NO, CANADA

May 18, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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I loved Canada. True, living there made me aware that “snow” is a four-letter word and “cold” is an understatement but the majority of people I met, while reserved, were capable of the occasional warmth, especially when fuelled by alcohol. Their attitudes, while characterized by indifference, were never openly hostile.

Any people whose great gifts to the world are Canadian Football and Curling have to be simultaneously masochistic and mystic, combative and crazy. I was not surprised that the Canadian one-dollar coin is called a “loonie” and (something Trinidadians will appreciate) the two-dollar coin is known as a “toonie”.

Some Americans were completely unaware of what and where Canada is. Marilyn Monroe, blonde star of “Some Like It Hot” admitted, “When they said Canada, I thought it was up in the mountains somewhere.” Chicago Mafioso, Al Capone, confessed, “I don’t even know what street Canada is on.”

Britney Spears recently boasted, “I get to go to a lot of overseas places like Canada.”

In the years I lived and went to University there, the early- and mid-seventies, Canada was trying to find its own identity in a world increasingly dominated by American language, values and, most of all, television.

The Canadian Prime Minister, the charismatic Pierre Trudeau, said, “Americans should never underestimate the constant pressure on Canada which the mere presence of the United States has produced. We’re different people from you and we’re different people because of you. Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt. It should not therefore be expected that this kind of nation, this Canada, should project itself as a mirror image of the United States.”

Having come to terms with the elephant, the tragedy is that Canada now seems to fancy itself a thousand-pound gorilla. Its behaviour towards some of us West Indians who want to visit, do business or spend holidays there is consistent with the question, “Where does a thousand-pound gorilla sleep?”

The answer is, “Anywhere it wants.” When I went for a visitor’s visa at the Canadian Immigration Office in Trinidad a few days ago, King Kong made sure I knew I was not wanted.

I was warned to be there for about 06:30 in the morning. When I arrived the line was already long and quickly lengthening. Think of hot sun getting hotter. Then imagine a stretch of concrete pavement from which, rising almost perpendicularly, is a grass-covered embankment, with two dwarf palm trees, one on either side, with leaves so skimpy that they provide no shade at all. Adorning the junction of the steep embankment and the concrete pavement is a four-inch thick brick border and jutting from its base a five-inch thick concrete skirting.

Men and women of different ages and sizes balanced precariously waiting for the guards to open the gates. I thought of Buchenwald and Belsen, the Nazi concentration camps, with the hopeless and the hopeful crouched wondering when the next cattle car would come. The one good thing about the experience is that it was a great leveler.

If I ever have any delusions of grandeur, all I need to do is to join the line of applicants and supplicants for the privilege of going to Canada for a holiday. This is what they think of you, I said to myself, praying that it would not rain.

The gate opened and we filed inside to sit on a long concrete bench while being harangued by a Security Guard. We then put our documents in plastic bags and stood in line, hopefully waiting while five persons were admitted, the door closed for an interval, then five more and so it went for the whole day.

The crowning humiliation awaited those who were allowed inside. We had to present our documents for inspection by a Trinidadian woman behind a glass window who spoke to each applicant on a loudspeaker system making her comments audible to everyone in the waiting room– about 30 people at a time, maybe more. “This is the wrong document!” “You only have two pages and is three pages. You have to go back and come back again.”

It is normally a bad idea to give a West Indian a microphone and loudspeaker. We “gallery”. We play to the crowd. We perform. We “bring off” on people. The micro phonically enhanced Maestra asked one woman, “You are the lady who give the Immigration Officer trouble?”

In my case, she looked at my application. “Where is your brother and sister names?” I said quietly, “I don’t have any.” She riposted, “I see your children names, but where is their surnames?” I said, “The same as mine. I didn’t think I had to put them down.” “So how I will know what their surname is? Take back your papers, go and put in their surnames and then come back.”

It would have taken me five seconds to do that. I was Number 16 in the line. By the time I left her august presence and returned I was Number 52. Then she found another problem. Her voice echoing in the closed confines of the narrow waiting room, she asked, “Do you have the slip that came with the payment form?” Luckily I did because she continued, “If you didn’t I would have to send you back to the bank because you have the receipt but it doesn’t say how much.” She was enjoying herself and her audience. While she preened and preached, I wondered if this was the Canada that I knew or had it reverted to the one that Chief Dan George described, “When the white man came we had land and they had the bibles; now they have the land and we have the bibles.”

The colonisers have always hidden behind local enforcers. This was no exception.

It is a huge disappointment that Canadians, having been belittled and abused by America, have now become abusers. While the writer of the following description of the modern Canadian is anonymous, the description is increasingly becoming apt and valid, “What is a Canadian? A Canadian is a fellow wearing English tweeds, a Hong Kong shirt and Spanish shoes, who sips Brazilian coffee sweetened with Philippine sugar from a Bavarian cup while nibbling Swiss cheese, sitting at a Danish desk over a Persian rug, after coming home in a German car from an Italian movie… and then writes his Member of Parliament with a Japanese ballpoint pen on French paper, demanding that he do something about foreigners taking away our Canadian jobs.” Time Magazine said, “Canada is one of the planet’s most comfortable, and caring, societies.” That Time seems to have been in the very distant past and refers to a very different People. What I know and suggest that my ‘Readers Digest’ is that some Canadian Immigration Officers used me, and will probably use you, to get their Entertainment Today.

*Tony Deyal was last seen repeating this line by Dale Tallon, “I wouldn’t say it’s cold, but every year Winnipeg’s athlete of the year is an ice fisherman.”

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