Canada has ambitious targets of immigration aimed at raising its population from 25 to 40 million by 2020. Behind every immigrant’s statistics, however, is a personal tale. Martin Smith tells his…

It was autumn 2004 and, after three years in North East, the marketing job, Number Two to the managing director, just wasn’t working out.  And, it wasn’t the first time.

It was clear, I had to change jobs — the long hours with little or no reward were just getting me down.

I seriously started to think about my options.  What did the region offer in terms of job prospects? Very little. Another move within the UK? Not if I could help it. I was in my late 40s, married with a young son, what was I to do?

Yes, change job, but what else was directing our thinking?  Simple — the desire for a better standard of living and to spend more time together, as a family.

While our thinking was fuelled by what we wanted out of life as a family, the ultimate decision was about our son. He hated being an only child and the brother or sister he wished for every Christmas would have been yet another medical miracle. We wanted him to have the support of his extended family — cousins of a similar age — who he could grow up with, get to know and who could be there for him (and he for them) in the future. We also wanted to give him better opportunities than we believed were possible in the UK.

We only had one option — we had to move to Canada, or more specifically Aurora, Ontario; hometown to my wife’s brother who was married with two girls a little younger than our son. Also, with my wife’s cousins only an hour away, there would be a huge extended family that we could get to know.

But, what would our families in the UK and, specifically, my elderly parents, think? It was going to be difficult to tell them that we were taking their only grandson a few thousand miles away, especially as they would ever make the trip. To say they took it badly is an understatement but, as ever, they understood the reasons, supported us 100 per cent and sincerely wished us all the happiness in the world while being silently heartbroken.

Having made the decision to move, we were actually very lucky. My wife had lived in Canada from age 18 to 30 and had taken Canadian citizenship, so our son was Canadian too. And, what about me?  Having fallen in love with the country during several visits in the 1980s, I had to apply for Permanent Residency.  Having a Canadian wife and son was obviously going to help, but we were unsure how long it would take.

Thinking of emigrating to Canada?

To be honest, the form filling was something of a nightmare. Obviously we had to provide the expected documents — proof of citizenship, passports, birth certificates and wedding certificate. But we also had to supply address details of everywhere we had lived since the age of 18 and, if you knew us, you’d know how difficult that would be. Our friends have an address book just for us! And, we had to provide photographs of friends who knew us before we were married, were at our wedding and after the wedding. We had to provide details of family members in Canada and proof of how much money we were going to be bringing into the country. I had to visit the Canadian Embassy in London twice. Once to submit all the papers, and again to collect my permanent residency card.

Having heard it could take up to a year, it actually happened really fast – in just three months. This was probably because my wife and son were Canadian citizens and possibly because I’d had an application accepted in 1994 which I had turned down to take an “amazing” opportunity in the UK. We were now in a position to move and decided summer was an ideal time, so that our son could start the new school year in his new country.

Now, of course, we had to sell our house and cars, and resign from our jobs. The challenge was to accomplish all this in five months. We also had to find somewhere to live in Canada and find a school for our son. Oh, and what was I going to do for a living once we arrived in Canada ?

After some nervy opening weeks, the house sold fairly quickly although, having agreed to a price, the purchaser did try some underhand tactics to reduce the price further, knowing we were moving to Canada and had to sell. In fact, we didn’t know if we were going to close on the house until the day of closing, which was quite stressful. The cars also went fairly quickly. Resigning, of course, was delightful and I can still see the look on my MD’s face when I told him.

As for work, I advised my long-standing clients based in Belgium and the United States, who had followed me through thick and thin, that I was once again moving, but this time to Canada. They were delighted for us and, importantly, wanted to maintain our working relationship. So, my job was settled.  I would be a freelance marketing consultant, working from an office in the house. Oh, and the company is named after my son who inspired me to make the bravest decision of my life.

We travelled to Canada for a week in May with the intention of finding somewhere to live and to check out the schools. The fact that we achieved both still amazes us to this day — especially buying the house! I guess a decent deposit helped, but the bank couldn’t have been more helpful. For days afterwards, we kept pinching ourselves to see if it was all real. Having seen a new build that we liked, the purchase had taken just three hours.

We arrived in Canada on July 28, 2005, staying with my wife’s brother for a week until we closed on our house purchase. Frustratingly, we then had to wait another month for our possessions to arrive, as they got caught by a strike at Vancouver, even though they were coming via Montreal. That was probably our only bit of bad luck in the ten months since we decided to move.

Has it all been worthwhile? Yes.

Although it took our son a little longer to settle than we expected, it has all worked out well. He is doing well in school and getting involved in sports and activities that we never would have thought of in the UK — ice hockey, snow-boarding, sailing, kayaking and water skiing to mention a few. Oh, and he is still playing football (or, soccer as it is called in Canada). During his long summer vacation, he spends time at sports camps (day and residential) where he has great fun and meets new friends. While not inexpensive, different sports are much more accessible than in the UK as, being active outdoors, is very much a way of life — whatever the season.

He gets on well with his cousins and we see family as regularly as we want; they are always there for us if we need them.

As for my wife and me, well she hasn’t stopped smiling, having wanted to move back from the day we got married. My consultancy is going well despite the economic downturn, and I am earning more now than ever. Long may it continue.

In our opinion, the cost of living and quality of life in Canada is much better than in the UK. For the first time, we have been able to save and put some money into pension plans. We have a more relaxed attitude to buying what we need, either for the house or ourselves, without having to think hard if we can afford it, and our credit cards aren’t anywhere near their max.

Do we miss living in the UK ? No, and annual visits confirm our opinions. Do we miss our friends and family? Of course. Do we regret moving? Absolutely not, as we are now living the life we always wanted to.

An outsider’s view of Canada and things Canadian…

It was my geography teacher, when I was 17, who gave me my first inkling of what it must be like to be Canadian, when he suggested that Australians had a stronger sense of national identity because they were an island continent. Canadians, on the other hand, have been separated from the most powerful nation on Earth by only a very long, often invisible line.

Forty years and numerous visits to different parts of Canada later, I think he was both right and wrong. On the one hand, no-one can deny that Canadians do share many cultural values, social principles and lifestyle features with their dominant neighbour – Canadians even have their own distinct version of that uniquely American “world” sport known as American football, though hockey remains the national passion.

I'm a stranger here myself!

But on the other hand, the perpetual need to differentiate themselves from the USA seems to have bred in Canadians a patriotic need for differentiation.

So while American consumer and cultural “imperialism” has made strong advances north of the border, Canada’s institutions and ethos of fair-mindedness have always seemed to have more in common with Europe’s liberal democracies.

After all, Canada has banned the death penalty, has, unlike the USA, grassroots universal health care and other social services, doesn’t have its neighbour’s levels of gun crime, and doesn’t indulge in “born again” Christian fundamentalism. Nor does it start wars. Indeed, one British national newspaper commentator suggested not long ago that Canada should join the EU before Turkey, and the notion, if wacky, remains the currency of more than a few blogs.

For me, Canada actually combines some American positives – a sense of can-do and ambition – with the European notion that work is not everything in life. And how important is that in a country with such vast open spaces in which to play and reconnect with nature?

Canadians still pride themselves on being a “vertical mosaic”, as opposed to the American melting pot, of immigrants from many parts of the world, especially the Commonwealth, to the extent that historical tensions between its Anglophone and Francophone communities now seem to be more about language rights than cultural origin. But those big spaces seem to me the greatest leveller.

Visit a campground in Québec, Ontario, or anywhere in this vast land and you’ll struggle to see the difference. Similar people will emerge from the same Winnebagos; they’ll play volleyball in camp and take the same sort of hikes through bear country. They’ll gather round the same barbecues and in all probability drink the same beer and eat the same burgers and wings. And breakfast on blueberry muffins and pancakes smothered with maple syrup.

Canadians seem lured by a sense of adventure spawned by their distinct sense of place and that’s as true of the vast wilderness of northern Québec as it is of pristine territories such as the Yukon.

Yet, for all the fierce sense of independence, Canadians aren’t always as confident as they might be that national identity and cultural sovereignty will prevail – the federal system and historic regionalism mean that provincial governments often jostle for economic parity within Canada. And so, in more lugubrious moments Canadians, may fear the incursion of American mega-corporations in Alberta, the Texas of the north, while BC could assimilate with the US West Coast, Yukon with Alaska, while Ontario would defiantly stand alone, leaving Québec to finally go its own way as a sovereign nation and the rest to fumble along somehow.

“The grunting elephant as bedmate” is a phrase commonly used in Canada, which refers to an important and obvious topic, which everyone is aware of, but isn’t discussed because it is uncomfortable or unpleasant. It usually means the big scary neighbour to the south.

Recently, however, the editor of www.canadianimmigtant.ca, Naeem “Nick” Noorani, used a similar phrase to open a debate on racist attitudes among both “established” and new Canadians.

He wrote: “I was speaking to a group of immigrants when one person of Indian origin came up to me and said, ‘What I don’t like about Canada is the huge number of Chinese people here.’ Obviously he thought that since I was of Indian origin, I would agree with him.

“Instead I replied, ‘I have many Chinese friends and I don’t think like you do. This is Canada. We all live in a multicultural society, and that’s something you should get used to’.”

It cast my mind back to that geography classroom all those years ago. Then, if you said Canada, people thought of Mounties and lumberjacks. Even when Ben Johnson won, and was then stripped of, his Olympic Gold, I don’t think my generation had grasped the multicultural nature of Canada society.

The road is never easy, but Canada has much to be proud of in the way it has welcomed diverse ethnic groups and cultures. Indeed, perhaps the most telling statistic of the 2001 census is that more than 11 million people chose to describe their ethnic origin as Canadian – more than double the number who selected English, French, Scottish or Irish – rather than the fact that there were 30 ethnic groups of 150,000 people, including a million First Nations People and 300,000 Métis.

Long live the Canadian national dream!

L’Étranger