Paul Tomkowicz, Switchman

I always wonder about the street cleaners I see around Hong Kong, small and weathered by sun and age, who sweep the pavement with coarse straw brooms. Their wide-rimmed hats, like the kind traditionally seen on Tanka “boat people,” seem oddly anachronistic next to their reflective safety vests and surgical masks. Who are they? Where do they live? How did they find themselves on a path that led to days and nights spent brushing the gutters free of debris?

I wonder if anyone thought the same when they saw Paul Tomkowicz, a Polish immigrant who worked as a street railway switchman fifty-five years ago. In the bitter air of midwinter Winnipeg, his job was to clear and defrost the city’s frozen streetcar tracks. In a beautifully-shot 1952 National Film Board documentary, we observe him as he works, silently, to clear the tracks, his ghostly frozen breath illuminated by the kerosene lamp he keeps at his feet.

It seems a lonely, anonymous life, but Tomkowicz doesn’t seem to mind it too much. He seems resigned to it more than anything, if only because the alternative, for him at least, would have been far worse. “Winnipeg’s alright,” he says. “In Winnipeg, you can go in the street, daytime, nighttime, nobody bothers you. My sister wrote me from my village in Poland. The soldiers came in the night. Murdered 29 people. My brother. My brother’s wife. Why’d they do that?”

Half-Truths and Reflections on Home

If it hasn’t yet been made clear to my regular readers, I’m on the verge of moving to Hong Kong, maybe for only a year, but likely for much longer than that. What this means, of course, is that I’m going to leave Montreal. (I would take my beloved city with me, but the South China Sea is a poor substitute for the Saint Lawrence.) Lately, as I contemplate my impending move, I have been coming to terms with the memories I will leave behind in the city I have, over the past six years, deliberately fashioned as my home.

At night, when I lie awake, unable to sleep, my mind floats through the laneways I have strolled at night, past the mountain, its cross, the silos on the Lachine Canal, the sign blinking Farine Five Roses and down to the St. Henri bedroom in which I first lived as a new Montrealer. I think of those first nights I spent here, listening, as I lay in bed, to the sound of trains coupling in the distance. I think of the six years of memories and experiences, all of them linked inextricably to the life and landscape of the city around me.

Guy Maddin, the maker of eccentric films best known for his 2003 movie, The Saddest Music in the World, has a somewhat different relationship with his hometown. While I left the city of my birth at the age of 17, in search of a place that better suited my outlook and personality, Maddin has spent all 52 years of his life in Winnipeg, one of the coldest and most isolated cities on the continent. Now he has made a movie—ostensibly a documentary—about the city in which he has spent his life.

“Always winter, always sleepy… Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg. Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg,” he intones in the opening sequence of My Winnipeg, which is currently playing in Montreal at the Cinéma du Parc as well as at various arthouses and small cinemas around North America. In his inimitable style, drawing heavily from the aesthetic of silent films and the kitschy melodrama of b-movies, Maddin creates an image of a city propelled by drowsy inertia, its inhabitants’ attempts at escape foiled by the heavy pull of memory and nostalgia.

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Indo-Fijians, Filipinos and Romanians

Winnipeg: it’s a long way from the Philippines. Photo by Jezz

I’ve been pouring over the new 2006 census data on language and immigration released by Statistics Canada last week. Nationally, all of the attention is being paid to the fact that one-fifth of all Canadians are foreign-born, one of the highest rates in the world. Here in Montreal, the focus is on both a surge in immigration (especially from North Africa and China) and the changing linguistic makeup of the city.

Francophones — people whose mother tongue is French — are now a minority on Montreal Island, thanks mostly to high levels of immigration from non-francophone countries. The number of anglophones, meanwhile, has increased for the first time in 30 years. Arabic, Spanish and Chinese have become the fastest-growing non-official languages in Montreal.

But enough with the big picture news; it has already been dissected ad infinitum in the media. What interests me are some of the odd, surprising and overlooked trends in immigration that are having an impact on Canada’s cities.

Indo-Fijians in Vancouver

Looking through the census data, I wasn’t surprised to see that nearly 17 percent of Vancouver’s population now speaks a Chinese language, and I certainly wasn’t surprised to see that China and India were its top sources of immigrants. I was a bit surprised, however, to note that there are more than 17,200 immigrants from Fiji who live in Vancouver. Most of them arrived before 1991, but enough came between 2001 and 2006 (1,670) to make the tiny Pacific island Vancouver’s fifteenth-largest source of new immigrants, after Mexico and before Afghanistan.

People from Fiji have been immigrating to Canada since the 1960s and most of them have landed in Vancouver. The vast majority are Indo-Fijian and they have a distinct sense of cultural identity, not unlike other immigrants of Indian descent from countries like Guyana.

Filipinos in Winnipeg

Winnipeg is not normally a major draw for immigrants, yet it has become one of the principal centres of Filipino immigration to Canada. Winnipeg is home to Canada’s third-largest Filipino population despite being the eighth-largest city (even then, at 694,000 inhabitants, it has only a couple of thousand more people than Hamilton). 6,885 Filipino immigrants arrived in Winnipeg between 2001 and 2006, more than three times as many people as the city’s second-largest source of new immigrants, India. One-fifth of all immigrants in Winnipeg, or roughly 25,000 people, come from the Philippines.

The reason why so many Filipino immigrants settle in Winnipeg is obvious: friends and family who are already there. That’s the case for most immigrants across Canada, whatever their origin and wherever they choose to live. But what is especially notable is that Winnipeg has maintained such a large Filipino community despite continually losing people — both native- and foreign-born — to other provinces.

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I Hate Winnipeg

When John K. Samson, lead singer of the Weakerthans, croons “I hate Winnipeg” in his song “One Great City!”, he’s merely excavating the civic self-loathing that seems buried beneath the skin of every lifelong Winnipegger. Beset by a sluggish economy, high crime, mortally cold winters and muggy, mosquito-ridden summers, not to mention complete and utter isolation, residents of Manitoba’s capital can be forgiven from the occasional bout of cheerlessness. But you know, all of the things that make Winnipeg a nominally bad place also make it exceptionally interesting: here is a city with great architecture and kitschy bungalows, a sumptuous history of immigration, organized crime, would-be Bolshevik revolutions and all of the strange stuff you would expect from a city more than 1,300 kilometres from anywhere of real signifiance.

That’s where l’Atelier national du Manitoba comes in. Over the past couple of years, this two-man crew has been drawing from Winnipeg’s cultural history for its art, including experimental films and street art. “[ANM] founders Walter Forsberg and Matthew Rankin have made it their duty to dig up and preserve the most ignored, maligned and downright despised aspects of their province’s cultural history,” declared THIS Magazine in a profile of the duo. “Basically, all of the cultural production of Winnipeg is despised by the citizens who live here, vengefully disposed of and rejected by its own people,” explained Rankin. “Which is kind of beautiful, in fact.” The ANM’s films deal with such things as the birth and death of the Winnipeg Jets; its poster art includes posters bearing the likeness of Guess Who vocalist and Winnipeg folk hero Burton Cummings.

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