CANADA

CANADA
Visited in June/July in 2003 and 2006

My family has a strange relationship with Canada. My Grandfather went there as the Indian Ambassador, and it was there that he married for the second time. Aunt Helen, as we called our Step-Grandma, came back to India with him – returning to Canada 13 or so years later, after he died. The highlight of my two visits to Canada was meeting her again. My Father’s Brother too settled in Canada, leaving India in the late 1960s to set up a successful car dealership in Toronto – I have met him only once, on his only visit back to India in the late 1970s. Another Uncle, a con man who had been cashiered from the Army for having it off with a (female) CIA agent in Paris, dumped his second wife to move there in the 1980s with a young lady and apparently just a step ahead of the law – he now has children younger than his grandchildren. My Father too made (ultimately unsuccessful) plans to emigrate in the early 1980s, but I remember being clear that I would not go with him.

And so, when my organization enrolled me in a course on development evaluation at the Carleton University in Ottawa in the summer of 2003, I set off with a sense of wonderment. This was my first visit to the western world outside of the UK and Europe.

The most pleasant thing about Canada was discovered even before reaching there. I had taken a Gulf Air flight from Delhi to Muscat, changed for another to London, from where I flew on Air Canada to Toronto. By London, some of us passengers had become friends – including one guy from Delhi who was emigrating there, and was going for the first time. At every Canadian passport check, they would see his passport and burst into smiles and words of welcome to the country. Unlike the UK and Europe, the word ‘immigrant’ is not a pejorative in Canada. Right through the visit, people I met would ask whether I was here to stay and on discovering I was not would ask why not, that Canada was a great place to live in.

I arrived in Toronto at 0005 hours – not a good time to arrive on a strange continent with plans only to get a bus onward to Ottawa. Where should I spend the night? After pumping the fellow who hailed cabs outside the airport, who turned out to be from Pune, for information, I decided to sleep off on a couch at the airport itself and catch the first bus from the airport to the bus stand (what they call the Greyhound Station) in the morning. The plan went perfectly, and I soon found myself on an early morning Greyhound bus making the six-hour journey to Ottawa. And here was the second discovery – of Canada’s size. A six-hour road journey in Europe takes you from one end of a country to another, but in Canada it is a journey between neighbouring cities.

Canada is the largest country in the world after Russia, but has a population of only about 30 million (two Delhis) most of whom live in a small belt running along its southern border with the USA. The most famous Canadian (for my generation of men) is Pamela Anderson. Most Americans, with some justification, think of it as a giant refrigerator – but my experience in June and July was of a pleasantly warm and sunny climate with long days and lightly cool evenings. I’m told that things are a little different at other times of the year. Canada’s size makes it a difficult country to really see, except in patches. I managed to take in Ottawa and Montreal.

Ottawa itself is a nice but limited city – a seat of government, straddling the divide between French and English speakers by virtue of its location across both Ontario and Quebec provinces. People are relaxed and friendly – if you don’t have correct change for a bus ticket the driver just waves you in anyway and says to just forget paying. The height of excitement is Canada Day, when you have a series of public events. The highlight is the musical ride, a horse event performed to music by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There is also a rock concert with singers from all provinces of Canada, and an impressive fireworks display. The youth are all drunk out of their minds, in a pleasant and unaggressive way, and the smell of dope is also heavy in the air. The meanest thing I saw in Canada was the police finding very drunk kids and pouring their remaining beer supplies into the drain. And someone had photographed a kid taking a piss on a monument to Canadian war casualties, and there was a public outcry after this was published in the papers. The poor kid was identified a few days later and said that he was so drunk that he had no idea of where he was pissing, and there was no malicious intent. I sympathised – the queues for the public toilets were miles long and, as they say, ‘when you gotta go, you gotta go’.

I used Montreal as my point of entry and exit the second time I visited Canada (this was to attend the advanced course of the same programme), and ensured that I arrived at a civilised hour. There was a bus from Montreal airport to Ottawa, for which many people had pre-booked tickets so I had to smarm up to the driver to let me on. This was done by helping her with the luggage – she not only had to drive, she also had to load and unload all the luggage of all the passengers, unpleasant when you have over 40 passengers all of whom have heavy luggage. No coolies, no khalasis here – it was her job and she had to do it, and none of the passengers lifted a finger to help.

Montreal is unique in North America as a city with a European feel, cobbled stone city centre and all. This is not particularly exciting when one has been to many European cities, as I have, but as it counts among its residents my Step-Grandma it was a must-visit for me. I hadn’t seen her since 1984, and had not had any contact, and so had to locate her in 2003 using phone books and searches on the Internet. The phone number that I finally got was for that of her Mother, and thereby contact was re-established. I spent a very enjoyable two days with her in 2003, regressing back to my college days when I used to go over to her house in Delhi and just eat, sleep and read. I also met members of her family, some of whom I had met as a child (Aunt Anne and Aunt Lovey) and some who were just names to me (Aunt Helen Sr., my Aunt Helen’s Mother, Aunt Ruth and Aunt Helen’s Brother Glenn – who like me has very bossy sisters and two sons). In 2006, with the advantage of knowing where she was and with better planning, I spent a few days with her and we did the sights – a visit to the casino, a visit to a lake in the north along upon which Uncle Glenn had a cottage, a fair bit of wining and dining, etc. Montreal provided me with my third discovery – that language chauvinism was a first-world phenomenon as well. The signs were all in French, and when there were signs in English they were below the French ones and smaller, and there were laws in place about how much below and how much smaller an English sign should be to the French one. French speakers have a strong feeling of losing out in Canada, and this has resulted in a movement for secession that remains despite umpteen referendums, some ridiculous laws to accommodate French sentiments, and an anti-English sentiment that is obvious even to new visitors. There were also signs of a backlash from other parts of Canada, especially in the west, of ‘let’s not accommodate them any more – if they want out let them get out’ and even among non-French speakers in Quebec ‘if they have a right to secede from Canada, we too would like the right to secede from Quebec’. Quite a khichdee here!

I would have liked, given the opportunity, to see more of Canada’s North – such as the newly formed province of Nunavut and its headquarters Ikaluit (formerly Frobisher’s Bay), Baffin Bay, and the Mackenzie Delta in the northwest. The Canadian North is still the preserve of groups such as Indigenous Canadians (formerly Red Indians, now called the First Nations) and the Inuit. Canadian policy towards them is fairly familiar – keep them happy with lollipops in the form of subsidised services, good unemployment benefits, et al, while extracting gas, oil, minerals and electricity from their regions. The result is a thoroughly emasculated indigenous population with low education and high unemployment, drunkenness and domestic violence levels and an attitude of ‘they are just a bunch of moronic tribals living off the taxes we pay’ among others. Discovery no. 4 – it doesn’t happen only in India.

Are you looking to emigrate to Canada? I spent some time with first generation Canadians and spoke to them about what it was actually like. Canada welcomes immigrants and is comfortable about people having dual identities – their Canadian one and the one of the country from which they came. This was obvious and visible to me as well. But life is tough here. Getting a job is difficult, especially if you are well educated and used to a certain station. Being unemployed is difficult, because the cost of living is high. The winters are long and severe. The main advantage is for your children, who will come up through a world-class education system and will reap the benefits of being Canadian.