A Canada Special

Have you ever found yourself in a group of four, five, six people, and realized that you were each born in a different country? I’ll guess that there are vast areas of the world where this would be highly unlikely, where it hardly happens at all. And there are doubtless other places where it wouldn’t be particularly rare. New York, London, Hong Kong suggest themselves. But I’ll also bet that there aren’t very many places on Earth where this happens with such regularity that it’s almost commonplace. Toronto is such a place.

I’ve never before had a name for this phenomenon. But since I decided to write about it, I think it needs a tag. And because one of my first experiences of it was during a long ago summer in Montreal, I think that ‘A Canada Special’ will do the job.

But what to call it doesn’t matter. Let me get to why I think it’s worth writing about. And the simple answer is that it gives me a feeling for how big, variable and yet inter-connected the world is. It animates my sense of being an Earthling, with roots in the Planet that I share with each of my fellow Earthlings. And I thrill in the random complexity of Life, and the completely random chance that ‘we who gather’ found our ways here, to this moment and place, via such disparate routes and reasons.

So what exactly is a Canada Special? It’s a group of several people that also represents several countries of origin. There doesn’t necessarily need to be a 1:1 correspondence, exactly as many countries as individuals, but that makes it ever more wonderful. We could call that a Canada Extra Special!

                      (image courtesy of 4Chan on Reddit)

That first experience of the phenomenon that I mentioned takes me back to when I was nineteen. A fellow American and I decided to spend a summer in Montreal, and we wound up with jobs selling Colliers encyclopedia door-to-door. Because we had an English language product, and because Quebec was something like 80% francophone, we spent most of our time on crews travelling out-of-province. After our training, we were flown out to join a crew in Halifax. The crew was led by a recently immigrated Parisian and his Canadian born wife. And the crew, numbering about a dozen, had members from Greece, England, Vietnam, Nigeria and India. Eight countries among us. We were all young, and most of us were students, and I remember being so fascinated as we compared notes on our individual slices of the World.

My wife, her son and I form a Canada Special, as I was born in the US, she in Poland, and her son here in Canada.

My writers group is a Canada Special, the five of us landing on Earth via Canada, the US, Scotland, Poland and Hungary. And we’ve had former members from other countries.

And the job I retired from a year ago boasted a staff full of immigrants, from Palestine, Jamaica, Afghanistan, Ghana, India, Antigua, Iran, England, China and quite a few other countries, so we were always forming Canada Specials.

Then there's Regent Park, Canada's largest public housing development, in which I was priviledged to work for several years. The twelve thousand residents hailed from over ninety countries! Imagine the possibilities. Particularly in a community where the youth did not always and inevitably gravitate to their own kind!

This diversity is such a regular part of life in the urban centers of Canada, and it is a beautiful blessing and benefit. I vividly remember my first visit to Toronto, and being tantalized by all the snippets of other languages I heard. I looked at the various brown complexions I came upon and realized it was a different experience than when I’d grown up on New York’s Upper West side. At that time, I’d generally assume that the brown skinned people I encountered who didn’t look African-American were Puerto Ricans, and I was probably right a lot of the time. But in Toronto, an identical shade of brownness could as likely belong to someone from Venezuela, Pakistan, Tonga, South Africa, or to a Native Canadian. Or to some other nationality or ethnicity that didn’t occur to me.

There is something very freeing about such diversity. It softens prejudices when it’s impossible to assume where someone is from. There were many times in those early days when I spoke to someone, assuming them to be a native-born Euro-Canadian, and had my assumption dismantled the moment they spoke with an accent. And I shouldn’t say ‘early days’ because it happened when I first spoke to my wife, ten years after that first visit. And she tells me that people often interpret her Polish accent as French.

Canada Specials are a gift of living here. They nudge us daily out of the lazy assumptions, judgments and generalizations we so easily form about how other people live, think and feel. And in exchange, we gain a richness in perspective and shared experience that broadens us, even when we don’t particularly want to be broadened. It's clear that one of the main reason that people in urban centers are more liberal than those in rural and suburban communities is that the former are exposed to a much broader array of people.

So here’s celebrating Canada, and its cities like Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver, which are like microcosms of the World, and which have so much to teach the rest of the World. And may you experience your own little Canada Special, wherever you are!