggestive. But in 2012, the government renamed it “Sir John A. MacDonald Parkway” after the first Prime Minister of Canada, a historical name unrelated to geography. We used to call it the “SJAM,” an easy and short name. In 2023, the government renamed it in the Algonquin language, “Kichi Zibi Mekan,” in English: “Great Old River.”

I preferred the Ottawa River Parkway name; it seemed tied to and congruent with the Ottawa River when driving, walking, or riding. Renaming decisions were and are political, in my view. The Conservative government picked Sir John’s name. Sir John was a Conservative politician. When Sir John acquired a bad reputation for his policies towards First Nations, the Canadian public ostracized him. Remember when his monuments were destroyed? This reflects the changing attitudes towards historical figures in Canada.

Instead of returning to the original name, the government, in the spirit of the current ‘reconciliation’ with Indigenous people in Canada, named it in the Algonquin language that few people speak in Ottawa. This ‘reconciliation’ refers to the ongoing efforts to address the historical injustices and promote a better relationship between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. The name seems divorced from the Ottawa River for English-speaking people; it is three words in the Algonquin language. It is unintelligible to me. However, it is a step towards recognizing and honoring Ottawa’s Indigenous history and culture.

Our bicycle ride took us across the old railroad bridge from Ottawa to Gatineau. I thought the bridge’s name was the Prince of Wales Bridge. The Quebec, Ontario, Ottawa, and Occidental Railway was built in 1880 and christened with a name that lasted over 124 years, although its function as a rail bridge had stopped years ago. However, the bridge went through a major rehabilitation the past couple of years, into a multi-use pathway spanning the Ottawa River; the Ottawa City Council reopened it as the Chief William Commanda bridge.

My curiosity led me to find out who Chief William Commanda was. Commanda was an Algonquin elder, spiritual leader, and chief of the Ashininabeg First Nation for 19 years. In 2008, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, an award for meritorious service in Canada. The rehabilitation of the bridge and its renaming as the Chief William Commanda Bridge not only honors his legacy but also provides a safe and scenic route for cyclists and pedestrians to cross the Ottawa River.

I cannot comment on how well-known Commanda was among the Algonquin people or on his accomplishments since this was the first I had heard of him before the Ottawa City Council announced the name of the rehabilitated bridge. But I wonder why we needed a new name and why the new geographic names in Ottawa appear to be acquiring Algonquin memes.

To understand the local politicians’ emphasis on the Algonquin Nation, it’s important to note that the Algonquins have occupied the Ottawa area for over a thousand years. Today, most of the 8,000 Algonquin people live on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. Therefore, using Algonquin history in naming local streets, bridges, and venues is attractive from a historical perspective and a way to pay respect to the Indigenous people who have shaped the region’s history.

I am less impressed by the use of the Algonquin language in naming parts of Ottawa, like Kichi Zibi Mikan for the Ottawa River Parkway; the words in English mean “Great River Road.” Why not call it the latter? It is understandable in English and carries the historical Algonquin connotation. Members of the Algonquin nation may understand the name but form a minuscule percentage of the population of Ottawa, where over 36,000 people speak Arabic, 16,000 speak Spanish, and 14,000 speak Chinese, in contrast to the 1000 people who speak any indigenous language, including Algonquin (Ottawa’s population is one million).   Based on this precedent, should we see Ottawa venues named in Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese words?

The growth and diversity of Ottawa’s population make the city an exciting place for bike rides. Reflecting on our experiences during our bike rides, we often like to end our trips with a relaxing coffee. This time, the bike path returning from Gatineau across the William Commanda Bridge led us to the Art-Is-In Bakery close to downtown, where we had lunch. I was pleasantly surprised by the long lineup for service and the bustling crowd inside and on the outside patio, especially the vibrant presence of young people. It felt like a scene from the cafes in Marseille around the inner harbor, a delightful surprise in the heart of Ottawa.

There is no question that Ottawa is becoming a sophisticated metropolitan city, with elaborate bike paths sporting historical names and crowded cafes with outdoor patios. However, I prefer to keep street names and similar venues in their original toponymy and not subject them to political whims.