Fort McMurray Goes Supernova

Oilsands refinery in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo by Chad Young

VBS.tv, the online documentary arm of Vice Magazine run by Spike Jonze, has a thought-provoking documentary called Toxic Alberta available to view for free (in 15 segments, with some interruptions for ads). The film touches on the extreme environmental impact of tar sands operations; the burning of natural gas to reform bitumen into crude oil is responsible for a staggering 20% of all of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and this is set to rise as there are calls to quintuple output in the next decade.

However, the film also inadvertently exposes the crisis the boom towns face, in terms of managing a 9% population growth rate. Most cities struggle to deal with 2-3% growth; 9% would be crippling. (Imagine adding another 100,000 people to Montreal in a very short time.) Thousands of people — many of them Maritimers looking for work — have flocked to the towns of Fort McMurray and Fort Chipyewan. I’ve heard stories of people getting paid insane amounts of money — even fast food workers make $20 an hour — and thus everyone with some sort of skilled trade has headed west. The documentary bears this out, with one surveyor mentioning a $10k monthly paycheck.

The problem is that planning has lagged far behind. The influx of newcomers and lack of housing has left many in a quasi-homeless situation. On top of that, the enormous salaries have distorted the local economy; a one-bedroom apartment rents for $1800 a month, and a small house can cost upwards of $500,000. Developers are building everything from dormitory-style bunkhouses, to subsidized apartments. One developer, quoted in the film, says that ‘anyone making less than $70,000 here basically needs public assistance.’

When the boom is over — or if there’s a massive switch to renewables and energy efficiency — what will become of these towns?

Looking for Chinatown

“There’s no Chinatown in Quebec City. There’s never been one,” snapped a research assistant at the city archives. It sounded as if I wasn’t the first to come asking for information. “There were a handful of Chinese-owned stores in the lower city, but it was hardly a ‘Chinatown.’”

Had I been misled all these years? I had first heard about Quebec City’s former Chinatown in the NFB documentary Pâté Chinois. Articles mentioned it in Le Devoir and the Globe and Mail. I’d heard local Chinese reminiscing about it on the six o’clock news. Louisa Blair devotes a chapter to Quebec’s Chinatown in The Anglos.

Then there’s star playwright Robert Lepage, who staged a six-hour opus called La Trilogie des Dragons. It begins in a Lower Town parking lot where the kids, poised to dig to China, realize they don’t have to dig too deep to find it. They discover instead that memories of opium dens, mah-jongg, and Chinese laundries exist very close to the surface. “It used to be a Chinatown,” the play ends, “now it’s a parking lot.” Was it all just exaggeration, someone digging for a story? Well yes—and no.

The Chinese first began arriving on the West Coast during the 1850s gold rush. A second wave came in the 1870s, cheap labour for the cross-country railway, where they earned ten to twenty times what they could earn in Guangdong. The last spike in the CPR railway was driven in 1885, and a discriminatory Chinese head tax was implemented that same year. This made further immigration difficult. Anti-Chinese sentiment ran high and many landlords would not lease apartments to them. They banded together and created Chinatowns.

Some Chinese fled discrimination by coming east in the 1890s. A trickle made it to Quebec City, but most settled in larger cities. In 1911, there were 68 Chinese in Quebec City while 1,200 had settled in Montreal. Nevertheless, their presence was visible. Most ran laundries or restaurants.

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Where Latinos Speak Korean

Se habla español in LA’s Koreatown. Photo by Hunhee.

Multiculturalism is usually framed in terms of the relationship between immigrants and a “host society.” But what about the relationship between immigrants themselves? In Los Angeles’ sprawling Koreatown, a growing population of Latino immigrants is leading to a cultural and linguistic exchange that is unprecedented in recent American history.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal describes the trend: “At the Galleria, a large Korean supermarket here, store manager Yoonah Yoon greets Hispanic cashiers and bag boys each morning with a hearty ‘buenos dias’—’good morning’ in Spanish. The Latino workers, who make up more than half the store’s 162 employees, answer him with the equivalent greeting in Korean: ‘Ahn-nyung-hah-seh-yo.’”

Korean immigrants began settling along Wilshire Boulevard in the 1960s, gradually establishing a vast Korean neighbourhood that eventually became the epicentre of the world’s largest Korean community outside of Asia. Eventually, most of the neighbourhood’s Korean residents decamped for other neighbourhoods and suburbs around Los Angeles, motivated in no small part by the 1992 riots that targeted Korean-owned businesses above all. Over the course of the 1990s, Koreatown became home to a new wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Despite the area’s changing demographics, Koreatown remained the most important hub of commerce and culture for the Los Angeles Korean community. In fact, in recent years, Korean investment in the neighbourhood has increased, including the construction in 2001 of a $40-million Korean spa and a new Korean shopping mall.

That’s where things get interesting. Many of these Korean businesses draw their employees (and, in some cases, customers) from the surrounding area’s largely Latino population. The relationship is such that many Koreans business owners are learning Spanish—and many Latino workers are learning Korean.

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No Ching-Chong Here

“Yeah, but where are you really from?” It’s a question familiar to many Chinese-Canadians who grew up feeling torn between different cultures, identities and places. Tomorrow, seven young Montrealers of Chinese descent will share a roundtable discussion on what it means to be Chinese in a multicultural Canada: General Tao, Kung Fu, Ching-chong: Chinese Identity in a Multicultural Canada.

I met up with three of them last week at Magic Idea, a popular Chinatown café. Shuang Liu is a 19-year-old college student who is one of ten students allowed to skip her undergraduate studies and enroll straight into dentistry at McGill University in the fall. Sandra Lee is 26 and an environmental activist. Cedric Sam, also 26, is a web developer who runs Smurfmatic and the upstart subway-oriented restaurant review site Métro Boulot Resto (to which he has graciously allowed me to contribute). As we made introductions, a Jay Chou song came on and the café staff cranked up the stereo. We almost had to shout.

I started with the obvious question: why pick a title that plays so heavily on stereotypes? “The media plays such a huge role in how others see us,” Shuang answered. “When you think about Chinese food, you think about General Tao. When you think about a Chinese guy, you think he must do kung fu and talk like ‘Ching-chong ching-chong.’ The influence is huge and how I perceive myself is not really separate from that.”

Like many young Chinese-Canadians, Shuang has struggled to find her place in Canadian society. Born in Beijing, she immigrated with her family to ethnically homogenous Sherbrooke when she was two years old. (They later relocated to Quebec City, which isn’t any more diverse.) After a few years of being the only Asian kid on the playground, Shuang adopted a non-Chinese name, Melissa, to better blend in. It wasn’t until after her family had finally moved to more cosmopolitan Montreal that she decided to change it back. “It’s a name I’m really proud of. My parents happened to have the same [family] name and ‘Shuang’ sort of means ‘bringing together.’ It’s really beautiful,” she said.

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The Greeks of Tarpon Springs

Close to three major metro areas and thirty suburbs make up the collection of cities known as Tampa Bay. Starting with Apollo Beach to the south on the mainland, the arc of towns curves counter-clockwise through Brandon, Tampa, Dunedin, Clearwater, and finally ending with St. Petersburg on a spit of land in the Gulf of Mexico. They’re affable places, full of friendly people and a succession of strip malls in varying states of repair. The quality of life is high. The amount of hurricane hits has been surprisingly low. Still, with so much suburban development sandwiched into such a small area, it’s unavoidable that Tampa Bay—once the home of pirates and the Spanish explorers—has somehow faded to vanilla.

But life is not all beach condos and lattes. At eleven o’clock on Tampa Bay’s arc, there is a place where working fishing boats still bob daringly on choppy green water and everyone speaks… Greek? It’s a metropolitan suburb, but it’s also everything you’d expect from a place where people still dive for sea sponges for a living. The dining is unforgettably good, though it’s a stretch to call it “fine,” and you can pick up CDs of the hottest Hellenic pop stars before you leave town for the day. Welcome to Tarpon Springs.

Tarpon Springs has somewhere between 6 to 8,000 Greek-Americans living in its borders, which—incredibly—still only accounts for a quarter of its population. (The entire state of Florida is home to about 150,000 Greek-Americans.) Still, the cultural ties are so strong that Tarpon Springs is the smallest city in the nation with its own consulate. The Greek Orthodox community is still alive and thriving, and the town’s annual Epiphany festival is one of the largest of its kind anywhere in the United States.

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Are Canada’s Cities Becoming More Segregated?

“Mapped Presence” by blacqbook

According to Statistics Canada, Canada now has 254 “visible minority neighbourhoods”—neighbourhoods that have more than 30 percent of their population from a particular visible minority group—most of which are found in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. When this number was first revealed in 2004, many members of Canada’s mass media saw it as an indication that our cities are becoming racially segregated patchworks of ethnic enclaves and insular communities.

Some have used the number as a convenient way to raise questions about official multiculturalism. Last year, pollster and pundit Alan Gregg wrote in a Walrus essay that the rise of “ethnic enclaves” tells us that “Canada’s fabled mosaic is fracturing and that ethnic groups are self-segregating.” Later, he adds that “this growing sense of separateness can have troubling consequences for national identity.”

More recently, in a Le Devoir article on the 25th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the reporter Hélène Buzzetti rolled out the same numbers to question whether Charter-led multicultural policy might be undermining Canada’s social fabric. Could the rise of such enclaves ethniques be a sign of the “obliteration of Canadian society?” she asks.

But Buzzetti and Gregg, like many others, cite the “ethnic enclave” number without seeming to understand the demographics behind it. In fact, few people in the mass media have ever taken a close look at why the number of visible minority neighbourhoods has increased. (For one, nobody really seems to grasp that Statistics Canada’s “visible minority neighbourhoods” are not actually the same as ethnic enclaves.) The end result is that the media give the impression that Canadian cities are becoming more and more segregated when, in fact, the opposite is true.

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This is Where You Lived in 2006

New condo tower in fast-growing downtown Vancouver

The first round of data from Canada’s 2006 census was released yesterday morning; we now have an accurate update of city population trends across the country. (We’ll still have to wait for the juicier data on income, education, language, race, and immigration, however. They will be released at regular intervals over the next year.) Are there any surprises? No, not really. The cities we already knew were growing are indeed growing; the cities we already knew were stagnating or declining are doing just that, too. But, as always, the real story is in the details.

First, the broad sweep of things: Canada as a whole grew by 5.4 percent between 2001 and 2006, making it the fastest-growing G8 country. (By comparison, the United States grew by 5 percent, Japan grew by just 0.4 percent and Germany didn’t grow at all.) What makes this even more interesting is that two-thirds of Canada’s population growth comes from immigration; in the more fertile United States, most of it comes from natural increase.

Within the country, Toronto’s suburbs and exurbs are growing like crazy, as is almost every town and city in Alberta. Brampton, a suburb of Toronto, grew by a remarkable 33.3 percent as its population rose from 325,428 to 433,806. (Future data releases will probably reveal that most of this growth comes from international migration—from South Asia in particular.) That’s nothing compared to Okotoks, however: the town just south of Calgary posted a growth rate of 46.7 percent. Greater Calgary as a whole, meanwhile, grew by 13.4 percent, its population rocketing to nearly 1,100,000. Ottawa, watch out!

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The Age of Chinese Laundries

Chong Sing Laundry, Notre Dame Street

The Chinese laundry seems like such an inexplicable stereotype. References to them still exist—witness Abercrombie and Fitch’s infamous “Wong Brothers Laundry Service” t-shirt from several years back—yet Chinese laundries long ago vanished from the North American landscape. There are no indications today why Chinese people would ever be associated with the laundry trade.

Sixty years ago, the link was more evident. In 1949, Montreal was home to 231 Chinese laundries and they were a fixture of every neighbourhood and every commercial street in the city. Twenty years before that, the number was even higher: 405 Chinese laundries in a city with less than a million people.

Over at Coolopolis, Kristian and J.D. Gravenor—authors of the indispensable book Montreal: The Unknown City—have been digging up all sorts of great material on Montreal’s Chinese laundries, including a fascinating interactive map that charts the location of every single one of them. (The densest concentrations were in the east end of downtown, around the old Forum, near the Main and in Mile End.) These laundries—not to mention the very history of the local Chinese community—are an oft-overlooked facet of Montreal’s past.

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Gung Hay Fat Choy: Notes from Vancouver

Candy-apple pig’s heads in a chocolate shop in downtown Vancouver

For a Montrealer, visiting Vancouver in mid-February is eerie, at once a glimpse of the future and a visit to some alternate dimension. Fountains gurgle, people sit in sidewalk cafés and flowers are starting to bloom—it’s strange to experience this without having to pass through customs or change currency. No wonder why Vancouver is seen by many Canadians as something akin to our own Hawaii.

It seems fitting, then, that the weather was so springlike as Vancouver rang in the Lunar New Year, also known in Chinese as the Spring Festival. More than anywhere else in North America, the Lunar New Year here is mainstream. A decade ago, it was an essentially ethnic celebration, like in most other cities. Now, it has been fully integrated into the cultural and economic life of Vancouver, just one indication that this city is becoming like Hawaii in more ways than just as a destination for escape. Like the American state, Vancouver is transforming into a multicultural, majority-Asian society.

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Disneyopolis

New development in Orlando. Photo by David Burnett

“Everything happening to America today is happening here,” writes T.D. Allman in the latest issue of National Geographic. He’s talking about Orlando, the sprawling urban region in Central Florida that is most famously home to Disney World. For Allman, Orlando represents the next generation of American cities, a vast and diffuse cornubation that is truly a manufactured landscape. His article is an intriguing and unsettling look at the future of urban America.

Allman starts by sketching a brief history of Disney World, without which, a local saying goes, “the Orlando region would be called Ocala, a rival town up the road.” It is a history as murky as the water in Orlando’s sludge-filled lakes, made possible by a “sweetheart deal with the state legislature” that places the Magic Kingdom “above and beyond the law.” State safety inspectors cannot examine Disney’s rides and the people who live on Disney’s property—in the faux-historic subdivision of Celebration, or in time-share condos—have no say in how it is managed. Everything about Disney World is carefully designed and controlled, a legacy of Walt Disney’s consternation over the dreary suburban landscape of motels and strip malls that quickly engulfed his original Disneyland in California.

Visiting or living in the Magic Kingdom is an experience beyond reality. In a way, the same can be said of Orlando. Allman certainly makes his case. “The most telling theme park in Orlando isn’t even Disney’s,” he writes.

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My Heimishe Bakery

Every couple of days, I walk to the corner and buy a few things at Cheskie, my heimishe bakery. Of course it’s not actually my heimishe bakery—it’s owned by Cheskie Lebowitz, an affable Hasidic Jew from New York—but I’ve gone there enough over the years to feel a sense of proprietary pride.

As its name would suggest, Cheskie is first and foremont a Jewish bakery that specializes in kosher treats. Its challah bread is expensive but divine. So are the rugelach, which come in four varieties—chocolate, poppyseed, vanilla and cinammon—and are best eaten layer by layer, the better to contrast the crispy exterior with the soft, sweet layers inside. Seasonal sweets like hamantaschen are also exceptionally good. My favourite baked good from Cheskie is not particularly Jewish at all, however: the black and white cookie. A staple of every bakery between New York and Boston, these flat frosted cakes (made famous in the Seinfeld episode “The Dinner Party,” when Jerry vomits because the flavours “aren’t getting along”) are inexplicably absent from Canada. It took a New Yorker like Cheskie to rectify this unfortunate situation.

Although Cheskie is not a place to linger—it’s quite small and there are no seats—part of what makes it interesting is the clientele. About half of the customers are Hasidic, making this bakery a mainstay in Montreal’s largest Hasidic neighbourhood: Mile End and Outremont, home to 6,000 of Montreal’s 11,000 Hasidim.

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Hérouxville and the Big City

Over the past year, Montrealers have been subjected to a steady flow of stories on “reasonable accomodation,” a catchphrase that refers to the accomodation of religious minority needs in public institutions. Like other major Canadian cities, Montreal is very diverse. It has a long history of intercultural relations, so reasonable accommodation seemed, well, reasonable.

But then something happened: some media began interpreting reasonable accommodation as an attack on Quebec’s values and identity. Last year’s Supreme Court decision to allow a Sikh boy to wear a kirpan—a ceremonial dagger—to school, as long as it was permanently encased in a wooden sheath, was met with almost universal furor from the francophone press. Columnists saw it as an attack on Quebec’s cherished secularism. Then came news that men had been excluded from a prenatal class in Park Extension attended mostly by Hindu and Muslim women. The breaking point was a minor controversy that erupted over the Mile End YMCA’s decision to frost the windows of its exercise room after concerns from the adjacent Hassidic synagogue that its young male students were being distracted by the sight of Spandex-clad women. That set off a storm, with the YMCA affair being used as an excuse to dredge up every conceivable concern over immigration and ethnicity. Last week, the storm reached its peak with what seemed like a joke: a headline in La Presse that read, “It is forbidden to stone women!”

It wasn’t a joke. The people of Hérouxville had spoken.

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A New “Chinatown” Grows in Montreal

On a cold January night, Fabian Jean and his mother, Lily, were enjoying a warming bowl of tong shui (sweet dessert soup) at the Chinese restaurant Prêt à Manger on Ste. Catherine St. West.

“I find it’s actually a lot better than the Chinese restaurants in Chinatown,” Fabian said.

“It’s so hard to park in Chinatown, too,” added his mother, who was born in Hong Kong, but moved to Montreal “too long ago to remember.”

Lily Jean (the name, which is Toisanese, is pronounced like the jean in blue jeans) and Montreal-born Fabian, an artist who lives on the Plateau, have seen the area west of Concordia University revitalized by students and immigrants.

“It was a struggling part of Ste. Catherine St. for many years,” Fabian said. “It’s refreshing to see a bit of life here.”

The transformation goes beyond Ste. Catherine. In the last few years, thousands of students, immigrants and business owners from Asia have turned the west end of downtown, from Guy St. to Atwater Ave., into a sort of Chinatown West.

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Typographic Tokyo

Korean snack stand in Tokyo. Photo by Yohei Morita

My wife and I lived in Tokyo from 1992 till 1998. We spent a week here in 2000 and I am now back here for a week in 2007. It is a tantalising experience—it seems familiar in so many ways and yet subtly different, like a Star Trek teleportation that did not quite fully work!

Before, as a foreigner in Tokyo, I rarely drew as much attention as I did when I travelled outside Tokyo. This time, though, I am really struck by how many people here have grown up used to seeing foreigners. We no longer seem to be an issue. People no longer express surprise at a white person speaking Japanese—it is simply seen as the common language of communication, much as French is in Montreal.

I have been particularly struck as to how I now see signs in both Chinese and Korean. Over and over, I have been told that co-hosting the soccer world cup with Korea broke the ice between the two historic rivals. Noticeable Chinese and Korean investment in and around Tokyo may also be part of it.

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