Canada: As immigration booms, ethnic enclaves swell and segregate

Tristin Hopper | February 11, 2012 4:31 PM ET
More from Tristin Hopper | @TristinHopper

Aaron Lynett / National PostPedestrians walk east on Dundas Street West, near Spadina Avenue, under various signs for local businesses in Toronto's Chinatown, Monday evening, April 26, 2010. File photos for any use.

• More than 600 newcomers per day have arrived in Canada since 2006, and many of them have settled in neighbourhoods like Richmond, B.C. The once-quiet farming community on the south end of Vancouver is now home to North America’s second-largest Asian community — and Canada’s densest proportion of foreign-born residents. The city’s strip malls are a haven for dim sum. Richmond’s roads are replete with white delivery vans emblazoned with Chinese characters and massive 150-store Asian-friendly malls seemingly plucked right from downtown Shanghai.

Richard Johnson / National PostCLICK TO ENLARGE

While the Chinese who came to Canada in the opening days of Confederation settled into dense urban Chinatowns, recent Chinese immigrants now occupy large sprawling Chinalands: Large, self-contained and lined with restaurants and supermarkets offering the comforts of the old country. Indo-Canadians, South Asians and others can lay claim to similar booming settlements in the outskirts of Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto — and the resource-rich centres of the Prairies. And it is only the beginning. By 2030, according to Statistics Canada, more than 80% of Canada’s population growth is expected to depend on immigration. Ethnic enclaves are set to fill up faster and longer than ever before.

In almost every Canadian family tree, there is an ethnic enclave: Irish Catholics in Montreal’s St. Anne’s Ward, European Jews in Toronto’s Kensington Market or Ukrainians in the new farming villages of early 20th century Alberta. “People find their footing in these neighbourhoods … they pull comfort from these areas, especially women and elderly people,” said Sandeep Agrawal, a specialist in ethnic enclaves at Ryerson University.

In 1981, Canada had only six neighbourhoods with ethnic enclaves (neighbourhoods where more than 30% of the population is a visible minority). Now, that number has mushroomed to more than 260. In cities like Vancouver, home to nearly half of these enclaves, neighbourhoods are becoming increasingly defined by ethnicity. Unlike the racial ghettoes of the U.S. or France however, Canada’s ethnic communities are often shaped by choice. “People have made the decision voluntarily to move to these areas,” said Mr. Agrawal.

The enclaves of today may have more staying power than the Little Italys and Jewish quarters of years past, explained Mohammad Qadeer, professor emeritus of urban and regional planning at Queen’s University. “They will continue to draw new immigrants who will keep on arriving as far as the eye can see,” he wrote in an email to the Post. While Canada’s influx of Italians, Germans, Jews and Greeks largely ended after only 10 or 20 years, India, China and South Asia represent near-bottomless supplies of new Canadians — particularly as Canada’s immigrant needs are more potent than ever.

The vast majority of these enclaves are in the suburbs. “They’re going to where the land is cheaper and they’re going to where accommodation is available,” said Larry Beasley, former co-director of planning for the City of Vancouver.

And, economic mobility is not what it once was. Although many immigrant neighbourhoods are prosperous — the largely Chinese Toronto suburb of Markham, for example — newcomers arriving in Canada between 2000-2004 on average earned only 61 cents for every dollar earned by Canadian-born workers, according to a recent TD Economics Report. This, coupled with spiralling urban land prices, means that the newcomer of 2012 does not have nearly the economic freedom as the newcomer of 1992. “Although the term ‘ghettoes’ is rarely used in Canada, the concentration of immigrants into ethnic enclaves is similarly often caused by economic factors,” wrote Alex Lovell, a Queen’s University Ph.D. candidate, in an email to the Post.

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The result, critics fear, is that poorer, far-flung, constantly replenished enclaves have become more susceptible to isolation. Even better-off immigrants have tended to settle in prosperous suburbs filled largely with people of the same background, served by media and merchants focused on one community.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, under whose watch more than a million newcomers have claimed Canadian citizenship, can often be seen mounting podiums at Chinese restaurants and Indian business associations calling for greater integration. “We don’t want to create a bunch of silo communities where kids grow up in a community that more resembles their parents’ country of origin than Canada,” he said in 2009.

Illustration / Kagan Mcleod After Grant Wood

In 2009, a planning firm hired by the city of Calgary ignited outrage when it called for the city to discourage “Asian’’ malls that cater only to a specific ethnic group” on the grounds that it “marginalized ethnic enclaves.” Amid a torrent of complaints from Calgary’s 67,000-strong Asian community, the city omitted the offending passage from the report. “I understand why certain people are concerned about it,” said Tom Leung, the firm’s Chinese-descent president told Postmedia in 2009. “I’m a very strong supporter of the Asian community. But we also have to take a look at the commercial realities.”

Mr. Leung need not have mentioned it. Behind the scenes, the wheels of integration were already spinning. This year, more than 6% of Calgary marriages will be interracial — higher than the national average. Notorious as a centre for white supremacist rallies and marches, in 2010 Calgary also became the first major Canadian city to elect a Muslim mayor, Naheed Nenshi. The son of Tanzanian immigrants, Mr. Nenshi came of age in Calgary’s minority-rich northeast quadrant.

At its height in the 1980s, the 10-block-long Greek section of Toronto’s Danforth Avenue was the largest Greektown in North America. Street merchants hawked spanakopita and lamb souvlaki outside Greek nightclubs and coffee shops — while Greek families filled the verandaed homes of the surrounding neighbourhood.

But lately, there are not a lot of Greeks left in Greektown. The sons and daughters of the Giannopolouses and the Rossos, well-versed in the language and steeped in Canadian culture, moved off to condos downtown and ranch houses in the suburbs — if they have even stayed in Toronto at all.

Every year, the four-lane avenue sees another Greek restaurant or cafe close up shop, soon replaced by a sushi restaurant or a high-end clothing boutique. Some are driven out by rising rents, others close their doors simply because a Canadian-born son has refused to take up the family business. As one Danforth business owner told blogTO.com last March, “I’m afraid the only thing still Greek in a couple of years will just be the signs.”

“As a planner, you’re always sorry when character dissipates,” said Mr. Beasley. “We all love the character of an ethnic area, but to some extent it’s a sign of social dysfunction rather than a sign of social integration,” he said.

Mr. Beasley points to the famous Chinatowns of the West Coast: Dense urban areas in Vancouver and Victoria fronted by ceremonial gates, hung with lanterns and peppered with mysterious alleys, basement cafes and winding former opium dens. They are “physically vivid” sectors of the city, but they are also the scars of ethnic segregation, said Mr. Beasley. In early 20th century British Columbia, Chinese were blocked from high-earning professions and had their children sent to separate schools. Locked out by mainstream society, their culture turned in upon itself and flourished.

But even these storied downtown landmarks may not be Chinese forever. “They’re all looking for alternative destinies for these neighbourhoods,” said Mr. Beasley, referring to the neighbourhood’s modern-day Chinese-Canadian owners. “They’re not saying ‘we’re holding this as Chinatown,’” he said.

Chinalands may share the same fate sooner than we think. In China and India, surging economies are increasingly absorbing the engineering and high-tech talent that once left to find work in Canada. Meanwhile, the Eurozone crisis is promising fresh waves of Irish, Icelandic and Greeks. Since 2009, Filipinos — to the tune of 30,000 per year — have trumped even the Chinese in Canadian citizenship oaths.

Within 15 years, even the daunting Chinese landscapes of Richmond could well be gentrified with hipsters and yuppies — or emblazoned with the text of some African or South American newcomer. Already, the neighbourhood’s veterans are pining to move on. “I’d like a more typical North American city and lifestyle, with not so many Chinese people,” Richmond resident Jeremy Lau, who came to Canada from Hong Kong in 1993, told Postmedia in October.

As it should be, said Mr. Beasley. “Ethnic neighbourhoods are a joy when you have them, and it’s a joy when you don’t have to have them,” he said.