A jewel and a land of opportunity

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This article was published 29/06/2023 (921 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“My dream is for people around the world to look up and to see Canada like a little jewel sitting at the top of the continent.” Former Premier of Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas

As we get closer to Canada Day, it’s impossible for this immigrant Canadian writer to miss the obvious. We are a nation of immigrants.

One out of every four people living in our nation of 40 million people is an immigrant. Tommy Douglas, the former Saskatchewan premier, the first leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party and the person who is known as the father of universal health care, dreamed a dream which has come true. The world does see Canada as a jewel sitting on top of North America.

I do get that some of my fellow Canadians have succumbed to the most wrongheaded and depressing political slogan of all time — “Canada is broken.”

But if ever there was a country in the history of humanity that is not broken, it is the one we are living in. We can choose on any given day to be angry with a prime minister or a premier or the price of strawberries. We can choose to be annoyed by sky-high cable and cellphone bills. We can be fed up by streets that are always in disrepair.

But none of the annoyances that we all share takes the shine off the jewel that is Canada.

Canada will always be more than irritants about prices, politics and potholes. Canada is so much more that. And it is why 10 million people who were not born here, are living here.

One of those 10 million immigrants came here 53 summers ago — she was 13, the daughter of two professionals from Hong Kong. Mum was a teacher. Dad was a school superintendent. They had a comfortable life. But Mao’s so-called “cultural revolution” next door in China was making life in Hong Kong much less comfortable. So the teenager and her parents decided to move to the jewel atop North America. Their middle class life now belonged in the rear view mirror. Her mother’s first job in Canada was exactly the same as the one my mother was doing 13 years earlier when she came to this jewel of a country. She was a seamstress in a sweatshop — a factory where ventilation, hours and pay are all brutal. It’s a very uncomfortable life and you endure for years, hoping that the pennies you save will get you to a higher rung on the Canadian ladder. While the teen’s mother was hunched over a sewing machine, just like my mother did, her dad, the former school superintendent, was now driving a hack on the streets of Toronto.

This week, the sweatshop seamstress and cab driver’s daughter was elected mayor of Toronto. Her name is Olivia Chow.

Not everyone who comes to our shores gets to be the mayor of Canada’s largest city.

Not everyone who immigrates to Canada gets to host national talks shows and write columns for one our country’s most respected and venerable newspapers.

Not everyone who comes to Canada is as fortunate as some who come here.

But everyone who sets foot in our land has a better chance of opportunity and prosperity than the one they came from. Our Canada is not ruled by oligarchs who own the judges, the media and the secret police.

This is a free country.

It’s a country where I feel free enough to tell you that I would not have voted for Olivia Chow. I think of her as a friend and I thought of her husband, Jack Layton, as one of my best friends.

But my personal politics are to the right of Jack Layton, Olivia Chow and Tommy Douglas, three Canadians who I have admired far more than many — if not most — of those I have voted for.

In the Canada I love, I feel free enough to tell you that even though I don’t vote NDP, I do leave a barrel of tears on my keyboard when I get the breaking news on a Monday night that Canadians in a community I called home, multiple times, voted for the daughter of a seamstress and cabbie from Hong Kong.

I cry tears of joy because it’s not just the Chow family’s story. It’s the Canadian family’s story. And as long as our country continues to be refreshed by new Canadians who want to polish the jewel, we will never be broken.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com