Choosing Canada

Some dates are engraved on my soul. Wendy’s birthday, and mine; our wedding day; the date of Wendy’s death; birth dates of our three children; dates of epochal world events like September 3 1939, June 6 1944, August 6 1945, and a few others I’ve noted in posts on this blog.

November 9, 1969 is another. That was the day I arrived in Canada as a landed immigrant. Three weeks later I flew back to Edinburgh to collect Wendy and the kids; we all came back together to Ottawa a week before Christmas (incubating influenza B, which made our first Canadian Christmas rather miserable). This year is the 45^th anniversary of our Canadian lives. I’ve been a resident and citizen of Canada for a little more than half my lifetime. Now I am more proud of being Canadian than of having been Australian.

I never thought I’d live to hear myself say that, but recent actions of the Australian government would have made me ashamed to be Australian if I still were one. The fact that these actions have wide public support makes me aware that I am out of step with prevailing Australian opinion, not for the first time.

When it comes to human rights I’ve put my money where my mouth is throughout my adult life. Amnesty International has been top of my list of causes worth supporting since the 1960s and was intermittently on my list before then, philosophically from medical student days onward. It’s to be expected, therefore, that I oppose Australian policy and practice towards what Australians call asylum seekers. This is a reincarnated version of the White Australia policy of the 1920s and 1930s, a manifestation of bigotry and intolerance, as obscene as the anti-Semitism of the same era. It is profoundly depressing that the policy is supported by a majority of the Australian people. The intelligent ones use weasel words and spurious rationalizations about “fairness” and “queue-jumping” to justify the policy and turn blind eyes to the evil consequences of the practice.

Under the present government, we are no better in Canada.  When it comes to compassion and empathy towards refugees from the brutal Syrian conflict, Canada’s record is deplorable.  It’s covert anti-Islam prejudice.

The Australian government’s policy and practice in the face of the Ebola epidemic is epidemiologically indefensible – an example of the anti-science approach that has characterized the present government, for instance denying the evidence on climate change and its causes. Canada’s policy on the Ebola epidemic, announced a few days later as I was assembling this post,  is the same, flying in the face of science, epidemiology, public health practice, and common sense, catering only to the base instincts of ignorant brutes. When it comes to official responses to the Ebola epidemic, I’m equally appalled by the actions of my old and my new homelands.

All that said, there’s so much to admire and love about Canada and the people who live in this great nation. High on the list is multiculturalism. We have achieved a happy balance and comfortable acceptance of the ethnic and culturally distinct groups that live amicably in Canada. For about 30 years I observed the process close up among classes of medical students. The names below the mug shots of the entering first year medical student classes revealed the process at work as Canada's social demography shifted under the influence of successive waves of refugees and voluntary immigrants.  I had the great privilege and pleasure of many contact hours with the first year class, and I saw the composition of names and appearance of mugshots changing. In 1970 the names and faces reflected the British Isles and France. South Asian names began to appear in the early 1970s, not from the Indian Subcontinent but from Idi Amin's Uganda. Then came Vietnamese boat people, then Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan, followed by Chinese from the PRC and Sikhs, Parsees, Hindus and Moslems from South Asia, and Croats, Bosnians and Serbs when Yugoslavia disintegrated. Only the very topmost layer of intellectually outstanding youngsters survived the rigorous selection process, and they were not only superb students, but lovely young people too.  I was a mentor to selected students and a confidential counsellor to a handful each year; some of these became life-long friends and some of these, about a third, came from cultural backgrounds different from my own, often from a different ethnic group too. I  observed how the class of 84 students bonded into one big happy family during their first year.  A good deal of “assortative mating” went on, not infrequently across ethnic divisions. I’ve formed long-term friendships with enough former students to be confident that many such unions survive intact.  Of course I knew a very small and unrepresentative sample, but I know many provided moral leadership to the ethnic communities from which they came. The children of such unions form a wonderful foundation for the next generation, and give me great confidence and optimism about the future of Canada. Of my reasons for loving Canada, the manifest success of the multiculturalism policy is high on the list. Long may it prosper. As I look at the little school children in the French immersion school at the other end of the block I live on, I see them playing in the playground, taking no notice of differences in skin colour, hair texture, clothing. Some of what I observed among medical students is harder to observe now. The year I officially "retired" the class size which had been pegged at 84 each year began to increase and is now over 200, too many to get to know on first name terms as I was always able to do, too many, probably, to bond into a single large happy family. That was another precious way life was so kind to me, less kind to those who came after me.  Indeed I've had a fortunate life in so many ways, have so much to be grateful for.

Holding my favourite of all the books I've written or edited, the second edition of Public Health and Human Ecology (1997). I smuggled many of my values and beliefs, as well as a great many facts and much good science, into this book.