To the Editor:
In 1911, Chasia Shumiatcher gathered 10 of her 11 children and followed her husband, Judah, and son, Morris, to Canada. The two men had left Gomel, Belarus, a year earlier to seek a new life, lured by the promise of freedom, land and opportunity.
They traveled overland from Russia to England, boarded a ship in Liverpool, crossed the Atlantic to arrive in Halifax, and then by train to Calgary.
One hundred years later, their extended family - musicians, lawyers, judges, filmmakers, doctors, architects, teachers, businessmen and philanthropists - are scattered over North America. The son who came first, Morris, whose last name was changed by Canada Immigration to Smith, is remembered in the iconic symbol of Calgary, the white Smithbilt cowboy hat, still made in the factory he started.
Chasia lived in Calgary until she died in 1955 learning only some English. No French. She spoke Russian and Yiddish and her oldest grandchildren still speak the language adopted by European Jews from Low German. I am married to one of those grandchildren, and he laughs that his parents spoke Russian only when they didn't want their three sons to know what they were saying.
The story of the Shumiatcher family parallels that of Canada, a scattering of immigrants determined to escape the persecution and hidebound ways of whatever "homeland" they left. The curiosity of this is that the story of one family of Russian Jews is not unique - most second or third-generation Canadians can spin a similar tale.
What is different today is that Chasia Shumiatcher and her children would have been turned away. They were not useful, not fluent in one of Canada's two languages, not educated or skilled or employed. This is the language used now to put a limit on family reunification, in the words of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, quoted by Postmedia News: "We have to calibrate those limits based on our country's economic needs, our fiscal capacity... there have to be practical limits to our generosity."
For this, the architects of Canada's "new" immigration policy, the federal government should hang their heads in shame. Under the surface of fast-tracking scholars and skilled workers, of welcoming the skilled and the professional, lies layers of people this country no longer wants. In other words: tell grandma to stay home, she contributes nothing.
This year's Citizenship Week was an ironic study in contrasts. Canada welcomed almost 5,000 new citizens in special events across the country. Meanwhile, we took the welcome mat out from under the feet of extended families, using the excuse that there is already a million-person backup to get into Canada.
Sense would say fix the system responsible for the waiting list, but that's not the method employed by a mean-spirited government which seeks its mandate from those who are already here and want the door closed.
As someone who discovered, much to her Calgary-born father's chagrin, that in order to get a Canadian passport, his oldest child had to swear out an application for citizenship, I pay attention to such things.
It continues to rankle that of my entire family, I am the only one who, with every passport application, has had to haul out that certificate. Perhaps some explanation is in order: My father, sister and brother were born in Canada. My Irish mother became a Canadian citizen upon her marriage, prior to 1947 when the law was changed. Me? Born to Canadian parents, but in England and thus, part of the great post-war brides-plus-children emigration to Canada.
I am therefore acutely conscious of the exigencies of getting, keeping and valuing Canadian citizenship.
This year even more so, having just finished former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson's new book, Room For All Of Us: Surprising Stories of Loss and Transformation.
Clarkson, herself a refugee and immigrant, details the stories of what she calls people who came "out of cataclysm and catastrophe, not of our own making and found ourselves almost thrown into Canada... Canada took us in, and our real lives began."
This is the Canada in which I grew up - a country that recognizes hardship because living in this climate can be hard and lonely; a country that values the desire for a new life; that welcomed the diasporas: Doukhobors from Russia; those escaping Communist Czechoslovakia and Hungary, those fleeing dictatorship in Chile; boat people from Vietnam; refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia - all of these disparate people contributing to make Canada what it is today.
This is not the Canada we are preserving, certainly not the country we will be leaving for our children if a xenophobic government has its way.
Shame on them.
Catherine Ford, Troy Media Corporation.
