22 - How Multiculturalism Was Born

When rights and laws began to benefit Italian immigrants who faced hardships

Friulian Julian Fantino, Chief of the Toronto Police, recounts that his first assignment, in 1969, was to drive Italians away from the sidewalks on Sunday afternoons. "You're one of them, you know how to do it," he would tell Italian-Canadians.
In those years the Blue Laws were still in force, and according to them three or more people who assembled in the open on a Sunday were considered a riotous crowd, usually dispersed with determination by the police. Sundays, in then-puritanical Toronto, were to be devoted to family and prayer, and public bars were closed.
The Italians, on the other hand, spent their Sundays in the few open bars on College Street and St. Clair Avenue, with their ears glued con to short-wave radio to follow their beloved soccer games. After 90 minutes, when the games ended, people began commenting on them. The place of choice was the sidewalk, catching some fresh air just outside the smoky bars, and soccer fans were prone to manifesting their joy or their disappointment in loud voices. The crowd became "riotous", and the police never failed to show up. "But those were not dangerous criminals," says Fantino. "They were just workers and labourers who attended soccer games as a way for completing a week of hard work and beginning the next. I was aware of this. I didn't send them away with harsh words; I just explained that this country had its laws and that everybody had to respect them. They understood and went back inside their bars, chatting about Juventus or Milan."
In the past 15 years or so, Canada had been facing a massive immigration that it was unprepared for. Along with good immigrants come some not so good, but they were easily lumped together, in accordance with the theories of the time about Mediterranean people being "the subjects most inclined towards crime." On the basis of such rudimentary ideas and with laws inadequate to the situation, young cop Fantino had to identify DPs (displaced persons) and WOPs ("without papers"), considered criminals or so.
Those were difficult years for Italians, arriving in increasing numbers since the early Fifties. There were many problems, and not only limited to getting acquainted with the place and learning the language; safety on the workplace, for instance, was totally inadequate, like the treatment of injured foreign workers (nicknamed "broken backs").
Access to high schools was heavily restricted to the children of immigrants, Italian was not taught, and the pension system gave small change, at best, to people who had worked for an entire lifetime.
"In the early Sixties people began to talk about multiculturalism," says Elio Costa, teacher of Italian Literature at York University and holder of the Mariano Elia Chair. "The discussion developed mostly within the New Democratic Party. The search was on for a formula that could link Canada's past and future. However, the discussion was not on abstract principles, but concrete needs that surfaced every day and concerned economy, education, and social security. Keep in mind that those were not sterile demands, but a real struggle that ended up changing the face of Toronto and Canada. For instance, I remember Bruno Zannini, a charismatic union leader, Marino Toppan, John Stefanini and others who launched a great mobilization of construction workers."
Costa, a Friulian from Pordenone, came here when he was 12. "Too young," he says, "to work, unlike my two brothers and my father, but old enough to understand how hard it was to be immigrants. That was 1952. It seems like ages ago."
Costa continues: "In Toronto in the early Sixties many people were charmed by the challenge of changing this country that had generously welcomed us, but found it difficult to rejuvenate itself and recognize to Italians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Polish, the rights these people had won with their sweat. The arrival of Odoardo Di Santo, who managed to rationalize many youthful enthusiasms, was healthy. As was the encounter with the Ukrainians who had already obtained that their language be taught in Saskatchewan public schools. If they have managed it, we said to ourselves, why shouldn't we? In short, the demand for equal dignity and for the rights of workers, students and pensioners led us to multicultural politics even before the very idea and name for it existed."
The problem was not limited to teaching the Italian language. Access to high school was determined by an IQ test that was grossly biased against the children of immigrants, who could often access only the Vocational Schools, not high schools and universities. "There were exceptions, of course, but they were rare," remembers Costa. "The test results were final. When the macroscopic anomalies of the tests were pointed out, school principals shrugged and claimed that they had instructions to stick to the tests, and that they could not change the law. They were right, because what had to change was the mindset."
In construction (a leading industry at the time), even disregarding the lack of laws on hiring, site safety, pensions and injury insurance and so on, immigrants were exploited almost as slaves. Considering that most construction workers were Italian, it's easy to see how heavily such a situation weighed on a large yet unprotected community. "When Italians were hired as labourers," says Costa, "labourers for life they remained; management was exclusively reserved for Anglo-Saxons."
Was the discussion on multiculturalism limited to the NDP or did it involve other parties as well? Costa responds: "The situation really bordered on the unbearable, therefore all parties tackled the problem and looked for a permanent solution. The Liberals found one, due to their ideological specificity that allowed them to understand emergencies and respond in a timely fashion. In those years, the Liberal Party also had an additional bonus: the Federal leader was Pierre Trudeau, the keenest politician in modern Canada. Now you see how the problem of equality between immigrants and Canadians became paramount."
Thus the Canadian Mosaic was born, as an attempt to allow every ethnic group to maintain its cultural identity in a country where everybody had equal rights and duties; it was meant to be different from the U.S. Melting Pot, where all ethnic groups had to merge and conform to the American model. Proclaimed as a political goal of the Federal government in 1971, multiculturalism became law on July 21, 1988 (Canadian Multiculturalism Act/Loi sur le multiculturalisme canadien). Based on that law, today's Canada is an ethnically and culturally diverse society.
"The rest came as a consequence: labour laws, equality of rights, education open to all," says Costa. "It all happened within a handful of years. It looks like ages in comparison with the situation my family found here. However when I think back to that period I feel a lot of bitterness."
Why? "When my parents came here they were almost 50. They had to start everything from scratch in clearly difficult conditions, and not just on the job. They felt helpless, and so did we kids. People here did not want us, and Italy had abandoned us, dumped us. I don't feel bitter towards Canada, which eventually found a solution, but with Italy, which gave us a passport, like it did with millions more emigrants, and forgot all about us. It was shameful."
Many people consider Canada's multiculturalism as still incomplete; for instance they say that proclaiming a policy is not enough to make ethnic problems disappear. Do you agree that multiculturalism has a great future behind it?
Costa does not reply at once, lost in his thoughts. Then, "Yes," he comments, "it's an unfinished project. It was a great idea, but it stopped at reforms, certainly beneficial and indispensable, that could have been achieved even without a multicultural policy in place. Emergencies and injustice were so evident that those laws would come regardless. We might say that multiculturalism has given Canada an identity, but not a national awareness yet."
How can it come to pass? "Through the schools," says Costa. "This is the one field where the Canadian multiculturalism is still a point of departure, not a finish line. We live in a system where schools are not creative, do not raise awareness: they only produce robots, destined to take their place in a system heavily conditioned by the economy. There's very little space for ideas. I teach Italian Literature, Dante in particular, but I don't only explain the Divine Comedy: I also use it as a precious tool for transforming students into citizens, an indispensable operation in times of globalization."
How so? Costa: "Did you ever think about the devastating effects globalization can have upon a Canadian lacking a specific national awareness? I resort to poetry as a form of 'resistance', of fight against injustice, of pride and conscience. Here, on the other hand, schools teach everything about the tiniest aspects of business, about the most trivial applications of technology, little or nothing about the history of ideas. That's why I, a Canadian teacher of Italian origin, enlist Dante as an ally. We cannot live in the past, but that's where our future should start from."
The future has the eyes of Maria Bonofiglio, one of Costa's students. She studies Italian Language and Literature and works in a pharmacy. Her Italian is excellent, her analysis is suggestive. "To me," she remarks, "Italy is a value, not just the country where my roots are. The role Italy played and still plays in European culture cannot be reduced, for young Italian-Canadians, to a memory; we are called up to be the new ambassadors of that culture."
For example, says Bonofiglio, "Take the most common idea: the Italian piazza. It's more than a meeting point: it's always been the place where ideas were born and shared. Of course the piazza cannot be reproduced in Canada or elsewhere, but its meaning can. Italians know it, we learned it at home from our parents and in schools and universities from our teachers. When Professor Costa tells us of the history of ideas and of Dante as a politician, he also talks about medieval Florence, an important city at the time, but especially a big piazza where political passion bred modern democracy, embodying an urge for participation. And democracy is about participation.
"We young Italian-Canadians have certain values in our DNA. By rediscovering and updating them, we can put them at the disposal of our country, Canada, that still needs a national awareness. As for Italy, where our roots are, we are the natural ambassadors of its culture, much like our parents and grandparents were the natural ambassadors of its products. We are the new bridge across the Atlantic."
From Dante to the present: Why did the NDP lose its future? Costa: "For three main reasons," says Costa. "Firstly, because here making politics from the Left is very difficult: one has a vacuum behind, a potentially strong and numerous base that is almost impossible to aggregate, especially without a close alliance with the unions. As a comparison, Joe Clark's Conservatives are supported by the economic and financial establishment. Secondly, the NDP saddled its war-horses - healthcare, pensions, workplace safety - and allowed the Liberals, always very capable of balancing the needs of the people with the desires of the establishment, to mount them. The Liberals were so good at it that Italians voted for them for years, despite the epic battles the NDP had waged for Italian workers."
And the third reason? "The NDP was unable to renovate itself," concludes Costa. "So here we are, in this generous and occasionally naive country that anyway manages to give its citizens the means to survive. But where the means are available it is easier to note that the ends may be lacking."

Publication Date: 2002-12-22
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2173