Public health and safety guidelines change on a daily basis as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across Canada. Information is conveyed in English, French and sign language, but there’s concern that important and even life-saving information is not being translated for newcomers who don’t comprehensively understand either of Canada’s official languages.
View More Sounding the Alarm Over Canada’s Language Gaps in Pandemic InformationStatistics Canada has released new data from the 2016 census that shows more than any other G8 country, Canada is a nation of immigrants. One…
View More Closing the Immigrant Wage Gap: Is Speaking English Important?
Memorizing adjectives and pronouns did little more than create a resentment for having to learn French in the first place. Meanwhile, speaking the language took…
View More Alberta Needs to Rethink French CurriculumQueenie Lai’s parents often call her a “white girl,” because she likes eating western food. But in fact, though born in Canada, 23-year-old Lai is…
View More ‘Ethnoburbs’: The New Face of Immigrant CitiesTwenty years after voting in Quebec’s referendum on sovereignty, immigrants in the province say cultural relations are improving, but more progress is still needed. In…
View More Quebec Multiculturalism Improves Post-Referendum
Diversity is a major part of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival and it’s no wonder, with almost 200 films being screened from…
View More Spotlighting Diverse Films, Filmmakers at this Year’s Hot Docs
I felt flattered when I received a request from Oxford University Press Canada for permission to include my article “Social disconnect leads to ethnic enclaves”…
View More Grammar over SubstanceReview: The Orenda, by Joseph Boyden, Penguin Canada (Fiction, 2013) It’s easy to keep track of how long my citizenship study guide has been on…
View More Canada Before CanadaThe first significant changes to Canada’s Citizenship Act in almost four decades will make it more difficult for new immigrants to become Canadian citizens, seek…
View More Jumping through hoops to become Canadian
I grew up in Québec. We saw nuns in full habit everywhere: in schools, driving cars, the shopping centre. That Québec … steeped in religion,…
View More Québec’s very problematic Charter proposal