As regular readers of this blog may recall, Professor Wilson and I have recently moved to Toronto, Canada. This post reports a few "person on the street" observations I've made in the past few weeks -- those allergic to diaristic blogging may wish to skip this post! (I hesitate to draw explicit morals about similarities and differences between attitudes of "typical" Canadians and Americans, since my time in the US during the Bush presidency has been largely spent in Ithaca, NY, an eccentric place as American cities go; and, of course, Toronto is the largest city in Canada, and has a 48% immigrant population.)
- The beginning of the academic year on Monday was under cloud over the weekend due to a stall in negotiations between the University and the Steelworkers local (representing most of the University's support staff). Discussions of this matter with locals attending our (semi-suburban) neighborhood fair on Saturday were overwhelmingly and adamantly supportive of our decision not to cross the picket line had it come to that (though it must be said that a mortgage broker and recent evangelical convert in attendance was outspoken on behalf of US-style right wing craziness). (We won hockey tickets at the street fair raffle -- our acculturation begins -- and will be taking our ultra-leftist protest song singing labor unionist commonlaw marriage across the street neighbors (no we didn't plan this!).)
- US citizens are not in the top ten immigrant groups in Toronto, so Professor Wilson and I are a bit of a curiosity. Canadians we meet in casual contexts are often a bit surprised that we've moved here. My typical response when asked why is "to get away from the Republicans". Roughly half of people get it; the other half seem to think of Canada as somehow dreary and the US as more thrilling, and can't understand why anyone would make our move.
- Katrina was on the front page of many local papers for about a week, but has since dropped off. In the week after the hurricane, gas prices climbed 44% (to USD 4.36/g!!!), but have since dropped back to pre-hurricane prices. Newspapers blamed profiteering and endorsed making national the system of Prince Edward Island, in which gas prices are set centrally for the entire month.
- Overheard on the University radio station was a news broadcast detailing the horrible extent of today's violence in Iraq. This was followed by a comment to the effect that the media like to focus on deaths caused by the insurgency, but that one can learn from www.iraqbodycount.net that the vast majority of civilian deaths in Iraq were caused by the US military. The reporters then segued into news to the effect that Germany, France, and Spain had refused to participate in Rumsfeld's plan to militarize the NATO peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, but bemoaned Canada's going along with the US. Bush's "taking responsibility" for the failure to protect NOLA and the Gulf Coast from Katrina was derided: to truly take responsibility would be to resign. One announcer wanted to go down to the US, slap people around and say "you voted for that idiot!" The other announcer pointed out that there was probably massive election fraud, so this response would be inappropriate.
- The undergrad population at the campus at which Professor Wilson and I teach is amazingly diverse in terms of ethnicity -- roughly a quarter of the students in my course are of evident European descent, as compared to roughly four-fifths in a typical undergrad course in the Ivy League schools I inhabited for the last decade. More generally, relations between people of varying ethnicity in Toronto strike me as being considerably less fraught with anxiety than those in the US.
Jealous? -- Benj Hellie
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