Canada: The Mecca of multicultural charm

Toronto, like all great metropolises, tends to provoke extreme reactions from people. But one of the most startling comments about the city came from a white Canadian, a down-on-luck graphic designer I met in a bar in Banff, a small town thousands of kilometres from Toronto, in the lap of the Canadian Rockies.

“Toronto plays a big role in keeping Canada united,” he said.
“Really?” I said, curious. “How does it do that?”
“People all over Canada are united by their hatred of Toronto.”

As a visitor to the country who had just spent a pleasant week taking in the sights and sounds of Toronto, I was naturally taken aback by his comment. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would hate such a lovely city.

For someone who had flown there straight from the groin of Ghatkopar, as it were, Toronto seemed like all that Mumbai could never be — empty, green, pedestrian-friendly, with just the right number of Indians for a city of its size.

Is it really a lake?
My first impression of Toronto, as we drove out of the airport, was that the city had been evacuated. This is how Mumbai might look, I thought, if 90% of its population disappeared. It was late afternoon, a bright summer day, and the silence on the streets made my ears buzz. The air was so transparent my eyes hurt — the dust and pollution that you take for granted in any city of respectable size seemed to have been evacuated too, along with the population.

Instead of the crowds and pollution that any country’s largest urban centre and commercial capital is supposed to have, Toronto has lots of parks, extra-broad sidewalks, and a lake that seems as vast as the sea. If you were any good in Geography, you would of course know that Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America, is 311 km by 80 km, and has a surface area of 19,500 sq km. The funny bit is that this seemingly endless body of water that follows you all the way from the airport to the city centre is the smallest of the Big Five.

Toronto in May is an outdoor city. Canadians like to be outdoors as much as the weather would allow them, which is not much for a country that begins in the Arctic circle and ends at a latitude that is ‘above’ even Kashmir. So the sun is a sort of celebrity in these parts and people love spotting it, talking about it, and spending as much time with it as they can.

So you’ll find them running, skate-boarding, cycling, dog-walking all through the day — early in the morning, under the mellow midday sun, and right till sundown.

Torontonians want to squeeze the maximum out of every last photon of daylight, while it lasts. For in the cold, damp, and endless winter, I am told, all the joggers, skate-boarders and cyclists go underground, literally — for Toronto is home to North America’s largest continuous underground pedestrian system, christened PATH.

It connects 1,200 shops and restaurants, 50 office towers, five subway stations, six major hotels, and is also in the Guinness Book for being the world’s biggest underground shopping complex. So you can, if you like, go on for months, with all your shopping needs met, without ever having to surface into the cold air and snow above ground.

Boys who dance
But this, unfortunately, is not an option for every Torontonian. Like, for example, Jace and Jordan, two young garbage boys. I bumped into them when I was walking down Yonge street, which happens to be the yongest, err…sorry, longest street in Toronto, in Canada, in North America, indeed, in the entire world. I’m not making it up.

It is 1,896km long and began life as a trail used by Huron Indians and early explorers. Dimension and native Indian lore are two recurring themes that any tourist to Toronto and Canada will encounter time and again — Canada being as vast as it is, and, like its southern neighbour, a country of settlers from another continent, most things are either the biggest in the world/North America, or have some interesting tale concerning native Indians, explorers and migrants.

Speaking of migrants, 46% of Toronto’s population (2.5 million) are immigrants to Canada, with South Asians accounting for the largest chunk (12%), followed closely by the Chinese (11.4%). Both Jace, 30 and Jordan, 25 belong to that 46%, as do all taxi drivers in the city. (I took a cab 16 times while I was in Toronto; the drivers were all first generation immigrants, and not even one was white.) Jace is semi-Irish, with a mish-mash of continental blood, while Jordan, with his curly hair and softer African features, is half-Trinidadian.

I halt in my tracks when I see them b-boying on the side-walk. Nobody pauses to even notice, but as a Step-Up fan, I’m intrigued. There is no music. “Jordan has all the music in his head,” Jace tells me. And it is obvious that both of them have bones as light as a bird’s. Their power moves and freezes are as good as any I’ve seen in a music video, so I ask them what they’re doing picking garbage instead of being on TV or something.

And then it all comes pouring out, their resentment against the “university-industrial-banking complex.” Jace is an Arts student who dropped out of university at some point, while Jordan is a bit vague about his past. Both claim to be artists.

“We put up graffiti and posters on the street, but you need to do something to support your art — we transport garbage. It pays for these,” says Jace, pointing to a bundle of posters rolled up in a corner of the cart. He tells me that he had certain ideas about the kind of art he wanted to do, but it was not tame enough to get academic support, so he’s ended up as a “freelance artist” who is funded by the “garbage and the waste of the city”.

I thank them for chatting with me and take pictures. As I walk back to my hotel, I remembered the strange comment of the graphic designer from Banff. Who in his right mind would hate this gleaming, first world metropolis that has given hope and home to one-quarter of all immigrants to Canada? Well, go figure.