The Quest for an Inclusive City - Metropolis BC

17
Vancouver
There is no parallel in Vancouver to this four-stage settlement story. Firstly, the number of
Tamils who have come to Vancouver is microscopic compared to Toronto. Tamils with professional
qualifications began arriving in very small numbers from the 1950s to the 1980s. Until 1984, there
were less than 20 Tamils arriving each year. In 1984, this increased to 55, in 1989 to 107, and since
the mid-1990s, almost 200 Tamil arrivals per year. (Statistics Canada 2001). These individual and
family immigrants did not gravitate to any one part of the city, and they did not form Tamil
community organizations. After the outbreak of civil war, there was an increase in Tamil immigrants,
(Statistics Canada 2001b), but nothing like the influx that Toronto has experienced. And the
settlement pattern continued to be scattered throughout the metropolitan area rather than concentrated
in one or two neighborhoods. Based on our interviews with Tamils in Vancouver, the community here
is fragmented: both scattered in space, and pursuing individual goals rather than shared community
aspirations.
3. Integration challenges and barriers: the Tamils in Toronto
‘People just don’t recognize our situation, or don’t want to hear it… as a whole, our
voices are not heard’ (Org2).
Given that the majority of Tamil settlers since 1983 have been refugees from a war-torn
society, we may expect significant settlement difficulties. Indeed, in one of the few studies of these
issues in Canada, Ethno-Racial Inequality in the City of Toronto: An Analysis of the 1996 Census,
Michael Ornstein (2000) identifies Tamils as two of the five severely disadvantaged groups relative to
the larger Toronto community in terms of levels of poverty, unemployment, over-representation in
low-skill jobs, low education, and high high-school dropout rates. Thanks to the willingness of our
Tamil interviewees to share their settlement stories, we can translate this statistical analysis into
actual human experiences; we can expand on the list of issues identified by Ornstein; we can add
balance to his grim statistics by drawing attention to some of the strengths of the Tamil community;
and we can provide complexity beyond raw statistical data by teasing out some of the paradoxes of
the Tamil story.
When we asked our interviewees about their hopes and dreams when they arrived, we heard
the same response many times. They had no dreams: their only hope was for safety. Faced with the
struggle for survival, that thought remained paramount.