Author's note: I started this topic on another thread. But after posting it, I realized that I could NOT modify the article. The modify feature disappears after a while. Since posting my earlier write-up, I have vastly expanded on this topic, edited the language, and included links to various newspaper articles on this subject. I have spent several hours of my personal time to prepare this write-up, as a service to this community. I believe, there is great value addition in sharing this revised write-up with fellow immigrants on this forum, and see what they think about this topic as well as to understand their experiences.
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I have been living in Canada as a Permanent Resident since last 5 years. During this time, I have experienced discrimination first hand, both in offices of large banks and reputable consulting companies as well as in the daily walks of life. Discrimination and racism is rampant in Canada, sometimes overt and often covert. When it’s the latter, you have no recourse, because you can't point your finger at it and complain. You can only feel its impact but can't understand how it happened because the events leading upto the impact are engineered behind the scenes. Let me give you a few recent examples from my life in Canada.
Racial stereotyping
I was at the GAP store at Eaton centre in Toronto one evening, during Christmas time last year, looking for a pair of jeans. Since I was on my way home from work, I was dressed in a suit and a tie. I had barely spent 3 minutes in the store, when one white girl approaches me and asks where the women's section is. I politely tell her that I am just a shopper like her and I don't know. Then, another white guy in his 20's approaches me and asks me about a certain kind of jeans. Again, I express my inability to help him. Next, another white woman in her 30's approaches me and asks me about some other kind of dress. All of this happened to me within a span of 10 minutes in rapid succession. I felt really disgusted and left the store. In the sub-conscious mind of caucasians, a visible minority is always seen as a worker, salesman or some kind of service provider. Why can't they think of me as another shopper just like them? This has happened to me many times in other stores as well, such as the HUDSON BAY store in Eaton centre. And invariably, the pattern is the same. I always have white people (it’s never another non-white person) coming upto me and mistaking me for being a store employee. In the minds of many white middle-class shoppers, visible minority equals worker class, who are meant to serve them. And examples of white people being rude to me on the street are too many to cite.
Minorities are type-cast as worker-material as opposed to leader-material. While I was employed with Bank of Montreal as a full time employee, after working there for a couple of years, and being rated as a solid performer in the annual appraisal and earning over a dozen performance awards; I applied to over 35 internal jobs for which I was eligible, across various groups/departments of BMO for promotion to the next grade. I was relatively new to Canada back then, having been here for only 2 years. Call it my naiveté, I thought, why not me? After all, I was well qualified with several degrees, diplomas and certifications to my credit. My immediate manager, a white female, who was in the Senior Manager grade level that I aspired to move into, did not like my ambitions. During my conversations with her, when I told her that I was interested in growing internally within BMO, she said, I can always apply and see what happens. But she also told me that I should compare myself with less fortunate immigrants who happen to be highly qualified but drive taxis in Toronto. She said, atleast I was better off than them, thereby dropping ample hints that I should not try to aspire for anything more than what I had. I suspect that she sabotaged all my chances of getting any interview for the jobs I had applied to. A few months later, when a new CIO took over and wanted to reorganize his group and asked for across-the-board staff reductions, I was conveniently laid off. In Canada, it’s dangerous for any visible minority or aboriginal to demonstrate ambition. Forget about growth, you could lose what you have.
My experience is not unique in this respect, this happens to many minorities across Canada. It’s a well known fact that minorities are under-represented in leadership positions across all sectors of the Canadian economy. They are kept suppressed at the bottom layers of the pyramid. On the rare occasion, when minorities get into a leadership position, they neither mentor nor lend a helping hand to genuinely meritorious fellow minorities. They are scared that they could be seen as parochial, and they lack self-confidence. So they often try to over compensate by being extra-harsh on fellow minorities and hiring and promoting white Canadians. In sharp contrast, I have observed that white Canadians who hail from a certain community (for instance; Italian, Jewish, Irish) feel quite comfortable hiring fellow white Canadians whom they might have met in social situations such as their Church or Community Association. The inability of visible minorities to form professional networks and lend each other a helping hand is a contributing factor for their current situation. All five tier-1 Canadian banks, which are headquartered in Toronto, a city with a huge visible minority population, seem to have gargantuan challenges in finding qualified visible minority candidates to staff their ranks at the Senior Manager and above levels. I hear, the situation is no different in other industrial sectors. What is this, if not a kleptocracy, where a privileged few, who happened to win an ovarian lottery, have organized themselves in such a manner so as to engage in a form of corruption that increases the personal wealth and political power of their own kind, at the expense of the wider population, with the pretense of honest service. We should drop this farcical pretence of being a tolerant, multi-cultural society and come to accept the reality, that in some aspects, Canada is no different from the kleptocratic and dictatorial regimes found in the African continent. At the cost of sounding harsh, I have to admit that visible minorities and aboriginals are second class citizens in Canada who count for little in the milieu of this country.
Canada is a low context culture
I have worked and travelled in Asian countries where you get a warm feeling and a sense of friendliness when you talk to other people. But when you talk to white Canadians, conversations tend to be very transactional. Asian people are likely to perceive white Canadians as being very cold and unfriendly. At first, I attributed such behaviour to racism and their inherent dislike for visible minorities. However, while studying at a college in Toronto, I was forced to correct and revise my stance after I came across a concept called, “High context and low context cultures”. You can read about it on this wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-context_cultures
The differences in behaviour between Asian and North American groups can be attributed to the differences in cultures and that does not necessarily constitute racism. From the perspective of the Caucasians, they are behaving in an absolutely normal manner, even though Asians might find that behaviour abnormal. Let me give you an example. White Canadian colleagues (a subordinate and his manager) will socialize one day and on the next day, the manager might fire his subordinate, either due to performance issues or due to lack of work. In either case, the subordinate will be given 10 minutes to pack his belongings and then the manager will walk him out of the building. Thereafter, that manager and all other colleagues will cease to have all further contact with that subordinate. This could happen to you even if you worked there for over 10 years. Now, as an Asian, I find this kind of behaviour very bizarre. How can you severe your relationship abruptly with someone with whom you socialized everyday? In Asian countries, allowing others to save face is considered critical. In the same layoff/termination scenario, after all options at securing alternate employment for that subordinate have run out, the manager will likely have a discussion with the subordinate in a private setting. Thereafter, he will be given a working notice of atleast one month, during which his workload will be minimal and he will be allowed time to transition out of that organization. Often, large companies will ask their vendors, on whom they have substantial influence, to absorb such employees. Before his departure, the manager or his colleagues might even organize a farewell party and give him a small gift. Humiliating someone publicly is just not done in Asia, but this is par for the course in North America. One thing is for sure. Tolerance levels are very low in North America and things tend to go downhill very rapidly in any relationship, whether it’s at work or at home. That explains why divorce rates are near 50% in North America while it’s less than 1% in most Asian countries. In North America, I have noticed that white couples are forever profusely apologizing for every little thing and go to elaborate lengths (including PDA) to profess their love - something that is never done in Asian countries - because couples in North America are acutely aware of the low tolerance threshold in this culture, they try to compensate by engaging in ostentatious demonstration of their love and commitment to their partners. In most cases, Asian couples who don’t like each other separate rather than divorcing, and often come together on occasion for the sake of their children. Pressure from the family and peers as well as positive role models (in the form of low divorce rates all around them) keep couples from breaking up, which creates stability in the society and leads to higher emotional satisfaction. From the perspective of Asians, caucasians are as cold to one another as they are to visible minorities – so this is not racism, they are just being themselves. My experience of living in North America has furthered my understanding of the finer nuances of discrimination and sharpened my emotional intelligence. I am able to read between the lines, gauge intent and determine a course of action accordingly. In Asia, people tend to be verbose and clearly articulate how they feel. A loud outburst or a spat at home or work, does not necessarily mark the end of a relationship. It’s just a way of communication and a form of expressing ones frustration. In North America, such an outburst or spat can often mark the end of a relationship. Visible minorities, who are so used to explicit communication in their home countries, need to learn how to interpret unspoken and unwritten signals from Caucasians and decode them in order to take appropriate action. Workplace communication is often surreptitious and covert, and if you are not plugged in or do not interpret situations correctly and on time, your goose will pretty soon be cooked. I sometime think, that what is often perceived as racism and discrimination by minorities is also an inability on their part to interpret and decode seemingly cryptic Caucasian communications. Communication is not just about verbal facility with the language. Most Asians, especially those from former British colonies read, write and speak well in English. But it’s their inability or limited ability to gauge and respond to complex non-verbal communications/cues in North America, that holds them back at the workplace and in social situations. Having said all this, I will also say that in many situations in Canada, I can clearly see that there is an intent to discriminate on the part of white Canadians. Any perceived discrimination from the vantage point of visible minorities due to inadvertent cultural misunderstandings between both groups can and should easily be condoned. But it’s the deliberate sabotage and treachery that bothers me the most.
Rampant workplace discrimination across Canada
I have worked in 2 large, reputable banks (BMO, RBC) here in Toronto as a full time employee. At BMO, my position was eliminated along with dozens of others (mostly visible minorities) when a new CIO joined and wanted to bring in his own team. At RBC, my job was terminated after exactly one year because my manager said, I escalated about colleagues and thereby spoiled my relationship with them and hence I could not work with them anymore. In both cases, I had a white manager who did not like me. In both cases, my managers were less qualified than me, and had the same level of industry experience as myself and were my age. In both cases, I felt they were competing with me and felt insecure. In both banks, I faced rude, hostile and uncooperative behaviour from white employees who would gang up against me and snitch on my back to my white manager, who conveniently believed them. On the rare occasion that I complained about white employees, no one wanted to believe me. But when they complained about me, the effect was instantaneous. If you are working as a lower level employee at the clerical level or as an assistant, chances are, no one will bother you. But the moment you reach middle management, that's where the competition begins. I was shocked to see that all the employees at Senior Manager and above levels were white. I once had an opportunity to look at the trading floor in the capital markets division of BMO, located at First Canadian Place. It was a sea of white wherever I turned my head! All well paying jobs in Canada are cornered by Caucasians, and they make no apologies about it. Most of the visible minorities are given lower paying jobs at lower rungs in operations (back office) or technology, and that's how banks are able to justify that they meet the employment equity standards. Visible minorities suffer from high levels of involuntary attrition, poor job satisfaction, get poor reviews in appraisals and don't have much career progression. It’s quite common to see them stagnating at the same level for several decades, and if you asked them, they are actually grateful to even be able to keep their jobs in Canada, let alone get promoted. In many meetings inside those banks, I was often the only visible minority within the room, all other participants would be white. And when I enter into the room, often, no one would acknowledge my presence, as if I was a persona non-grata. When I make requests for information/resources etc, often white colleagues will procrastinate, delay or deny those requests; which was effectively a form of social ostracization. Most of the white Canadians who work in large corporations tend to be conservative. And this is the same set of people who are courted by the right wing political groups in Canada. It’s no wonder that the attitudes, behaviours and mindsets they exhibit in the workplace are often an extension of how they think, act and behave in their private life outside of work. Canadian organizations are a microcosm of the Canadian society. Therefore, visible minority immigrants in Canada should expect to be discriminated against in the workplace in the same manner, just as they are subjected to hostile behaviour in their daily walks of life. What you get on the outside is what you get on the inside as well. Those hostile behaviours tend to directly impact visible minorities in terms of not being hired for jobs, getting fired for flimsy reasons, not getting promoted, being exploited in terms of salary etc.
Visible minority immigrants face a triple whammy in Canada
When visible minorities lose their jobs in Canada; they are forced to confront a triple whammy while trying to rejoin the workforce: (a) discrimination from recruiters and hiring managers, which makes it very difficult to find another job, with the added stigma of being unemployed now being conveniently used to exclude their application from the interview pool (b) having to operate in a small oligopolistic market with only a few companies in every sector, which limits the number of opportunities available. For instance; there are only 5 banks, 3 telecom companies, 2 or 3 large insurance companies etc (c) unlike white Canadians who usually inherit from their parents (money, house etc), visible minorities who are new immigrants to Canada do not have any sort of financial cushion. They also don’t have any kind of community support from friends and relatives because most new immigrants are in the survival mode, and everyone is trying to fend for themselves, and hence not in a position to help other members in their community. In addition, most visible minorities are afraid of being seen as being parochial, which causes them to over-compensate by keeping fellow visible minorities at arms-length, especially in work related situations. They are embarrassed of their under-developed or developing country origins. That causes them to behave in strange ways such as not advocating for or recommending fellow minorities for positions in their companies, lest they be seen as clannish and by extension being un-canadian. The visible minority community is also very divided because this is a very heterogenous group. I have not only witnessed but have also been a victim of another phenomenon within visible minority ethnic groups – that of outright hostility with fellow minorities from the same ethnic group. I have seen fellow visible minorities from my home country being hostile to me at work, in a bid to curry favour and ingratiate themselves with white managers. In fact, I lost my job in RBC mainly due to the snitching of a fellow minority from my home country. Higher and denser populations combined with scarce resources in Asia promotes a fierce sense of competition in every field, and by extension, a culture of achievement orientation. But the downside of that culture is that Asians are poor collaborators – causing them to compete for short term gains, where they should have been collaborating for long term success. In Canada, Asians tend to compete against each other at work. I don’t blame them. They are only doing what their culture has taught them back home. Due to aforementioned reasons, a visible minority losing his job is not the same as a white Canadian losing his job. The impact in the case of visible minorities is very severe and often long-lasting. With no support structure available to help them, many resort to government assistance to make ends meet. White Canadians often perceive this as reluctance on the part of visible minorities to rejoin the workforce. Indeed, their collective ignorance and animosity has led the federal conservative government to reverse social programs that have been introduced as a safety net over the course of several decades. A detailed analysis by Toronto Star explains this very well:
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/12/09/conservatives_dismantling_social_programs_built_over_generations.html
Such reversals tend to hurt the weakest sections of the society. The world over, Canada was known for being compassionate and taking care of the less fortunate sections of our society, which includes white people living below the poverty line, aboriginals, refugees, disabled people, homeless people etc. The adverse effect of these reversals will soon manifest itself in the form of higher crime rates, recidivism, suicide rates, unemployment, greater social turmoil, a general sense of dissatisfaction and unhappiness all around.
The colour of your skin is the dividing line for opportunity in Canada
Discrimination begins at the recruitment stage in Canada. Most visible minorities with non-Christian, foreign-sounding names don't even get invited for interviews. Most of the HR recruiters are white, so they tend to look for prospective employees who are like them. Even if a visible minority gets across those hoops, they tend to get eliminated at the interview stages, where they are invited just so that employers can demonstrate that they have been fair to everyone. But the hiring managers who usually tend to be white, eventually end up choosing a fellow white candidate. In one egregious case, a white female HR recruiter at CIBC interviewed me on phone on 3 different occasions, forgetting each time, that she spoke to me earlier. After each interview, the next day, she would email me saying that they have decided to move ahead with other candidates. I highly suspect that she was using me (a minority) as part of the pool, just to play safe, and satisfy employment equity rules. This article in the Globe and Mail titled, “Ontario now the worst place for educated immigrants looking for work” highlights how bad the problem is.
http://globalnews.ca/news/1480102/unemployments-up-for-canadas-most-educated-immigrants/
If you think, volunteering on boards of non-profits as a Director would be easy, where they don't pay anything, think again. Boards of large non-profits are like cozy private clubs for white Canadians. While non-profits don't pay anything, white Canadians do like to socialize with other people who are like them. So they hire only fellow whites for these unpaid board positions. After trying very hard, I got onto the board of one large non-profit (with 200+ employees) where all Board members were white. So I was essentially a "sympathy hire". Whenever I attend any meetings with the Executive Director/CEO or other board members, I keep getting told how much Toronto has changed since last few decades in terms of demographics. They are nostalgic about the bygone era, and for what might have been. I keep quiet, nodding my head and smile nervously, just trying to play along. I don't know how else I could respond to such ackward comments. I think the underlying sub-text that they want to convey is, "you should be grateful that we let you in here, you don't really belong in such elite company".
Most white Canadians in banks say, that visible minorities have cultural adjustment challenges, a euphemism for being a visible minority and hence, not deserving of higher positions and nicer treatment. Friends, nothing has changed from the days of slave plantations in North America that were owned by white people. Visible minorities are still perceived as slaves, the worker class, who are meant to serve their white over-lords. In fact, those of you who read American history will know that Britishers in US (US was a British colony) rebelled against the ruling British government. They asserted, "no taxation without representation in British parliament". And then, a war broke out between the British rebels (now known as Americans) and the British government. The British government lost the war; the rebels won, with some help from the French government, and went on to declare independence from the British. Now, at that point in time, some British citizens living in USA were disgusted by the victory of rebels because they were still loyal to the British monarch. So they left the US in protest, and immigrated to Canada. Today's Anglo-Canada mostly comprises of those whose ancestors were loyal to the British monarch. When they came to Canada, they carried with them; the prejudices, negative attitudes, bias and the airs of being a landed aristocracy; and passed those attitudes and behaviours to successor generations. Back then, white British citizens were allowed to keep slaves. They harassed the original inhabitants of this land – the aboriginals - and tried to "civilize" them by imprisoning them in residential schools. The abuses that aboriginals underwent at the hands of the British immigrants in Canada are well documented. Later, they found that they could import hard working Chinese people to work as labourers to build rail roads - hundreds of them died laying explosives to clear the hills and rocks. They met this fate, after paying a hefty head tax to the Canadian government for the privilege of being allowed to enter and work as labourers in Canada. Much later in the mid 1960's, they started importing all Asians, mainly to work in labour intensive industries. So the history of Asian immigration in Canada is very recent. A country whose composition was so homogenous for much of its history, suddenly finds it difficult to come to terms with this altered reality.
African slaves on cotton plantations have now been replaced with visible minorities working in other forms of enterprise. And cotton plantations have lost their relevance, because textile production no longer occurs in North America, that has shifted to Asian countries where yarn, fabric and finished products can be produced cheaply and quickly using local Asian labourers. The nature of the North American economy has also seen a radical shift from being a manufacturing economy to a services-oriented economy. As a result, apart from the lower level Asian labourers who are required to work in the labour-intensive industries (such as food and restaurant industry, agriculture, forestry/logging, construction, manufacturing etc) Canada has also been importing knowledge workers from Asia. These are highly qualified and skilled workers with university education and backgrounds in business, engineering, accounting, math, science etc. They are now being used to staff the bottom layers of the services economy. Often, they are under-paid and over-worked, and exploited. While I was employed with the Canadian banking industry, it was not uncommon to see Ph.D degree holders from Canadian universities, who were of Asian origin, working as low level Analysts or Programmers (entry level jobs), making way much lower than their true worth. And I also saw several white Canadians who were working as VPs, Directors and Senior Managers, with education no more than a Canadian high school diploma or a 2 year diploma from a Canadian college such as Seneca college, George Brown college etc. If some white employee had a BA degree in Philosophy from a little known institution like Athabasca University, that person would go on to scale the ladder like crazy and would be considered over-qualified and treated with great respect and deference due to his/her high education! My experience and observations on the ground, working in large Canadians companies squared with what I read much later in the media. Macleans published a remarkable story titled, “Why the world’s best and brightest struggle to find jobs in Canada - Why do skilled immigrants often fare worse here than in the U.S. and U.K.?” Please read this story on the below link:
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/land-of-misfortune/
Colour blind, we are not
Let me cite one specific example to prove that discrimination in Canada is all about skin pigmentation - not intellect, education, skills, cultural assimilation or any other factor. When it comes to visible minorities, white Canadian employers often proffer a plethora of lame excuses for not hiring them or even firing them. Some of these excuses revolve around visible minorities lacking Canadian work experience, lacking Canadian education/credentials, challenges with cultural assimilation etc. Incidentally, Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) has issued a directive prohibiting Canadians organizations from asking for “Canadian experience”. Please refer to below link to read more about OHRC directive, and if you find any employer asking for “Canadian experience” or forcing you to disclose the name of the country where your prior experience was earned, you could file a claim against that employer with OHRC.
http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/policy-removing-%E2%80%9Ccanadian-experience%E2%80%9D-barrier
Now withstanding this directive from OHRC, Canadian employers continue to demand Canadian experience from visible minorities. However, that standard is not being uniformly applied on Canadian immigrants across visible minority applicant and white applicant sub-groups. White people who immigrate to Canada from South Africa get treated like royalty. I have seen several white men and women who immigrated from South Africa and despite having no Canadian education, no Canadian work experience and virtually no exposure to Canadian culture - face little difficulty in finding well paying jobs. Indeed, many of them occupy top positions in various Canadian corporations. The experience of Caucasian immigrants from Australia, NZ, US, Europe, Russia and even African countries such as Zimbabwe (where a white minority once ruled that country which was formerly known as Rhodesia) is very similar. In the end, the course of Canadian history, it appears, is being influenced by something as innocuous as melanin - the pigment that is responsible for skin colouration. The more you have, the worse it gets. This is indeed a Bizarro World, devoid of any logic.
Discrimination in the licenced trades and professions in Canada
Canadian government entities at the federal and provincial levels make it extremely hard for immigrants with foreign licences to integrate into the Canadian economy. Most of them are forced to re-educate themselves (meaning, go back to school and repeat the entire degree) and take the licensing exam. The entry level barriers for professions such as Lawyers, Teachers, Pharmacists, Medical Doctors, Dentists, Nurses, Engineers etc continues to be extremely high, resulting in a diversion of that talent into unrelated sectors. This has contributed to unemployment or under-employment and fostered stereotypes of the immigrant engineer who delivers pizzas and the foreign-trained medical doctor who drives a taxi cab. What is most unfathomable is, why would the government invite those immigrants into Canada and then make it hard for them to succeed and integrate into the Canadian economy? That does not make any economic sense. To me, it appears like the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. The lack of coordination amongst various government departments, across federal and provincial levels, is mainly responsible for this situation.
We need to have a national conversation about racial discrimination in Canada
During the last 5 years, I have seen it all, and have been at the receiving end of many such bad experiences, which have taken a toll on me at an emotional, mental and psychological level. After my job was terminated from RBC, I sunk into depression for over an year. I often think, was it worth it? Living a life full of insults, dis-honour, having to be subservient and servile, living the life of an under-dog, not being able to speak freely, not being able to fight for your rights, being discriminated against everyday, not getting any recognition despite working like a dog, and being someone who is constantly despised/looked down upon/unwanted by majority of the population. After all, I was doing OK back home also, and I did not exactly come from a poverty-stricken country. Had I known all this before-hand, I often ponder whether my decision to immigrate to Canada have been different? We often talk about assimilation in Canada. But true assimilation happens only when the residents of a host country are receptive, welcoming and inclusive. In Canada, what I discovered is that white Canadians want exclusion at every level. They will invite you into their house to work as a Butler (inclusion), but won't invite you to sit at the dinner table with them as an equal (exclusion). As a minority, you are meant to serve them. We, the visible minorities are needed in Canada for work related reasons, but there is no social acceptance and inclusion. This is a very divisive society, much more than the United States. In US, discrimination is overt; the sort that involves white police officers shooting and tasering un-armed black people. Whenever that happens, there is a public outcry, civil and criminal lawsuits are filed, accountability is quickly fixed, remedial measures are put in place and everyone does just fine thereafter. I have lived in New York City (NYC) for many years before immigrating to Canada and never experienced anything like this. In the western world, NYC is probably one of the best places to live for minorities and is very heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. New York State was one of the very first states in US to abolish slavery. The conservative faction and the liberal faction in US fought an entire war on the question of slavery and got over with it once and for all. In Canada, we neither had a struggle nor a national conversation on the question of racial discrimination & minority rights, the status quo was meekly accepted, so the problem continues to fester and intermittently manifest itself. Canada's race relations problem is much bigger than that of US. We like to shove it under the carpet and pretend that the problem does not exist. I have observed that my fellow visible minorities in Canada are very embarrassed to publicly discuss their concerns; they think it’s politically incorrect to bring it up. They would rather put up with such disgraceful behaviour on a daily basis than complain about it. What is even more surprising is that it’s not politically incorrect on the part of white Canadians to engage in discriminatory behaviour but it’s seen as politically incorrect on the part of visible minorities to express their feelings in public. As a nation, we like to pretend that we are all one big multi-cultural family and all is going well. This ostrich like attitude is responsible for continuation of such behaviours. In Canada, discrimination against minorities is covert, its corrosive, and its harmful effects will be seen over the longer term. The following CBC article titled, “Racism still an uncomfortable truth in Canada” confirms as much about my original observations that much of the racism in Canada is covert rather than being overt.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/racism-still-an-uncomfortable-truth-in-canada-duncan-mccue-1.2831066
Due to some strange coincidence, as a visible minority, I have experienced discrimination first hand, have also spotted the difference between how I was treated in US versus Canada; but often brushed off my personal experiences as isolated incidents since I did not have enough data points to attribute this phenomenon as a wider trend. Years later, I would read about it in the media and get confirmation on many of my personal observations. Mccleans published an article titled, “Canada’s race problem? It’s even worse than America’s”.
The authors observations are spot on, this is not some arm-chair liberal fantasy. These observations square with what I have observed on the ground working in Toronto.
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/out-of-sight-out-of-mind-2/
Mcclean magazine called out the racism prevalent in Winnipeg in an article titled, “Welcome to Winnipeg: Where Canada’s racism problem is at its worst”.
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/welcome-to-winnipeg-where-canadas-racism-problem-is-at-its-worst/
Winnipeg is routinely cited as the most racist city in Canada. A detailed survey by CBC determined that Canadians have a “conflicted” attitude towards immigrants:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-attitudes-toward-immigrants-conflicted-poll-says-1.2826022
Discrimination does not make any business sense
Canada is losing billions of dollars every year in productivity due to visible minorities and aboriginals being unemployed, under-employed and under-utilized. It’s akin to operating a manufacturing plant at a quarter of its capacity, and creating a situation where the fixed costs exceed revenues generated from production. Canada is also losing billions of dollars in potential tax revenues that would have been collected, if these demographic sub-groups were to be fully employed in consonance with their true potential. Higher employment of visible minorities and aboriginals in tune with their potential could result in higher tax revenues, which in turn could be ploughed back into the economy, reduce budget deficits and even decrease taxes. As such, white Canadians who discriminate against visible minorities and aboriginals are hurting their own pocket - its self-inflicted pain. An article published by Globe and Mail confirms that under-employment of immigrants is costing Canada, 20 billion dollars each year.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/canada-competes/not-enough-skilled-labour-here-are-four-reasons/article8302094/
Another article by Vancouver Sun attributes a lower figure for the loss caused due to under utilization of immigrants.
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Cayo+Canada+loses+billions+marginalizing+immigrants/7466329/story.html
A somewhat older report in RBC, published in 2011 originally brought up this issue, and continues to be confirmed year after year in various publications and research reports.
http://www.rbc.com/newsroom/news/2011/20111219-immigrant.html
Multiple independent research reports, all point to the same set of facts, yet we have not achieved much progress, which is most distressing.
Earlier, discrimination in Canada was merely unethical; now it’s legal
Earlier, discrimination in Canada was merely unethical; now it’s legal, duly sanctioned by the state. It’s happening all around, and the government conveniently looks the other way, oblivious to ground realities. An entity no less than the Canadian federal government engages in discriminative practices. Expect the rest of the country to follow suit very soon. This is the new low in the history of Canada. And where does this stop? Read this article on Toronto Star. It says, government has begun to study the incomes of immigrants, based on where they come from. That data has been gleaned from the census.
http://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2015/03/20/government-studies-immigrant-incomes-by-where-they-come-from.html
What this means is that, this data will now be taken into account for immigration policy decisions. For example, aforementioned study has shown that immigrants from a certain group of countries (mostly western countries) have higher incomes in Canada; they could now tweak immigration policy to ensure that there is preferential and expedited recruitment of immigrants from those countries. Immigrants from another group of countries (mentioned in the article) are shown as earning lower incomes in Canada. Henceforth, immigrants from this group could be penalized by ensuring that there is lower intake of immigrants from those countries, going forward.
Social engineering, based on previous performance of certain ethnic groups, thus seeks to turn Canada into a high performance country, with the immigrants acting as the driving force for economic rejuvenation and helping to compensate for demographic factors such as ageing population and provision of social benefits to various sections of the society. Immigration is now increasingly been coupled with economic needs. Earlier, it was seen as a necessity to counter demographic factors that were not favourable to Canada. This change in policy coupled with the stringent criteria for acquisition of Canadian citizenship under bill C-24 could signal that Canada intends to pick up immigrants who are young, originate from English speaking countries, are highly educated and skilled in areas of high demand. Some of this sounds eerily akin to Adolf Hitler's quest to create a high performance Aryan super race, using the Eugenics program. During Nazi rule in Germany, and as described in Hitler's auto-biography, Mein Kempf, children who are disabled or crippled, homosexuals, weak and infirm children etc should not be selected to live because they are an economic burden on the society. The Nazi government instituted the Eugenics program so as to facilitate the deliberate selection of people who have favourable genes, and which would further the political ideology and Hitler's fantasy of a pure Aryan race. The Nazi party, not nature, was deciding who was the fittest to survive. The new set of immigration policies sound ominously similar in intent to the Eugenics program. The same Eugenics Program was in turn the inspiration for the Jewish extermination pogrom. Eugenics was a ruse to give a scientific façade to the Nazi government's nefarious intentions. Defining high performance "selection criteria" for Canada's immigration program is just the first step. The next step, I fear is reversal of decades of recruitment of immigrants from Asian, African and South American continents. Instead, performance statistics collected from census will be misused to justify new policies under which immigration will now be done from certain favoured European and Western countries. What we forget here is, immigrants from Asia, Africa and South Africa have a hard time assimilating in Canada, given the extremely hostile environment and discrimination they face. Most of them have a hard time getting a job. Now, the government points at their lower earnings and higher dependence on social assistance and says, "look, we told you so, it won't work and gee....the numbers say as much"...this is a self-fulfilling prophecy and very myopic on the part of the government.
This type of social engineering could be used to reverse the demographic composition, so as to create a favourable political landscape in future. Visible minorities will be marginalized in the coming decades, and a clear signal will be sent out, "you are not welcome in Canada any longer". Most of them will then emigrate to other countries. If similar policies were to exist in the US, Barack Obama would have never been born because his African father came to US as a student and married his mom who was a white American citizen. The two would have never met, and American presidential history would have been very different. I do not know what the intentions of the government are, but there is something unsettling about the way we are going about the business of immigration in this country. Our collective desire to create a society of white super-human, money-making machines will mark the beginning of the end of all progress we have achieved thus far. We will turn into a society without any emotions, feelings, compassion, love, care and desire for the collective upliftment of fellow citizens. We have been reduced to a controlled social experiment. Toronto Star’s article titled, “Canada’s immigration history one of discrimination and exclusion” explains this very well.
http://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2013/02/15/canadas_immigration_history_one_of_discrimination_and_exclusion.html
Another article in Toronto Star talks about how Canada now ranks at the bottom of the list of countries that receive refugees, which supports my earlier argument that Canada has increasingly embarked on a Eugenics-inspired immigration program that seeks to maximize political and economic returns.
http://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2015/03/26/global-asylum-claims-rise-45-but-canada-lags-in-receiving-refugees.html
There are many good white Canadians, all of them are not racist
I don't want to generalize and say that every white person is racist or is prone to discriminating against visible minorities. I have met many kind, gentle, magnanimous, liberal and fair white people. Some of them are even married to visible minorities and they have bi-racial children. They are few in number, but they do exist in Canada and their presence makes life tolerable, and offers a ray of hope in a society that is otherwise so polarized. I guess, its in human nature to discriminate.
Canada needs to demonstrate leadership and raise the bar
I can cite many examples of discrimination that occurs in Asian countries as well. In the middle east, Shia Muslims discriminate against Sunni Muslims, hundreds of thousands have died in these sectarian conflicts. 90% of the population of today's China originated from the Han race; and this group discriminates against the Uyghur Muslim minority there. In Egypt, the Muslim majority discriminates against Coptic Christians. In India, upper caste Hindus discriminate against fellow Hindus of lower caste. The entire African continent is rife with sectarian conflict. Many years ago, I saw a movie called, Hotel Rawanda that depicted the bloody ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. According to Wikipedia, "during the approximate 100-day period from April 7, 1994, to mid-July, an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 Rwandans were killed, constituting as much as 20% of the country's total population and 70% of the Tutsi then living in Rwanda". One of my arguments has always been that most countries in Asia, South America and Africa are under-developed or developing countries. They achieved independence from the colonists very recently and are now masters of their own destiny. It will take time for them to evolve into a mature democracy and an egalitarian society. Those societies are still unsettled because unlike western countries, they have still not resolved fundamental issues related to food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, clean drinking water and the like. But US and Canada are not like them. These countries have achieved political independence and economic stability much earlier, and have since led the way in terms of abolishing slavery, establishing UN, ending conflict, evolving into a mature democracy, establishing the rule of law and human rights etc. So immigrants from under-developed and developing countries actually look upto US and Canada as a beacon of hope and expect the situation to be different here in North America. Instead, when immigrants arrive here only to experience the same kind of discrimination that they encountered back home, they feel disillusioned in their misplaced trust.
Prior to the 1960's, visible minorities were not allowed to immigrate to Canada; so Caucasians of British origin discriminated against fellow Caucasians who originated from other European countries. During and after World War II, the Canadian government interned (segregated into a camp and closely guarded) all fellow Canadians of Italian origin because they were suspected of being disloyal to Canada. The age-old acrimony, animosity and mistrust between French Canadians and Anglo Canadians is well known. Over the last five years, during my conversations with Anglo Canadians, I discovered that there was no love lost between both groups. Anglos allege that the French are rude to them, not accommodating and live a cocooned existence. French Canadians use arguments identical to the ones visible minorities make, to buttress their point that they are being discriminated against because they are a linguistic minority in Canada. The simmering tensions between both groups is quite palpable. Differences in religious beliefs - Anglos are protestant while the French are Catholic – culture, language and age-old ancestral rivalry that has been nurtured from continental Europe – all of them created a heady mix and brought matters to a boil in 1995 that led to a referendum on the question of Quebec’s secession from Canada. To this day, both groups live in an uneasy co-existence. Many visible minorities might find it hard to believe this – anecdotal evidence suggests that white-on-white discrimination exists in Canada. It’s an aspect of discrimination that doesn’t seem to have been researched, published and publicly discussed. A former white Canadian colleague of German origin, now in his mid 50’s told me that in his childhood, the white anglo-Canadians would discriminate against him and even beat him up. When he went crying to his mom, she told him, "son, you better learn how to put up with this". She didn't go and fight with the Anglos. That, my friends, seems to be the best survival strategy in this society - have a thick skin, and learn to put up, don't react against every event. It is my understanding that few decades ago, white Canadians of British (Anglo) ancestry would look down and actively discriminate against the poor refugees from Italy, Ireland and eastern Europe. Now, visible minorities from Asian countries are the latest punching bag. And I guess it will never stop. We humans are such; we are braggarts who love to discriminate against others in a quest to show how superior we are.
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I have been living in Canada as a Permanent Resident since last 5 years. During this time, I have experienced discrimination first hand, both in offices of large banks and reputable consulting companies as well as in the daily walks of life. Discrimination and racism is rampant in Canada, sometimes overt and often covert. When it’s the latter, you have no recourse, because you can't point your finger at it and complain. You can only feel its impact but can't understand how it happened because the events leading upto the impact are engineered behind the scenes. Let me give you a few recent examples from my life in Canada.
Racial stereotyping
I was at the GAP store at Eaton centre in Toronto one evening, during Christmas time last year, looking for a pair of jeans. Since I was on my way home from work, I was dressed in a suit and a tie. I had barely spent 3 minutes in the store, when one white girl approaches me and asks where the women's section is. I politely tell her that I am just a shopper like her and I don't know. Then, another white guy in his 20's approaches me and asks me about a certain kind of jeans. Again, I express my inability to help him. Next, another white woman in her 30's approaches me and asks me about some other kind of dress. All of this happened to me within a span of 10 minutes in rapid succession. I felt really disgusted and left the store. In the sub-conscious mind of caucasians, a visible minority is always seen as a worker, salesman or some kind of service provider. Why can't they think of me as another shopper just like them? This has happened to me many times in other stores as well, such as the HUDSON BAY store in Eaton centre. And invariably, the pattern is the same. I always have white people (it’s never another non-white person) coming upto me and mistaking me for being a store employee. In the minds of many white middle-class shoppers, visible minority equals worker class, who are meant to serve them. And examples of white people being rude to me on the street are too many to cite.
Minorities are type-cast as worker-material as opposed to leader-material. While I was employed with Bank of Montreal as a full time employee, after working there for a couple of years, and being rated as a solid performer in the annual appraisal and earning over a dozen performance awards; I applied to over 35 internal jobs for which I was eligible, across various groups/departments of BMO for promotion to the next grade. I was relatively new to Canada back then, having been here for only 2 years. Call it my naiveté, I thought, why not me? After all, I was well qualified with several degrees, diplomas and certifications to my credit. My immediate manager, a white female, who was in the Senior Manager grade level that I aspired to move into, did not like my ambitions. During my conversations with her, when I told her that I was interested in growing internally within BMO, she said, I can always apply and see what happens. But she also told me that I should compare myself with less fortunate immigrants who happen to be highly qualified but drive taxis in Toronto. She said, atleast I was better off than them, thereby dropping ample hints that I should not try to aspire for anything more than what I had. I suspect that she sabotaged all my chances of getting any interview for the jobs I had applied to. A few months later, when a new CIO took over and wanted to reorganize his group and asked for across-the-board staff reductions, I was conveniently laid off. In Canada, it’s dangerous for any visible minority or aboriginal to demonstrate ambition. Forget about growth, you could lose what you have.
My experience is not unique in this respect, this happens to many minorities across Canada. It’s a well known fact that minorities are under-represented in leadership positions across all sectors of the Canadian economy. They are kept suppressed at the bottom layers of the pyramid. On the rare occasion, when minorities get into a leadership position, they neither mentor nor lend a helping hand to genuinely meritorious fellow minorities. They are scared that they could be seen as parochial, and they lack self-confidence. So they often try to over compensate by being extra-harsh on fellow minorities and hiring and promoting white Canadians. In sharp contrast, I have observed that white Canadians who hail from a certain community (for instance; Italian, Jewish, Irish) feel quite comfortable hiring fellow white Canadians whom they might have met in social situations such as their Church or Community Association. The inability of visible minorities to form professional networks and lend each other a helping hand is a contributing factor for their current situation. All five tier-1 Canadian banks, which are headquartered in Toronto, a city with a huge visible minority population, seem to have gargantuan challenges in finding qualified visible minority candidates to staff their ranks at the Senior Manager and above levels. I hear, the situation is no different in other industrial sectors. What is this, if not a kleptocracy, where a privileged few, who happened to win an ovarian lottery, have organized themselves in such a manner so as to engage in a form of corruption that increases the personal wealth and political power of their own kind, at the expense of the wider population, with the pretense of honest service. We should drop this farcical pretence of being a tolerant, multi-cultural society and come to accept the reality, that in some aspects, Canada is no different from the kleptocratic and dictatorial regimes found in the African continent. At the cost of sounding harsh, I have to admit that visible minorities and aboriginals are second class citizens in Canada who count for little in the milieu of this country.
Canada is a low context culture
I have worked and travelled in Asian countries where you get a warm feeling and a sense of friendliness when you talk to other people. But when you talk to white Canadians, conversations tend to be very transactional. Asian people are likely to perceive white Canadians as being very cold and unfriendly. At first, I attributed such behaviour to racism and their inherent dislike for visible minorities. However, while studying at a college in Toronto, I was forced to correct and revise my stance after I came across a concept called, “High context and low context cultures”. You can read about it on this wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-context_cultures
The differences in behaviour between Asian and North American groups can be attributed to the differences in cultures and that does not necessarily constitute racism. From the perspective of the Caucasians, they are behaving in an absolutely normal manner, even though Asians might find that behaviour abnormal. Let me give you an example. White Canadian colleagues (a subordinate and his manager) will socialize one day and on the next day, the manager might fire his subordinate, either due to performance issues or due to lack of work. In either case, the subordinate will be given 10 minutes to pack his belongings and then the manager will walk him out of the building. Thereafter, that manager and all other colleagues will cease to have all further contact with that subordinate. This could happen to you even if you worked there for over 10 years. Now, as an Asian, I find this kind of behaviour very bizarre. How can you severe your relationship abruptly with someone with whom you socialized everyday? In Asian countries, allowing others to save face is considered critical. In the same layoff/termination scenario, after all options at securing alternate employment for that subordinate have run out, the manager will likely have a discussion with the subordinate in a private setting. Thereafter, he will be given a working notice of atleast one month, during which his workload will be minimal and he will be allowed time to transition out of that organization. Often, large companies will ask their vendors, on whom they have substantial influence, to absorb such employees. Before his departure, the manager or his colleagues might even organize a farewell party and give him a small gift. Humiliating someone publicly is just not done in Asia, but this is par for the course in North America. One thing is for sure. Tolerance levels are very low in North America and things tend to go downhill very rapidly in any relationship, whether it’s at work or at home. That explains why divorce rates are near 50% in North America while it’s less than 1% in most Asian countries. In North America, I have noticed that white couples are forever profusely apologizing for every little thing and go to elaborate lengths (including PDA) to profess their love - something that is never done in Asian countries - because couples in North America are acutely aware of the low tolerance threshold in this culture, they try to compensate by engaging in ostentatious demonstration of their love and commitment to their partners. In most cases, Asian couples who don’t like each other separate rather than divorcing, and often come together on occasion for the sake of their children. Pressure from the family and peers as well as positive role models (in the form of low divorce rates all around them) keep couples from breaking up, which creates stability in the society and leads to higher emotional satisfaction. From the perspective of Asians, caucasians are as cold to one another as they are to visible minorities – so this is not racism, they are just being themselves. My experience of living in North America has furthered my understanding of the finer nuances of discrimination and sharpened my emotional intelligence. I am able to read between the lines, gauge intent and determine a course of action accordingly. In Asia, people tend to be verbose and clearly articulate how they feel. A loud outburst or a spat at home or work, does not necessarily mark the end of a relationship. It’s just a way of communication and a form of expressing ones frustration. In North America, such an outburst or spat can often mark the end of a relationship. Visible minorities, who are so used to explicit communication in their home countries, need to learn how to interpret unspoken and unwritten signals from Caucasians and decode them in order to take appropriate action. Workplace communication is often surreptitious and covert, and if you are not plugged in or do not interpret situations correctly and on time, your goose will pretty soon be cooked. I sometime think, that what is often perceived as racism and discrimination by minorities is also an inability on their part to interpret and decode seemingly cryptic Caucasian communications. Communication is not just about verbal facility with the language. Most Asians, especially those from former British colonies read, write and speak well in English. But it’s their inability or limited ability to gauge and respond to complex non-verbal communications/cues in North America, that holds them back at the workplace and in social situations. Having said all this, I will also say that in many situations in Canada, I can clearly see that there is an intent to discriminate on the part of white Canadians. Any perceived discrimination from the vantage point of visible minorities due to inadvertent cultural misunderstandings between both groups can and should easily be condoned. But it’s the deliberate sabotage and treachery that bothers me the most.
Rampant workplace discrimination across Canada
I have worked in 2 large, reputable banks (BMO, RBC) here in Toronto as a full time employee. At BMO, my position was eliminated along with dozens of others (mostly visible minorities) when a new CIO joined and wanted to bring in his own team. At RBC, my job was terminated after exactly one year because my manager said, I escalated about colleagues and thereby spoiled my relationship with them and hence I could not work with them anymore. In both cases, I had a white manager who did not like me. In both cases, my managers were less qualified than me, and had the same level of industry experience as myself and were my age. In both cases, I felt they were competing with me and felt insecure. In both banks, I faced rude, hostile and uncooperative behaviour from white employees who would gang up against me and snitch on my back to my white manager, who conveniently believed them. On the rare occasion that I complained about white employees, no one wanted to believe me. But when they complained about me, the effect was instantaneous. If you are working as a lower level employee at the clerical level or as an assistant, chances are, no one will bother you. But the moment you reach middle management, that's where the competition begins. I was shocked to see that all the employees at Senior Manager and above levels were white. I once had an opportunity to look at the trading floor in the capital markets division of BMO, located at First Canadian Place. It was a sea of white wherever I turned my head! All well paying jobs in Canada are cornered by Caucasians, and they make no apologies about it. Most of the visible minorities are given lower paying jobs at lower rungs in operations (back office) or technology, and that's how banks are able to justify that they meet the employment equity standards. Visible minorities suffer from high levels of involuntary attrition, poor job satisfaction, get poor reviews in appraisals and don't have much career progression. It’s quite common to see them stagnating at the same level for several decades, and if you asked them, they are actually grateful to even be able to keep their jobs in Canada, let alone get promoted. In many meetings inside those banks, I was often the only visible minority within the room, all other participants would be white. And when I enter into the room, often, no one would acknowledge my presence, as if I was a persona non-grata. When I make requests for information/resources etc, often white colleagues will procrastinate, delay or deny those requests; which was effectively a form of social ostracization. Most of the white Canadians who work in large corporations tend to be conservative. And this is the same set of people who are courted by the right wing political groups in Canada. It’s no wonder that the attitudes, behaviours and mindsets they exhibit in the workplace are often an extension of how they think, act and behave in their private life outside of work. Canadian organizations are a microcosm of the Canadian society. Therefore, visible minority immigrants in Canada should expect to be discriminated against in the workplace in the same manner, just as they are subjected to hostile behaviour in their daily walks of life. What you get on the outside is what you get on the inside as well. Those hostile behaviours tend to directly impact visible minorities in terms of not being hired for jobs, getting fired for flimsy reasons, not getting promoted, being exploited in terms of salary etc.
Visible minority immigrants face a triple whammy in Canada
When visible minorities lose their jobs in Canada; they are forced to confront a triple whammy while trying to rejoin the workforce: (a) discrimination from recruiters and hiring managers, which makes it very difficult to find another job, with the added stigma of being unemployed now being conveniently used to exclude their application from the interview pool (b) having to operate in a small oligopolistic market with only a few companies in every sector, which limits the number of opportunities available. For instance; there are only 5 banks, 3 telecom companies, 2 or 3 large insurance companies etc (c) unlike white Canadians who usually inherit from their parents (money, house etc), visible minorities who are new immigrants to Canada do not have any sort of financial cushion. They also don’t have any kind of community support from friends and relatives because most new immigrants are in the survival mode, and everyone is trying to fend for themselves, and hence not in a position to help other members in their community. In addition, most visible minorities are afraid of being seen as being parochial, which causes them to over-compensate by keeping fellow visible minorities at arms-length, especially in work related situations. They are embarrassed of their under-developed or developing country origins. That causes them to behave in strange ways such as not advocating for or recommending fellow minorities for positions in their companies, lest they be seen as clannish and by extension being un-canadian. The visible minority community is also very divided because this is a very heterogenous group. I have not only witnessed but have also been a victim of another phenomenon within visible minority ethnic groups – that of outright hostility with fellow minorities from the same ethnic group. I have seen fellow visible minorities from my home country being hostile to me at work, in a bid to curry favour and ingratiate themselves with white managers. In fact, I lost my job in RBC mainly due to the snitching of a fellow minority from my home country. Higher and denser populations combined with scarce resources in Asia promotes a fierce sense of competition in every field, and by extension, a culture of achievement orientation. But the downside of that culture is that Asians are poor collaborators – causing them to compete for short term gains, where they should have been collaborating for long term success. In Canada, Asians tend to compete against each other at work. I don’t blame them. They are only doing what their culture has taught them back home. Due to aforementioned reasons, a visible minority losing his job is not the same as a white Canadian losing his job. The impact in the case of visible minorities is very severe and often long-lasting. With no support structure available to help them, many resort to government assistance to make ends meet. White Canadians often perceive this as reluctance on the part of visible minorities to rejoin the workforce. Indeed, their collective ignorance and animosity has led the federal conservative government to reverse social programs that have been introduced as a safety net over the course of several decades. A detailed analysis by Toronto Star explains this very well:
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/12/09/conservatives_dismantling_social_programs_built_over_generations.html
Such reversals tend to hurt the weakest sections of the society. The world over, Canada was known for being compassionate and taking care of the less fortunate sections of our society, which includes white people living below the poverty line, aboriginals, refugees, disabled people, homeless people etc. The adverse effect of these reversals will soon manifest itself in the form of higher crime rates, recidivism, suicide rates, unemployment, greater social turmoil, a general sense of dissatisfaction and unhappiness all around.
The colour of your skin is the dividing line for opportunity in Canada
Discrimination begins at the recruitment stage in Canada. Most visible minorities with non-Christian, foreign-sounding names don't even get invited for interviews. Most of the HR recruiters are white, so they tend to look for prospective employees who are like them. Even if a visible minority gets across those hoops, they tend to get eliminated at the interview stages, where they are invited just so that employers can demonstrate that they have been fair to everyone. But the hiring managers who usually tend to be white, eventually end up choosing a fellow white candidate. In one egregious case, a white female HR recruiter at CIBC interviewed me on phone on 3 different occasions, forgetting each time, that she spoke to me earlier. After each interview, the next day, she would email me saying that they have decided to move ahead with other candidates. I highly suspect that she was using me (a minority) as part of the pool, just to play safe, and satisfy employment equity rules. This article in the Globe and Mail titled, “Ontario now the worst place for educated immigrants looking for work” highlights how bad the problem is.
http://globalnews.ca/news/1480102/unemployments-up-for-canadas-most-educated-immigrants/
If you think, volunteering on boards of non-profits as a Director would be easy, where they don't pay anything, think again. Boards of large non-profits are like cozy private clubs for white Canadians. While non-profits don't pay anything, white Canadians do like to socialize with other people who are like them. So they hire only fellow whites for these unpaid board positions. After trying very hard, I got onto the board of one large non-profit (with 200+ employees) where all Board members were white. So I was essentially a "sympathy hire". Whenever I attend any meetings with the Executive Director/CEO or other board members, I keep getting told how much Toronto has changed since last few decades in terms of demographics. They are nostalgic about the bygone era, and for what might have been. I keep quiet, nodding my head and smile nervously, just trying to play along. I don't know how else I could respond to such ackward comments. I think the underlying sub-text that they want to convey is, "you should be grateful that we let you in here, you don't really belong in such elite company".
Most white Canadians in banks say, that visible minorities have cultural adjustment challenges, a euphemism for being a visible minority and hence, not deserving of higher positions and nicer treatment. Friends, nothing has changed from the days of slave plantations in North America that were owned by white people. Visible minorities are still perceived as slaves, the worker class, who are meant to serve their white over-lords. In fact, those of you who read American history will know that Britishers in US (US was a British colony) rebelled against the ruling British government. They asserted, "no taxation without representation in British parliament". And then, a war broke out between the British rebels (now known as Americans) and the British government. The British government lost the war; the rebels won, with some help from the French government, and went on to declare independence from the British. Now, at that point in time, some British citizens living in USA were disgusted by the victory of rebels because they were still loyal to the British monarch. So they left the US in protest, and immigrated to Canada. Today's Anglo-Canada mostly comprises of those whose ancestors were loyal to the British monarch. When they came to Canada, they carried with them; the prejudices, negative attitudes, bias and the airs of being a landed aristocracy; and passed those attitudes and behaviours to successor generations. Back then, white British citizens were allowed to keep slaves. They harassed the original inhabitants of this land – the aboriginals - and tried to "civilize" them by imprisoning them in residential schools. The abuses that aboriginals underwent at the hands of the British immigrants in Canada are well documented. Later, they found that they could import hard working Chinese people to work as labourers to build rail roads - hundreds of them died laying explosives to clear the hills and rocks. They met this fate, after paying a hefty head tax to the Canadian government for the privilege of being allowed to enter and work as labourers in Canada. Much later in the mid 1960's, they started importing all Asians, mainly to work in labour intensive industries. So the history of Asian immigration in Canada is very recent. A country whose composition was so homogenous for much of its history, suddenly finds it difficult to come to terms with this altered reality.
African slaves on cotton plantations have now been replaced with visible minorities working in other forms of enterprise. And cotton plantations have lost their relevance, because textile production no longer occurs in North America, that has shifted to Asian countries where yarn, fabric and finished products can be produced cheaply and quickly using local Asian labourers. The nature of the North American economy has also seen a radical shift from being a manufacturing economy to a services-oriented economy. As a result, apart from the lower level Asian labourers who are required to work in the labour-intensive industries (such as food and restaurant industry, agriculture, forestry/logging, construction, manufacturing etc) Canada has also been importing knowledge workers from Asia. These are highly qualified and skilled workers with university education and backgrounds in business, engineering, accounting, math, science etc. They are now being used to staff the bottom layers of the services economy. Often, they are under-paid and over-worked, and exploited. While I was employed with the Canadian banking industry, it was not uncommon to see Ph.D degree holders from Canadian universities, who were of Asian origin, working as low level Analysts or Programmers (entry level jobs), making way much lower than their true worth. And I also saw several white Canadians who were working as VPs, Directors and Senior Managers, with education no more than a Canadian high school diploma or a 2 year diploma from a Canadian college such as Seneca college, George Brown college etc. If some white employee had a BA degree in Philosophy from a little known institution like Athabasca University, that person would go on to scale the ladder like crazy and would be considered over-qualified and treated with great respect and deference due to his/her high education! My experience and observations on the ground, working in large Canadians companies squared with what I read much later in the media. Macleans published a remarkable story titled, “Why the world’s best and brightest struggle to find jobs in Canada - Why do skilled immigrants often fare worse here than in the U.S. and U.K.?” Please read this story on the below link:
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/land-of-misfortune/
Colour blind, we are not
Let me cite one specific example to prove that discrimination in Canada is all about skin pigmentation - not intellect, education, skills, cultural assimilation or any other factor. When it comes to visible minorities, white Canadian employers often proffer a plethora of lame excuses for not hiring them or even firing them. Some of these excuses revolve around visible minorities lacking Canadian work experience, lacking Canadian education/credentials, challenges with cultural assimilation etc. Incidentally, Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) has issued a directive prohibiting Canadians organizations from asking for “Canadian experience”. Please refer to below link to read more about OHRC directive, and if you find any employer asking for “Canadian experience” or forcing you to disclose the name of the country where your prior experience was earned, you could file a claim against that employer with OHRC.
http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/policy-removing-%E2%80%9Ccanadian-experience%E2%80%9D-barrier
Now withstanding this directive from OHRC, Canadian employers continue to demand Canadian experience from visible minorities. However, that standard is not being uniformly applied on Canadian immigrants across visible minority applicant and white applicant sub-groups. White people who immigrate to Canada from South Africa get treated like royalty. I have seen several white men and women who immigrated from South Africa and despite having no Canadian education, no Canadian work experience and virtually no exposure to Canadian culture - face little difficulty in finding well paying jobs. Indeed, many of them occupy top positions in various Canadian corporations. The experience of Caucasian immigrants from Australia, NZ, US, Europe, Russia and even African countries such as Zimbabwe (where a white minority once ruled that country which was formerly known as Rhodesia) is very similar. In the end, the course of Canadian history, it appears, is being influenced by something as innocuous as melanin - the pigment that is responsible for skin colouration. The more you have, the worse it gets. This is indeed a Bizarro World, devoid of any logic.
Discrimination in the licenced trades and professions in Canada
Canadian government entities at the federal and provincial levels make it extremely hard for immigrants with foreign licences to integrate into the Canadian economy. Most of them are forced to re-educate themselves (meaning, go back to school and repeat the entire degree) and take the licensing exam. The entry level barriers for professions such as Lawyers, Teachers, Pharmacists, Medical Doctors, Dentists, Nurses, Engineers etc continues to be extremely high, resulting in a diversion of that talent into unrelated sectors. This has contributed to unemployment or under-employment and fostered stereotypes of the immigrant engineer who delivers pizzas and the foreign-trained medical doctor who drives a taxi cab. What is most unfathomable is, why would the government invite those immigrants into Canada and then make it hard for them to succeed and integrate into the Canadian economy? That does not make any economic sense. To me, it appears like the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. The lack of coordination amongst various government departments, across federal and provincial levels, is mainly responsible for this situation.
We need to have a national conversation about racial discrimination in Canada
During the last 5 years, I have seen it all, and have been at the receiving end of many such bad experiences, which have taken a toll on me at an emotional, mental and psychological level. After my job was terminated from RBC, I sunk into depression for over an year. I often think, was it worth it? Living a life full of insults, dis-honour, having to be subservient and servile, living the life of an under-dog, not being able to speak freely, not being able to fight for your rights, being discriminated against everyday, not getting any recognition despite working like a dog, and being someone who is constantly despised/looked down upon/unwanted by majority of the population. After all, I was doing OK back home also, and I did not exactly come from a poverty-stricken country. Had I known all this before-hand, I often ponder whether my decision to immigrate to Canada have been different? We often talk about assimilation in Canada. But true assimilation happens only when the residents of a host country are receptive, welcoming and inclusive. In Canada, what I discovered is that white Canadians want exclusion at every level. They will invite you into their house to work as a Butler (inclusion), but won't invite you to sit at the dinner table with them as an equal (exclusion). As a minority, you are meant to serve them. We, the visible minorities are needed in Canada for work related reasons, but there is no social acceptance and inclusion. This is a very divisive society, much more than the United States. In US, discrimination is overt; the sort that involves white police officers shooting and tasering un-armed black people. Whenever that happens, there is a public outcry, civil and criminal lawsuits are filed, accountability is quickly fixed, remedial measures are put in place and everyone does just fine thereafter. I have lived in New York City (NYC) for many years before immigrating to Canada and never experienced anything like this. In the western world, NYC is probably one of the best places to live for minorities and is very heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. New York State was one of the very first states in US to abolish slavery. The conservative faction and the liberal faction in US fought an entire war on the question of slavery and got over with it once and for all. In Canada, we neither had a struggle nor a national conversation on the question of racial discrimination & minority rights, the status quo was meekly accepted, so the problem continues to fester and intermittently manifest itself. Canada's race relations problem is much bigger than that of US. We like to shove it under the carpet and pretend that the problem does not exist. I have observed that my fellow visible minorities in Canada are very embarrassed to publicly discuss their concerns; they think it’s politically incorrect to bring it up. They would rather put up with such disgraceful behaviour on a daily basis than complain about it. What is even more surprising is that it’s not politically incorrect on the part of white Canadians to engage in discriminatory behaviour but it’s seen as politically incorrect on the part of visible minorities to express their feelings in public. As a nation, we like to pretend that we are all one big multi-cultural family and all is going well. This ostrich like attitude is responsible for continuation of such behaviours. In Canada, discrimination against minorities is covert, its corrosive, and its harmful effects will be seen over the longer term. The following CBC article titled, “Racism still an uncomfortable truth in Canada” confirms as much about my original observations that much of the racism in Canada is covert rather than being overt.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/racism-still-an-uncomfortable-truth-in-canada-duncan-mccue-1.2831066
Due to some strange coincidence, as a visible minority, I have experienced discrimination first hand, have also spotted the difference between how I was treated in US versus Canada; but often brushed off my personal experiences as isolated incidents since I did not have enough data points to attribute this phenomenon as a wider trend. Years later, I would read about it in the media and get confirmation on many of my personal observations. Mccleans published an article titled, “Canada’s race problem? It’s even worse than America’s”.
The authors observations are spot on, this is not some arm-chair liberal fantasy. These observations square with what I have observed on the ground working in Toronto.
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/out-of-sight-out-of-mind-2/
Mcclean magazine called out the racism prevalent in Winnipeg in an article titled, “Welcome to Winnipeg: Where Canada’s racism problem is at its worst”.
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/welcome-to-winnipeg-where-canadas-racism-problem-is-at-its-worst/
Winnipeg is routinely cited as the most racist city in Canada. A detailed survey by CBC determined that Canadians have a “conflicted” attitude towards immigrants:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-attitudes-toward-immigrants-conflicted-poll-says-1.2826022
Discrimination does not make any business sense
Canada is losing billions of dollars every year in productivity due to visible minorities and aboriginals being unemployed, under-employed and under-utilized. It’s akin to operating a manufacturing plant at a quarter of its capacity, and creating a situation where the fixed costs exceed revenues generated from production. Canada is also losing billions of dollars in potential tax revenues that would have been collected, if these demographic sub-groups were to be fully employed in consonance with their true potential. Higher employment of visible minorities and aboriginals in tune with their potential could result in higher tax revenues, which in turn could be ploughed back into the economy, reduce budget deficits and even decrease taxes. As such, white Canadians who discriminate against visible minorities and aboriginals are hurting their own pocket - its self-inflicted pain. An article published by Globe and Mail confirms that under-employment of immigrants is costing Canada, 20 billion dollars each year.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/canada-competes/not-enough-skilled-labour-here-are-four-reasons/article8302094/
Another article by Vancouver Sun attributes a lower figure for the loss caused due to under utilization of immigrants.
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Cayo+Canada+loses+billions+marginalizing+immigrants/7466329/story.html
A somewhat older report in RBC, published in 2011 originally brought up this issue, and continues to be confirmed year after year in various publications and research reports.
http://www.rbc.com/newsroom/news/2011/20111219-immigrant.html
Multiple independent research reports, all point to the same set of facts, yet we have not achieved much progress, which is most distressing.
Earlier, discrimination in Canada was merely unethical; now it’s legal
Earlier, discrimination in Canada was merely unethical; now it’s legal, duly sanctioned by the state. It’s happening all around, and the government conveniently looks the other way, oblivious to ground realities. An entity no less than the Canadian federal government engages in discriminative practices. Expect the rest of the country to follow suit very soon. This is the new low in the history of Canada. And where does this stop? Read this article on Toronto Star. It says, government has begun to study the incomes of immigrants, based on where they come from. That data has been gleaned from the census.
http://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2015/03/20/government-studies-immigrant-incomes-by-where-they-come-from.html
What this means is that, this data will now be taken into account for immigration policy decisions. For example, aforementioned study has shown that immigrants from a certain group of countries (mostly western countries) have higher incomes in Canada; they could now tweak immigration policy to ensure that there is preferential and expedited recruitment of immigrants from those countries. Immigrants from another group of countries (mentioned in the article) are shown as earning lower incomes in Canada. Henceforth, immigrants from this group could be penalized by ensuring that there is lower intake of immigrants from those countries, going forward.
Social engineering, based on previous performance of certain ethnic groups, thus seeks to turn Canada into a high performance country, with the immigrants acting as the driving force for economic rejuvenation and helping to compensate for demographic factors such as ageing population and provision of social benefits to various sections of the society. Immigration is now increasingly been coupled with economic needs. Earlier, it was seen as a necessity to counter demographic factors that were not favourable to Canada. This change in policy coupled with the stringent criteria for acquisition of Canadian citizenship under bill C-24 could signal that Canada intends to pick up immigrants who are young, originate from English speaking countries, are highly educated and skilled in areas of high demand. Some of this sounds eerily akin to Adolf Hitler's quest to create a high performance Aryan super race, using the Eugenics program. During Nazi rule in Germany, and as described in Hitler's auto-biography, Mein Kempf, children who are disabled or crippled, homosexuals, weak and infirm children etc should not be selected to live because they are an economic burden on the society. The Nazi government instituted the Eugenics program so as to facilitate the deliberate selection of people who have favourable genes, and which would further the political ideology and Hitler's fantasy of a pure Aryan race. The Nazi party, not nature, was deciding who was the fittest to survive. The new set of immigration policies sound ominously similar in intent to the Eugenics program. The same Eugenics Program was in turn the inspiration for the Jewish extermination pogrom. Eugenics was a ruse to give a scientific façade to the Nazi government's nefarious intentions. Defining high performance "selection criteria" for Canada's immigration program is just the first step. The next step, I fear is reversal of decades of recruitment of immigrants from Asian, African and South American continents. Instead, performance statistics collected from census will be misused to justify new policies under which immigration will now be done from certain favoured European and Western countries. What we forget here is, immigrants from Asia, Africa and South Africa have a hard time assimilating in Canada, given the extremely hostile environment and discrimination they face. Most of them have a hard time getting a job. Now, the government points at their lower earnings and higher dependence on social assistance and says, "look, we told you so, it won't work and gee....the numbers say as much"...this is a self-fulfilling prophecy and very myopic on the part of the government.
This type of social engineering could be used to reverse the demographic composition, so as to create a favourable political landscape in future. Visible minorities will be marginalized in the coming decades, and a clear signal will be sent out, "you are not welcome in Canada any longer". Most of them will then emigrate to other countries. If similar policies were to exist in the US, Barack Obama would have never been born because his African father came to US as a student and married his mom who was a white American citizen. The two would have never met, and American presidential history would have been very different. I do not know what the intentions of the government are, but there is something unsettling about the way we are going about the business of immigration in this country. Our collective desire to create a society of white super-human, money-making machines will mark the beginning of the end of all progress we have achieved thus far. We will turn into a society without any emotions, feelings, compassion, love, care and desire for the collective upliftment of fellow citizens. We have been reduced to a controlled social experiment. Toronto Star’s article titled, “Canada’s immigration history one of discrimination and exclusion” explains this very well.
http://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2013/02/15/canadas_immigration_history_one_of_discrimination_and_exclusion.html
Another article in Toronto Star talks about how Canada now ranks at the bottom of the list of countries that receive refugees, which supports my earlier argument that Canada has increasingly embarked on a Eugenics-inspired immigration program that seeks to maximize political and economic returns.
http://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2015/03/26/global-asylum-claims-rise-45-but-canada-lags-in-receiving-refugees.html
There are many good white Canadians, all of them are not racist
I don't want to generalize and say that every white person is racist or is prone to discriminating against visible minorities. I have met many kind, gentle, magnanimous, liberal and fair white people. Some of them are even married to visible minorities and they have bi-racial children. They are few in number, but they do exist in Canada and their presence makes life tolerable, and offers a ray of hope in a society that is otherwise so polarized. I guess, its in human nature to discriminate.
Canada needs to demonstrate leadership and raise the bar
I can cite many examples of discrimination that occurs in Asian countries as well. In the middle east, Shia Muslims discriminate against Sunni Muslims, hundreds of thousands have died in these sectarian conflicts. 90% of the population of today's China originated from the Han race; and this group discriminates against the Uyghur Muslim minority there. In Egypt, the Muslim majority discriminates against Coptic Christians. In India, upper caste Hindus discriminate against fellow Hindus of lower caste. The entire African continent is rife with sectarian conflict. Many years ago, I saw a movie called, Hotel Rawanda that depicted the bloody ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. According to Wikipedia, "during the approximate 100-day period from April 7, 1994, to mid-July, an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 Rwandans were killed, constituting as much as 20% of the country's total population and 70% of the Tutsi then living in Rwanda". One of my arguments has always been that most countries in Asia, South America and Africa are under-developed or developing countries. They achieved independence from the colonists very recently and are now masters of their own destiny. It will take time for them to evolve into a mature democracy and an egalitarian society. Those societies are still unsettled because unlike western countries, they have still not resolved fundamental issues related to food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, clean drinking water and the like. But US and Canada are not like them. These countries have achieved political independence and economic stability much earlier, and have since led the way in terms of abolishing slavery, establishing UN, ending conflict, evolving into a mature democracy, establishing the rule of law and human rights etc. So immigrants from under-developed and developing countries actually look upto US and Canada as a beacon of hope and expect the situation to be different here in North America. Instead, when immigrants arrive here only to experience the same kind of discrimination that they encountered back home, they feel disillusioned in their misplaced trust.
Prior to the 1960's, visible minorities were not allowed to immigrate to Canada; so Caucasians of British origin discriminated against fellow Caucasians who originated from other European countries. During and after World War II, the Canadian government interned (segregated into a camp and closely guarded) all fellow Canadians of Italian origin because they were suspected of being disloyal to Canada. The age-old acrimony, animosity and mistrust between French Canadians and Anglo Canadians is well known. Over the last five years, during my conversations with Anglo Canadians, I discovered that there was no love lost between both groups. Anglos allege that the French are rude to them, not accommodating and live a cocooned existence. French Canadians use arguments identical to the ones visible minorities make, to buttress their point that they are being discriminated against because they are a linguistic minority in Canada. The simmering tensions between both groups is quite palpable. Differences in religious beliefs - Anglos are protestant while the French are Catholic – culture, language and age-old ancestral rivalry that has been nurtured from continental Europe – all of them created a heady mix and brought matters to a boil in 1995 that led to a referendum on the question of Quebec’s secession from Canada. To this day, both groups live in an uneasy co-existence. Many visible minorities might find it hard to believe this – anecdotal evidence suggests that white-on-white discrimination exists in Canada. It’s an aspect of discrimination that doesn’t seem to have been researched, published and publicly discussed. A former white Canadian colleague of German origin, now in his mid 50’s told me that in his childhood, the white anglo-Canadians would discriminate against him and even beat him up. When he went crying to his mom, she told him, "son, you better learn how to put up with this". She didn't go and fight with the Anglos. That, my friends, seems to be the best survival strategy in this society - have a thick skin, and learn to put up, don't react against every event. It is my understanding that few decades ago, white Canadians of British (Anglo) ancestry would look down and actively discriminate against the poor refugees from Italy, Ireland and eastern Europe. Now, visible minorities from Asian countries are the latest punching bag. And I guess it will never stop. We humans are such; we are braggarts who love to discriminate against others in a quest to show how superior we are.
