Stand on the platform of Toronto’s Bloor Street subway station at rush hour and you will witness an incredible medley of tongues and ethnicities, occupations and cultures. It’s a pageant fitting of a Walt Whitman poem and a uniquely multicultural spectacle, arguably unrivalled by any other city anywhere. It’s a city with the third-largest foreign-born population in the world and the most diverse. But much of Canada bristles with resent: It’s a messy, confusing and self-important place, replete with smog, strained infrastructure and urban sprawl.
Yet addressing such issues is the very essence of this exciting experiment: Such a truly global society is what Toronto is striving to become and what, in my typically big-headed Torontonian opinion, all of Canada must also seek to become.
The anti-immigrant rhetoric of Dumont’s ADQ, especially with their success in Monday’s Québec election, is scary. When the pur laine chant “le Québec aux Québécois” on St. Jean Baptiste day, they’re not talking about Quebeckers named Maclean, Silverman or Kayssi. But one need not search far in English Canada either to find such redneck sentiments. These are tribalist roadblocks to Canada’s future.
Through Canada’s history, our institutions integrated us, making this country a viable proposition: from the Canadian Pacific Railway to the CBC to the TransCanada pipeline, from the Geological Survey of Canada’s exploration of hinterland resources to our Bank of Canada’s successful monetary policy, from equalization and unemployment insurance to universal health care and the Canada Pension Plan, from official bilingualism and multiculturalism to the Constitution’s patriation, this nation was made real by good government and good institutions. In all the aforementioned, this university made pivotal contributions. During the era when the majority of Canada’s population was rural, Queen’s was the “farmboy university”—a reference to our role in educating those of modest means but high industry and ability. Queen’s was the university for students from rural communities with then-newcomer surnames like Deutsch, Ellis and Mackintosh. They came to learn politics, engineering and economics, and through those disciplines would shape Canada’s future.
Today, Canada’s population is overwhelmingly urban. Where newcomers once sought opportunity on the prairies, current immigration is concentrated in three metropolitan centres. The Melnyks, Schwabls and Abelas are now third-generation Canadians, and it is the Manhases, Jiwans and Nguyens who are the first generations of their families to attend university in Canada.
This is the reality for which Queen’s must reinvent itself. In previous periods, Queen’s was dedicated to Canada’s great national projects: settling and linking the frontier, building the welfare state, and the civil rights transformation. Today there is another urgent national challenge: Making our cities work—that is, enabling them to be sustainable, prosperous, equitable and integrated communities.
Universities must promote scholarship and assume some leadership towards mending urban infrastructure, rehabilitating brownfields, combating poverty on city streets, ensuring community health, and surmounting cities’ intense energy and waste challenges.
But successful cities must be true communities. A recent study by University of Toronto sociologist Jeffrey Reitz observed that recent immigrants feel much less integrated than did earlier cohorts. Our metropolises feature increasingly segregated ethnic enclaves, and various studies show increasing employment challenges for newcomers. Ours cannot be a divided society but neither should we conceive of integration as assimilation.
More than ever, universities must assume a role in integrating Canadian society. Indeed, differential access to education and consequent exclusion from life opportunities is the surest route to the Paris banlieues. Universities should facilitate economic mobility and provide a nexus for social integration. It’s no secret that Queen’s at present is too homogeneous to serve this purpose honestly. We cannot be a national institution if we do not embrace what our nation is becoming. The Henry Report’s “culture of whiteness” assertion was inflammatory but not entirely off the mark. This is not to allege conscious racism or to advocate affirmative action, but rather to provoke some tardy if thorny self-scrutiny. Engaging the world is a great idea. With an increasingly integrated globe, Canada will only thrive if we become a truly global society. But that cosmopolitanism won’t come from sending well-heeled students to trendy overseas schools for pricey post-grad degrees. Instead, we’ll build that global society by integrating our ethnically diverse communities. The world is right here in Canada, and that’s who Queen’s must engage.
—Grant Bishop is a geological engineering graduate and will complete a degree in economics in May. He was Queen’s Rector from 2004 to 2006 and Engineering Society President in 2003-04.
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