Troubles In America And The Canadian Immigration Experience

Like many, it pains me to see the greatest and most powerful democracy and the most successful economy on earth being relentlessly attacked by anarchists; and it pains me to see its most vulnerable citizens left unprotected through severe police budget cuts.

My own love of America concretized as I began to live in Canada two decades ago, and I have discovered that in fact I have deep and long ties to the original American Colonies and to literally hundreds if not thousands of American citizens living today.

Canada is often touted as the "obvious" place to move to for dissatisfied Americans and for others who like the idea of North America but not America itself. But that view is usually based on inaccurate perceptions of each country. America has a comparatively much longer and greater experience of immigration. As I have walked the road of Canadian immigration, I will outline those experiences in this article.

I was born in England in the 1960s, of mixed heritage. My late mother was Anglo-Manx and my father is of mixed Afro-Jamaican and western European descent. As a child I was extremely proud of what Britain, America and the Allies had achieved against Adolf Hitler's Nazism, but always saddened that America remained so starkly divided in racial terms. Britain, however, was not without its own serious problems of marginalization and diminution.

As the years progressed and as the idea of emigration became more appealing, I decided on Canada after having visited it from coast to coast. There was little to no Internet grass-roots information then as there is today about daily life in Canada. Nor was Canada's history of Aboriginal Residential Schools, the Chinese Head Tax, the tale of the SS Komogata Maru, its treatment of Viola Desmond (who later emigrated to America) and Canada's historical de facto racial segregation (e.g., in Dresden, Ontario) so widely known then as they are today.

Emigrating to Canada legally in 2000 was a time-consuming, costly and daunting commitment. There were other countries that I could have chosen but the apparent friendliness and seemingly lower volume of racism in Canada were two key factors in my decision. I lost count of how many Canadians told me that my particular ethnic mix would more easily find a home in Canada.

After officially landing, I decided to continue the idea to become a lawyer. At that time the FLSC National Committee on Accreditation determined and handed out what were in truth arbitrary amounts of conversion time based on the perceived reputation of one's university or universities and one's degree class(es).

On the morning of my interview with the FLSC Committee representative I sat in an Ottawa University corridor together with a male Cambridge University law graduate and a female law graduate of Wolverhampton Polytechnic. We were all British citizens but with Canadian rights of residency and employment.

The Cambridge graduate was given two terms of courses to complete, I was given three terms, and our Wolverhampton Polytechnic friend was given a full three years. She later emigrated to the United States, completed a law degree there instead, and now she operates several law offices in America.

The FLSC Committee had explained to us that our law conversion courses were necessary to properly understand the impact of Canada's Charter of Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. However, one of my conversion courses was The Sale of Goods Act, which was near-identical to its English parent and counterpart legislation and which contained nothing impacted by Canada's Charter. I have taught that same law course in England and was very familiar with the subject-matter. Protectionism and additional business for Canadian universities seemed to be the Committee's over-arching motives. Nevertheless, I fortunately had and paid the money to commence my three-term conversion studies at Ottawa University in 2001.

Aside from the challenges at Ottawa University of navigating an environment full of young cliquish students who had little employment experience or adult life experience, noticeable too was the lack of respect for hard-back law books that I loaned them, which they physically defaced and which they returned long past due. The interest of Ottawa University students in me seemed largely to lie in determining whether I could connect them to a lucrative job in Europe. Later, even apparent Law School "friends" reneged on their commitments not to favour others who had clearly treated me in a racially prejudiced manner.

In retrospect, I have to credit every British and German university that I have attended, and their student bodies, with generally displaying a far more sincere welcome to all foreign / non-indigenous students.

In 2002, with my being a former London police officer, I was intrigued by a federal government jobs fair that was being hosted on the Ottawa University campus. So I paid it a visit and enquired about law-related public sector positions and careers. Canada's Prime Minister at this time was Jean Chretien, a francophone Liberal originating from Shawinigan, Quebec. Repeatedly, I was told by (white, female and francophone) federal employees there that they preferred candidates who spoke primarily Quebecois-French. That was my second taste of institutionalized Canadian protectionism.

While at Ottawa University, I also saw that University's faculty flagrantly breach its own rules on amanuensis and I also regularly saw the mostly francophone staff misinform and misdirect "foreign" immigrant law conversion students with sometimes near-catastrophic consequences for the successful completion of their law courses. Consequently, I cannot and do not recommend Ottawa University to anyone. In fairness and through my dealings, I have been quite impressed with the UNB Law School at Fredericton.

Most probably to our eternal good fortune, the University of Ottawa informed we law conversion students that we would not become its alumni after we had completed our law conversion course there.

Beyond that, I have also seen numerous jobs advertised through, for example, Randstad Canada state "Canadian employment experience only required." It is difficult to understand how, for example, carrying packages in Germany differs in any material way to carrying packages in Canada. Others will no doubt have seen similar advertisements. I understand that that xenophobic practice has only recently been prohibited in Ontario under human rights laws, although it might still be lawful elsewhere in Canada.

In the Canadian workplace, incompetence, xenophobia, outright racism, spite, petty-mindedness, gossiping and scape-goating are rife. To corroborate some of those points, take a look at this documentary made when the Canadian economy was performing comparatively well circa 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLEwNZ6qkms . Canadian employment law reports, unionized labour law reports and human rights law reports read more like fictionalized horror stories than true accounts of real-life events. Every would-be immigrant to Canada should be made to read at least a selection of those reports before committing to the country.

As an outline, my own Canadian workplace experience includes: white female law office assistants adopting a black American drawl when talking to me; alcoholic employers alleging to staff subordinate to me that I was misrepresenting communications I had received from the said employer (until the subordinate employee saw the applicable message from the employer); being deliberately given an inaccurate workplace assessment, in order to stop me requesting a pay rise or moving to another employer because I was a cash-cow for that employer; being targeted because I would not do voluminous extra unpaid work for the idle mistress of a director, who curiously failed to document certain supplier contracts as required; having to sit around a lunch table while so-called "feminists" assassinated the characters of male lawyers they hated and who then hypocritically discussed the size of penises.

The one single person to whom, without doubt, I owe credit and perpetual thanks and respect for their efforts to assist me in the Canadian workplace is the late Ottawa lawyer Thomas McDougall, Q.C. May he rest in peace.

Over the years, we in Canada have also watched the aggressive drive by militant feminist groups to promote the hiring or promotion of women over men - a discrimination that is claimed will redress the patriarchy of previous times. Here is one example: https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/05/22/eight-women-named-ontario-court-judges.html . Here is another example: https://lso.ca/about-lso/governance/ceo-senior-management-team .

Fair treatment for all should be our communal goal; no reasonable person could dispute that.

But it is not my understanding that men of colour ever held the power of patriarchy over the majority of Canadian women such that men of colour or indeed any innocent man living today should now be routinely marginalized in Canadian hiring and career promotion situations. Despite that, the creation of all-women business and networking clubs across Canada has been prolific (e.g., https://wlao.on.ca/ and https://www.ladieswholaunch.org/toronto-3); and reverse gender discrimination has been made the new religion for all Canadians to unquestioningly accept and for none to dare criticize as being sexist, when it clearly is sexist.

In previous decades it was the high cost of Canadian living that suppressed national birth rates, but today it is the trenchant antipathy between Canada's reproductive genders that compels mass immigration in order to keep the country adequately populated with sufficient future tax-payers.

Now we see the federal Liberal Canadian government promoting special funding for black entrepreneurs that smacks of more reverse discrimination (see https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-black-entrepreneurs-1.5717297). Canada's governments need to develop far better and more sophisticated approaches.

Canada is thoroughly awash with and runs on dangerous reverse discrimination as its general mode of operation, and discrimination in Canada is not merely an unwelcome exception. And the law conversion course I discussed above also shows how arbitrariness features significantly in Canada. Discrimination and protectionism dwell at the core of Canadian public policy; they are even written into the heart of a Liberal Party-inspired Charter that was in no party's election manifesto in 1980 or since.

Canada has shown me and other immigrants many things.

Through my own experiences in Canada, I see that institutionalized protectionism has continued to marginalize the opportunities and aspirations of new Canadian immigrants.

I see that a constitutionally entrenched Official Bilingualism, which has no democratic validity, in practice discriminates in favour of an 18% francophone minority and against Canada's majority 82% Anglophones - who pay the bulk of the nation's taxes and who comprise the country's electoral majority.

Apropos "official language parity" in Canada, I have elsewhere through LinkedIn posts outlined the 1497 English discovery of Canada to be and the post-1759 Battle of Quebec British introduction of democracy to Canada. There simply is nothing but the 1960s Liberal-sponsored "co-founding nations" propaganda to substantiate any alleged historical claim for national language parity by Canada's minority francophones. And the pro-democratic and economic contributions of more recent immigrants to Canada legitimately challenge the notion of ever keeping Quebecois-French as one of the country's two official languages.

Routine differential treatment of new immigrant "foreign" university students that resulted in near-catastrophes for the students' prospects has been visible.

In the time I have lived in Canada overt xenophobia in employment and recruiting situations has undoubtedly destroyed the hopes and dreams of many new Canadian immigrants. No doubt thousands of such immigrants have either moved on to third countries or have returned to their home countries carrying anguish with them.

We see that institutionalized gender preferences in Canada routinely discriminate against men (whether or not they are innocent or guilty of any misogyny), and critical thinkers ask themselves at what point are equilibrium, balance and fairness going to be restored? Who shall be permitted to decide that? Or has Canada now institutionalized a system whereby its government unilaterally and arbitrarily selects a minority group to receive preferential treatment for an undefined period of time?

And yet Canada as a nation is proud to constantly brag of its allegedly warm welcome, of its inclusiveness, and of its ability to be colour-blind. And Canada is forever keen to define itself in opposition to the United States and to the United Kingdom, an approach that unites minority francophones and Canada's left-wingers and that separates Anglophones from each other either side of the US-Canada border.

To virtually all constructive criticism of Canada, Canadians typically reply: "Leave if you don't like it." I have yet to hear one single Canadian respond: "Those are valid suggestions. How might we make them work to improve Canada?" And one sees only very few minor improvements in Canada; there is no grand unified vision of how to transform Canada into a functional majority-will democracy from where Canada presently is.

Canadians will also often brag about the alleged superiority of their public healthcare system in comparison to America, and other countries.

Emergency health care in each Canadian jurisdiction has been free to all since roughly the late 1940s and 1950s. But the treatment of chronic health issues is, like America, through private insurance or directly from one's own pocket and so can be very costly. There is no true universal health care system in Canada, largely because the federal and provincial governments cannot co-ordinate one, although Canadian jurisdictions do have reciprocity agreements in place.

Private medicine in Canada is largely prohibited by legislation and access to healthcare and the quality of Canadian healthcare have both declined markedly as immigration levels have soared and while little to nothing has been done to correspondingly scale up the nation's infrastructure.

There is no doubt in my mind that Australasia and the United Kingdom offer far superior public healthcare systems to their residents; and that America can offer the most advanced medical treatments available in the world to those covered by private insurance, which is roughly about 75% of the American population.

Now, to America.

We accept that America still has very serious social challenges to face, but we know that real opportunities and real inclusion in the broader economic life of the country are far greater in the United States than they are so narrowly available in Canada. It is not news to Canadians to publicly state that the better jobs and appointments in Canada mostly come through political patronage and nepotism.

To build a life or a business in Canada over the past 10 or so years has been, in the majority of cases, essentially to build one on a knife's edge. Outside of government employment, precarious is the only way for most people to describe Canada's private sector opportunities. In respect of business terminations, COVID-19 Canadian regulations have finished off what sky-rocketing Canadian taxes, hydro-electricity charges and other exorbitant operating and living costs did not quite achieve before.

It is no accident that roughly two million Canadians (about 5.5% of the total Canadian population) now live and work permanently in the United States. The equivalent would be about 18 million Americans living in Canada, and Canada's total population is about 37 millions.

When the border is open, I tend to visit the United States as much as I can. Nowhere else on this continent have I received and do I receive such sincerely warm welcomes as I receive in the U.S. The last time I experienced anything remotely racist in America was in Seattle in 1994. The choice, quality and competitive cost of services and goods in the U.S. tend to be phenomenal. At a basic level, it means, for example, that American consumers can immediately find an affordable range of narrow or wide fitting clothing to fit them.

Admittedly, Switzerland comes very close to America in terms of living standards, as does Singapore no doubt, but neither of those countries is a true immigration country in the style of America; and nor is Canada in truth, with so many closed doors to newcomers based on its systemic reverse discrimination and a protectionism that either excludes or marginalizes those newcomers who chose Canada over other countries. When compared to America, Canada's foray into mass immigration is new and is largely chaotic in practice.

Pictured above is Dr. Edward Bartholomew Bancroft, born 1744, Westfield, Massachusetts; a spy during the American Revolutionary War, and my paternal 5 x great-grandfather. Other familial connections to America include maternal ancestral relative Mathew Craddock, first Governor of the State of Massachusetts and key in the foundation of Harvard University, as well as an array of American pioneer-settlers in the American Colonies and Utah and immigrants on both parental sides since the late 17th century to the present day. My American cousins of all degrees inhabit virtually every major American city, and I am proud of that fact and of my extensive biological ties to the United States.

As a Canadian insider, my intention through this article is to share with those beyond Canada's borders what I personally know to be the typical experiences of a post-graduate immigrant to Canada. Such information was not available to me, and it is clear that immigration applicants are not given an honest picture of immigration to, re-licensing in and life in Canada. It is also to remind readers of the generally greater life chances in America. So, despite all of the recent unrest in the United States, in my view America still remains the greatest democracy and the place of greatest opportunities in both the Americas and throughout the world.

Because my philosophy is to keep moving forward, perhaps one day I will find myself enjoying America's fruits too. We can all live in hope.