This insightful editorial from today's Toronto Sun is a good addition to my ongoing series on diversity.
Toronto is a global city now
By SUN MEDIA
Okay, StatsCan. We get it. We get it, we get it, we get it.
Almost half of Toronto's population (46.9%), according to the 2006 census results, is visible minority.
Yawn. That's old news.
It's so old that for years the city erroneously reported on its website that Toronto's visible minority population was greater than 50%, after the Toronto Star erroneously jumped the gun in 1998, wrongly predicting in screaming headlines that would happen by 2000.
In fact, other communities in the GTA have already gone over the 50% mark, with their visible minority populations growing even faster than ours.
The real question is, what does it mean for all of us?
First, many good things -- a diverse workforce able to compete in a global economy, an incredible array of cultural, entertainment and sporting events, great restaurants, exciting stores and businesses offering us food, produce, goods and services from around the world.
Forget the outdated idea of Toronto as a "world-class" city, which speaks to a sense of envy of others and an inferiority complex.
Toronto today is a global city and for all its challenges, a city that works, from its quality of life to its relatively low crime rate to the ability of its citizens to get along.
But diversity has also brought problems and challenges.
Among them, a chronic lack of English as a second language teachers in our schools, contributing to low student achievement, because Ottawa sets immigration policy largely in isolation from Toronto, which, along with the GTA, accepts about half of all immigrants to Canada.
Our school board has foolishly decided to set up a token "Africentric" school for a few hundred students more than a year from now, instead of confronting and addressing an unacceptable, system-wide failure rate of up to 40% for black students. Then the board becomes indignant when one of its own trustees, Josh Matlow, rightly asks how it plans to address similarly high failure rates among students of Portuguese, Hispanic and other origins.
Well? ... How?
We have too many foreign-trained engineers driving cabs, too many foreign-trained doctors not allowed to practice here despite a doctor shortage because we've been slow to recognize their credentials and integrate them into our system.
We avoid, out of misguided notions of political correctness, honest discussions about the reality of racism, the problem of black crime, the resentment many whites -- often immigrants themselves -- feel toward "equity" programs they believe discriminate against them and their children, in order to make up for past sins against others they had nothing to do with.
It's time for honest talk about these issues.
The statistical question is over -- Toronto is a diverse city and its increasing diversity will be marked by every new census.
The challenge now is to make Toronto work for all of us, regardless of where we come from.
