The concern that Canada may be losing its identity, that the country is changing in not always good ways, that it s not what it once was... well, that s seen as an old stock complaint right? Some old-fashioned, out-of-touch old guy going on about the past... right? Well, maybe not always. Maybe more and more immigrants to Canada are feeling like what they're experiencing here isn't what they signed up for. And that the things that first attracted them to Canada, may be under threat. These sorts of themes are addressed in Lydia Perovich's new book, Lost in Canada: An Immigrant's Second Thoughts.
00:10:58.080And then you have, you have stuff happening like, I think it happened in Vancouver Sun a couple of years ago, when an op-ed was unpublished.
00:11:07.420So I think that's an interesting precedent and very, very strange, because it was an op-ed about questioning the levels of immigration
00:11:14.900and quoting Robert Putnam's study that I also mentioned in the book about how high, high level of ethnic diversity very fast have a temporary effect of reducing social trust in big cities, for example.
00:11:32.140And a lot of sociologists have studied this in various contexts.
00:11:36.640And they did, a lot of these studies did show that, temporarily at least, until we start intermarrying and getting a little less weary about other ethnic groups, the social trust goes down.
00:11:47.660So anyway, one of the arguments in this op-ed was this, and it was kind of diplomatically suggesting, oh, should we, I mean, I disagree.
00:11:57.640I think Canada needs a lot of immigration, but it was suggesting, what are we, is this wise 200,000, are we doing enough to integrate them and so on?
00:12:06.940And no, that was suddenly beyond the pale and it got unbuckished.
00:12:12.060So that, that was, that was shocking to me.
00:12:14.680Well, I guess when it comes to immigration, you'd give another example of something where we just can't even have a conversation.
00:12:19.880So for years, it was 250,000 immigrants we brought in, and it was brought up to 300,000 by Justin Trudeau.
00:12:25.300And right now, the plan is to exceed 400,000 a year.
00:12:29.000And we'd previously heard, I remember when we brought in Syrian refugees, the support agency said, well, hold on, slow down.
00:12:34.600There's just more people coming in than we can absorb.
00:12:37.880And it's like, there are legitimate conversations to be had about the number of housing spaces available, support groups.
00:12:44.660I know different church groups and different voluntary groups support people, but they're like, well, there's just too many for us to support.
00:12:51.180But then the politicization is, you're saying too many people of this religion or of this skin color, or how dare you, you're this and you're that.
00:12:57.620And they're like, no, no, we're simply talking about logistics as well.
00:13:38.420Yeah, and I mean, the new, let's say we need, I mean, you know how zoning is organized in a lot of our cities.
00:13:45.320Not, for example, in Montreal, but in Toronto, you have a tiny area, let's say two kilometers square, three kilometers square, where you can develop.
00:13:52.260And then the rest is detached housing.
00:13:54.600And detached housing, the so-called yellow belt, they don't want any degree of densification.
00:13:58.740So where do you put, like, I live in the highly tower-bent area in Upper Jarvis, and I had four or five different new condo towers coming up.
00:14:10.160So we're all on top of each other, right?
00:14:12.520So our public schools, do they have enough spaces?
00:14:45.400So you have to figure out your own way.
00:14:47.240And a lot of people just hunker down with their own ethnic group because there's already infrastructure, right?
00:14:53.720So I think I'm saying in the book that that's gotten a little worse, too.
00:14:57.180Because a lot of us, especially in large ethnic groups, just hang out with our own because there are pre-existing infrastructure, support, social services organizations, and so on.
00:15:08.480It's something that I wanted to avoid, and it doesn't exist for my small ethnic group.
00:15:13.960So you have to do it on your own and figure it out on your own.
00:15:17.780And, Lydia, you write very movingly about your own personal story, your personal situation, coming as an immigrant individually, as yourself.
00:15:24.700You didn't bring siblings or a spouse or children or parents along with you and talking about making friends, making meaningful connections, which we know a lot of times we do that when we're a teenager or first years of university, and you stick with those people as your close friends for years.
00:15:41.560When you move in your 20s or in your 30s, you will abandon those friends or not see them as frequently.
00:15:48.160And there's a lot of challenges in the immigrant experience, in the urban experience, in a place like Toronto.
00:15:53.640You know, you said that there's just people all over you in terms of all the new high-rise developments that have been built.
00:15:59.600But then at the same time, one can also be very lonely, you know, alone together.
00:16:41.700So now you have these adults coming as immigrants.
00:16:44.180And again, they hunker down to their own ethnic groups.
00:16:47.320And if you don't want that, or if you can't do that, because you don't have a big ethnic group, then it's tricky.
00:16:54.080You know, and you also point out it's even what your interests are in or in what your family makeup is in, in terms of you talking about how lesbian couples with children are now less likely to be close friends with lesbian couples without children or a single lesbian lady without a child.
00:17:10.060Because I guess the ones with children are just talking about what it's like taking the kid to hockey practice.
00:17:14.140So even there, there's a cleavage in those associations.
00:17:35.060He goes cruising every weekend, basically.
00:17:37.420But it's, that's a minority, even among the gay population, that's a minority.
00:17:42.400They also kind of settle and their life gets settled and cocooned and it's complicated.
00:17:49.800We get so picky with new people though, right?
00:17:52.520So it has, if you meet a new person as a friend, they have to get along with your kids, your partner, you have, so it's all these things, right?
00:18:00.040And we get very finicky as adults and picky and it gets hard.
00:18:03.180I find it fascinating that our conversation has so quickly just drifted into so many different, we've covered like 20 issues in a period of like six minutes, but it's all very organic.
00:19:13.300But politicization has become a real hotbed thing these days.
00:19:19.420I feel like we hear more and more of people who just can't talk to that person or associate with that person if they don't share the right views.
00:19:27.220Those famous polls that said, well, I'm a Trump supporter and I would never have lunch with a Hillary supporter.
00:21:55.300There's been lots of discussion about how bizarrely close-minded and non-liberal the liberal arts have become.
00:22:01.520I know you know the arts and culture world well.
00:22:03.520I'm always surprised by how increasingly dogmatic that realm has also become.
00:22:07.920One would think it should be free-spirited, open ideas.
00:22:11.520There's supposed to be a lot of oddball characters, so I guess you never know what views people are going to have.
00:22:15.980It's all, you know, any sort of art is about exploring the deep human condition, so you would feel like rigidity of view is not really a thing that happens in those worlds, but it is.
00:22:29.220You can add this to my list of surprises, but I hear from people who leave academia on social media, and they've riped about it, too.
00:22:41.080I mean, we know of cases like Professor Boghossian, who just decided, realized, I just cannot teach anymore because he offers different points of view in his teaching.
00:22:53.000And I'm sure there are many, many more cases that are behind the scenes, people just giving up on life in the academia.
00:23:04.500I wish I could say more of you could, I mean, I could say more of you should speak up, more of you should disagree, more of you should do something, but it's not really happening.
00:23:15.600They just want quiet lives, and that's how, I guess that's how large swaths of population conform to noxious ideologies.
00:23:24.620And I think perhaps one of the reasons you're able to see this more clearly, or at least write about it in a more open way, coming from a country that was less free, you've had these battles before, haven't you?
00:23:40.320Yes, I did my politics degree in Belgrade, and that was just as communism was ending and ethno-nationalism was on the rise.
00:23:50.860And there was, like, the liberal Democrats were a tiny minority.
00:23:57.400So you really had to brush up your arguments.
00:23:59.660You actually were in classes with a wide ideological spectrum of other students who may be refugees from Bosnia, who may be Serbian nationalists, who maybe still regret that communism fell apart.
00:24:18.380So that's the kind of conversation that you would, I mean, it was extremely stressful because you didn't know which way the country's going to go and whether the authoritarianism was going to return and stay for good.
00:24:29.260But you kind of, yeah, you kind of brush up, you get used, you work the muscle, you work the muscle, you talk to all kinds of people.
00:24:38.040And so when I see that there's, when I'm in an environment where there's a consensus about most issues, it's very strange.
00:24:48.160Lydia, I'm sure you're familiar with Justin Trudeau's famous phrase that Canada is the world's first post-national state.
00:24:54.780And a lot of people responded with great hostility to that.
00:24:58.120And, you know, he said there's no core underlying identity, I think he was saying.
00:25:02.300And people took that to mean he wanted that to be the case, and I think he probably does.
00:25:06.840But he might have also just been attempting to describe what's going on here.
00:25:10.540And as much as I don't like the idea and I'm against it, I mean, is he on to something that that is actually kind of what ails us right now?
00:25:19.760Well, I would, had he said post-nationalist, I would have co-signed.
00:25:25.420But I think, as I mentioned in the book, I think the nation state is a kind of solidarity that I think it's still worthy of existing.
00:25:35.360And it cuts across so many regional differences, regional resentments, lack of interest for each other.
00:25:43.040I mean, what, you could argue that we are effectively about five or six countries.
00:25:47.840And Canada has always been kind of a messy, messy project.
00:25:51.140And highly decentralized, two languages, now with the indigenous languages, things are getting complicated even more.
00:25:57.960And all the large ethnic groups have their own institutions as well.
00:26:01.220So you have institutions in Cantonese, you have institutions in Hindu, Hindi.
00:26:07.420And so, I mean, it would be good to have something that encompasses all this.
00:26:15.780And if we say we are post-national, that means we're just, we've given up on this great solidarity among all of us.
00:26:28.200And what actually happens now with that, we're losing interest in our own culture, what we used to be called national culture, which is, let's just call it culture.
00:26:37.120And my theory is because the arts now have this ideological demand before them that they have to be solving racism, they have to be solving sexism, social problems, which the arts did not create.
00:26:52.940Now we have to deal with, the arts have to deal with.
00:26:56.140And so Canadians are, I think this is my theory, are less and less interested in their own arts and just like American culture much more.
00:27:05.680The arts is becoming increasingly insular, perhaps.
00:27:14.120So we get a lot of stuff from America.
00:27:16.760We respond to a lot that's happening in the U.S.
00:27:19.660But about the rest of the world, yeah, that's probably true.
00:27:23.020That's very inward looking at the moment, yes.
00:27:25.880Canadian music has always done pretty well.
00:27:27.980We've always had icons of Canadian music.
00:27:30.360Either they move to the U.S. and are famous there or they stay here and they remain pretty famous and tour here and tour all around the world.
00:27:39.920Although we see that so many of these popular Netflix and Amazon shows, they're now filmed in Toronto, they're filmed in B.C.
00:27:45.800And maybe for the most part, the main people are Americans, but so many Canadians involved.
00:27:50.660And I think some of them, the Canadians are writing them.
00:27:53.180Are we seeing a new democratization where the cream of the crop is rising to the top, that the voices that have something important to say are being said and heard?
00:28:15.720And she has this company called Kid Pivot.
00:28:18.880And she and the collaborator, playwright Jonathan Young, do like every five years, they do something.
00:28:27.360And so their last work is called The Revisor.
00:28:29.500And a country that it's been touring around the world, whatever they do, everybody in the world wants to see that.
00:28:36.040So a country that produces Kid Pivot and Crystal Pipe is doing something extremely right.
00:28:42.880So I like that you still have, I mean, we have incredible opera singers who, of course, leave the country so they can have a career because we are too small a market.
00:28:52.520And I don't know what's happening with the current crop of literary writers, but we had a previous generation, of course, the boomer generation, which left the mark around the world with Alice Monroe and Atwood and so on.
00:29:07.720So I don't know what's going to happen, what's going to happen next with literature.
00:29:12.200Lidia, the subtitle of Lost in Canada is An Immigrant's Second Thoughts.
00:29:16.480We've been talking about all these disconnected but still connected threads here.
00:29:22.120And you're giving the immigrant experience, and I'm relating to you as a person who is not an immigrant.
00:29:26.280When you talk to other immigrants, though, whether they're from the same country as you or from other countries, are you getting the same sense?
00:29:33.400What are other immigrants and even new immigrants saying based on what they thought they were getting out of Canada in terms of a free speech place, an affordable place, a place where everybody would be commingling, and what they're actually getting?
00:30:15.820So all these variables affect how your experience will be.
00:30:20.440But a lot of us have similar experience.
00:30:24.760That we're finding the society very pampered, if that's the word.
00:30:32.020We're extremely sensitive, very pampered, slightly, well, yeah, let's say very pampered people who have forgotten what actual fascism was and what genocide is.
00:31:26.800So we have different understandings of what risk is, what danger is, and what pain is.
00:31:32.000I mean, I remember when I went to, just got a first package from Dalhousie, and I mean, I came from, I just told you about what was happening in university.
00:31:43.100It was a really, really heady time and very tricky.
00:31:45.860But the country fell apart in civil war.
00:31:51.140And you had to finish your degree through all that.
00:31:53.840And then I get a package from Dalhousie that tells me, you really, when you come over, you should not be wearing any scented products, because it'll upset blah, blah, blah, or people are.
00:32:03.960So, you know, you see, it's two different, very different notions of what is inconvenient, what is painful, what is dangerous.
00:32:11.000How do these second thoughts that immigrants are having manifest itself in terms of what they do moving forward?
00:32:20.080Is it a sort of quiet resignation and acceptance?
00:32:23.840Is it, oh, tell everybody else, you know, I can't, it's not actually that amazing.
00:32:26.780I know we were bragging about it for years, but, man, it's so-so.
00:33:06.700My kids have grown up and my partner's gone.
00:33:08.920And you see how shallow your roots have been in the last 20 years, right?
00:33:15.800So, but, I mean, I know people who have married a local person.
00:33:19.620And that's a whole different story again, right?
00:33:22.600So, I mean, when it comes to my second thoughts, that's probably referring to the more personal side of the book, which is, I hit the middle age.
00:33:43.180It's about being free from constraints or your family and your ethnic group.
00:33:47.340And the Balkan is oversaturated with history.
00:33:50.280And then when your parents are gone, you just think, wow, well, I should have maybe recalibrated some of that obsession about freedom with something else.
00:34:01.240Maybe I should have just had spent more time with them and that kind of stuff.
00:34:06.500Where do you see these problems trending in Canada?
00:34:09.100Is this a blip that we have to figure out, the isolation that comes with technology, the lack of strong communities, and we're going to get over these hurdles?
00:34:18.560Or are these things worsening or moving towards the science fiction horror story matrix scenarios?
00:34:54.760People should be allowed to rent rooms in libraries, even if you don't agree with them and things of that sort.
00:35:00.680So, I sometimes hear, like, I'm listening to an interview with somebody new, with a journalist in the U.S. recently on a podcast, and she's in her early 30s.
00:35:11.260She's one of those people who think it's already too late, that institutions have been captured with this new post-roliberal ideology, and then what we're having now, it's just the last resistance, basically, from old school oldies, old geezers, geezer liberals like myself, Gen X and older.
00:35:35.880I think that's very bleak, and I don't think that's warranted.
00:35:40.720I think there's still things to be done.
00:35:43.220When it comes to optimization and all that, that's a big one because the forces are economic, right?
00:35:50.140So, we're more and more precarious, and there's a lot of us who are freelancers, and two years of COVID and shattering of businesses did not help.
00:35:59.500So, that I don't know if I'm very optimistic about.
00:36:05.840We will be either, we will stay this much atomized, or it's going to get even worse.
00:36:13.780So, people hunkering down within their own ethnic groups and the rest, people living on their own.
00:36:19.460I mean, remember when Theresa May was prime minister in the UK, they had a special minister for loneliness.
00:36:27.460So, the people are noticing these social trends and trying to address them, but I'm not sure what's going to happen in Canada.
00:36:34.620I think for an immigrant who has not started their own family, I think volunteering is a great way to kind of grow roots.
00:36:43.900Yes, and I've been volunteering in an adult literacy college, which was absolutely great.
00:36:50.460So, things like that can help, and also joining sports leagues and soccer pickup and chess, a neighborhood chess club and that kind of stuff.
00:37:01.760Lydia Lost in Canada, An Immigrant's Second Thoughts is a very fascinating read.
00:37:06.260I found it really enjoyable and informative.
00:37:08.900Thanks so much for joining us for the discussion today.