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Weekend Newsstand: September 5, 2015
In the news today: a protest for refugees, John Tory sponsors one refugee family, and francophones in Toronto
On Friday evening, hundreds of people rallied in Toronto to push Canada to step up and take in more of the refugees whose attempts to flee chaos and violence have led to the “migrant crisis” on European borders. It was organized by the group No One Is illegal. Attendees said the federal government is not doing all it can to help people, many of whom are leaving Syria, and that Canada has a responsibility to accept more refugees. All the three main federal parties have promised to accept similar numbers of refugees, from 10,000 to 25,000, while Germany has already accepted several hundred thousand.
Mayor John Tory will be sponsoring a family of Syrian refugees to come to Canada; he and several others will share the $27,000 cost of privately sponsoring the family. Tory encouraged others to do the same, without mentioning that most Torontonians make so little money (and most Canadians have so little saved) that this could be impossible.
Toronto is well-known as a widely diverse city, but one group that often gets less attention here is francophones. There’s an entire province better suited to providing French-language education and life just next door, after all, and anglophone Canada has not done a particularly good job of ensuring francophone Canadians know their rights and have access to the things they’re entitled to—like French-only education for their children. That’s changing, with two school boards in the city dedicated to providing public French-language education, and it’s surprising both insiders and outsiders with the variety of people being drawn to the opportunity. Quebec expats and recent immigrants from La Mosaïque, “invisible francophones” because of their assimilation into a predominantly English-speaking city, are finding each other and forging new connections and communities for francophones in the city. While there are still issues, like access to secondary school, French-language education shows promise as a key to creating a newly invigorated francophone community in Toronto.