I was honoured to be invited to Lidya’s first birthday party - the lone Canadian, the oldest attending by 25 years, and the only non-parent. There I was amid the enthusiastic chattering of eight Turks in their early 30s with their four children — hearing, but unable to participate given the language barrier. I worked hard to express interest by catching people’s eyes and smiling, frustrated not to engage in the kinds of group conversations I normally want. The Turkish were eager to talk to me too, and so one by one, they made their way to my end of the outdoor sofa to talk to a Canadian. I gather, for them, despite each having been here six months or more, chances to engage with locals have been less common than they’d like. Through these stilted, Google-translate supported exchanges, I learned of the frustrations with their new lives.

I met my party hosts last summer when they came to Canada to have their baby. Birth tourism was not something I’d encountered before and I was fascinated at the sacrifices these first-time parents were prepared to make to ensure their daughter would travel with a Canadian passport. (To read my account from last summer, click here.) Despite the linguistic, cultural, and chronological gulfs between us, we clicked. I was nearly as excited as a real grandma, not because I have any strong feelings for infants but because this was a fun and cool thing to have happen in the inaugural rental of my house. Baby Lidya’s newness mirrored the newness of my life in my laneway suite at the back of the same property. When the new family of three left three weeks after her birth, we were all teary. While her parents said they’d applied for Canadian work visas - or at least that’s what I thought they’d said - we knew this special time in all our lives was over.

In January, I was delighted to host the family again as they returned to start that new life they’d wanted. A month later, they moved to Barrie, north of Toronto, searching for less expensive rent and opportunities to do the professional work they were trained to do. I crossed my fingers for them, hopeful that they’d escape the precariousness of the gig economy about which we’ve all heard.

Sitting among Lidya’s parents and their friends, I unearthed their stories. Most are on work visas. One is an earthquake refugee. They’d all met in Canada through their children or on social media, I think. The language barrier means I was connecting dots like mad. But I’m pretty sure I’m right about this: among them were a veterinarian, a journalist, a bureaucrat, an IT programmer, a child psychologist, a sales professional, a trainer, and a banker. Only a few of them had landed employment and they’d joined the Instacart/Uber delivery brigade. One was making pizzas. They shared their housing stories too - one family spent $5700/month on a house that was growing black mould. The landlord of another had missed the lessons on providing tenants with notices of entry: she exited her bathroom wrapped in a towel one day to find three workmen in her unit doing routine repairs. Another family reported a Chinese-Canadian homeowner landlord in Markham, a largely Chinese suburb of Toronto, said she’d prefer it if they were Chinese or at least Indian but grudgingly accepted them despite their shortcomings. Learning English was quite rightly a pre-occupation of all of them but they noted some of them had less access to the provincial grants or loans available for study because they had arrived under a different immigration program. One noted that newcomers from Turkey and other middle-eastern countries receive different treatment than newcomers from Ukraine or other more western countries. Despite all these barriers though, they were cheerful and seemed grateful to have arrived in Canada, which they still saw as a land of more opportunity than Turkey.

We dangle the Canadian life as a carrot, I thought as I walked to my car past the leased SUVs with their Uber and Lyft decals. But are we really prepared to give newcomers the life we have? Instead, we offer them carrot peelings - happy to let them deliver our food, but not our babies; prepare our pizza toppings but not our legal opinions; take us across town but not through our financial investment options; and use their savings to pay our mortgages but not from spaces we’d feel safe occupying. The real barriers to entry aren’t set by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, but are found in employment interviews, rental adverts, and in the fine-print of professional regulatory bodies.

We suck. We need to do better.

Want to read more about how we fail to deliver the Canadian dream? Check out this CBC article from February: click here

(below, A&Z as they left my house a year ago with Lidya; photos from the party; my gift to Lidya - books from my childhood collection, starting her English reading library)

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