What's life like for immigrants in Canada?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We are considering emmigrating from you UK to Canada, but have heard a number of scare stories that put us off slightly.

Hopefully Canadian Dopers can refute some of these stories.

  1. There is an ethnic “pecking order” in Canada, UK immigrants are generally regarded as being higher in the scale than Native Canadian tribes and lower than Chinese and Canadian citizens.

  2. You can’t get tea (by which I mean English breakfast or similar) in Canada drunk hot with milk.

  3. You cannot buy Heinz baked beans or anything similar, apparently Canadian beans are overcooked and contain lumps of pork fat.

  4. Bread and pies are completely different to those in the UK.

  5. You are frowned upon if you make any kind of positive remark about your country of origin.

That’s all I can remember at present, not all are deal breakers. Maybe the tea is though, I recently spent a week in America and it took ages to find anywhere that could make a decent cup of tea, in the end McDonalds of all places was the best. even the US Starbucks was crap. I can’t live without tea.

2

  1. There is an ethnic pecking order, but it goes (bottom to top) Aboriginals -> everyone else. The problem is worse in the north, and in the prairies. I have heard people who didn’t like Asians, but that is rare and strange. In any case, Englanders are very well liked here.

  2. Perhaps not in a restaurant, but any large store will have an abundance of bagged teas. Tea was very trendy for a while, but it seems to be slowly dieing out now. Most large centres should have a loose-tea shop.

  3. You say anything bad about Canadian baked beans and I’ll come at you with a loaded beaver!

  4. Yes. However, our pies don’t cause food poisoning. You’re in for a treat when you discover our pudding: we don’t put congealed blood in it!

  5. No, unless you are expatriating to show us colonials how it’s done.

3

You know, Canadians have their own worries when they go to the UK. Chips mean something different there!

Good grief, man (or woman). If those are your biggest concerns, you are doing better than a good chunk of Canada’s other immigrants – war refugees and asylum seekers. You have mroe to fear from the winter than prejudice, I think. Last I checked a ton of Canadians still had their British accents,

4

If there’s a pecking order then I didn’t get the memo. What kind of a racist statement is this? Canada has a population containing many diverse cultural and ethnic groups. There have been conflicts between some aboriginal groups and some government agencies regarding things like land claims, taxes, and the like. There will always be xenophobic individuals anywhere, but certainly there is no coordinated discrimination against any particular group in our country.

Every single restaurant and pretty much every fast food outlet has tea. Whether or not you think it tastes the same as back in the UK is up to you, but it is plentiful.

There are about 6 varieties of Heinz baked beans in stores, some with pork and some without, and about a dozen other brands and varieties. Most grocery stores also carry “home made” baked beans.

Stores carry about 20 different brands (times about 20 different varieties) of bread and pies, plus have their own in-store bakeries. Plus there are lots of individual bakeries.

Like fuck. Everyone here is from somewhere else. We thrive on the diversity. I have worked with and have made friends with people from every continent and every religion. We’re all in it together here and have no issues with people talking about the old country.

Whoever told you all of this is very, very mistaken.

5

I think the Canadian Tourist Board should give very serious consideration to making this the new national slogan.

6

As person who migrated from Australia to the US about 10 years ago, I’m wondering why some of these questions are being asked. Air travel across the Atlantic is cheap these days: why not take a week or a fortnight’s holiday, and visit Canada to sample the baked beans, bread and pies?

Though I must say that the bread that is mostly sold in supermarkets in the US is very inferior to Australian (and British) bread: it’s too sweet and soft, and not like proper bread at all, perhaps because they use high-fructose corn syrup to make it. However, you can get specialty breads, like sourdough and rye breads that taste good.

7

Blood pudding is readily available too. Yumm.

8

I haven’t observed anything like this. Ethnic communities here, probably like most places, tend to be tight-knit and a little on the cloistered side, but I haven’t really seen any sort of pecking order or ethnic strata going on any more than you normally see with social classes.

Say what? I buy steeped tea (ordinary Orange Pekoe) with milk every day from my local Tim Horton’s, and they have numerous varieties of bagged tea, including English Breakfast, chamomile, chai, and so on. Most coffee shops have a variety of bagged teas available, and milk is always an option. I can say you will get non-tea drinkers working at some establishments who mistake your tea order and put cream in it instead of milk (yecch), but that’s about it.

Heinz baked beans are available in numerous types: With molasses, with tomato sauce, with maple, and all available with or without a lump of pork. (It’s usually just one little cube about 1/3" square, sitting at the top of the can)

In what way? Pie here refer either to a sweet filled dessert pastry or a savory meat or vegetable pastry (i.e. a pot pie of some variety). I’m not sure how bread could be any different. Most larger supermarkets carry a wide variety of bread to suit your tastes, either pre-packaged or fresh baked and unsliced.

I have to think that someone was having you on with this. We don’t have any real sort of national “CANADA, F*CK YEAH!” pride like you hear about the US having, but we still like it here and are free to say so.

9

WTF? Whoever told you this lot of racist, xenophobic claptrap needs a sound smack upside the head.

1. There is an ethnic “pecking order” in Canada, UK immigrants are generally regarded as being higher in the scale than Native Canadian tribes and lower than Chinese and Canadian citizens.
Over the years, I’ve met tons of immigrants from all over the world… places like Israel, Russia, Portugal, France, Guyana, Trinidad, Cambodia, India, Tanzania, Lebanon, the Phillipines and yes… the UK. For that matter, I’m first-generation Canadian myself, as my mother and her parents immigrated from Portugal back in the 60s.
I’ve yet to see any of my immigrant family, friends or colleagues get treated as if they were sub-par to someone who is Canadian-born or sub-par to someone who immigrated from a different country. Granted, they all came as students or as skilled workers, so the experience might be somewhat different for an unskilled worker or refugee, but most would probably tell you that life is still better for them here than it was at home.

2. You can’t get tea (by which I mean English breakfast or similar) in Canada drunk hot with milk.
Quite the opposite, IME. I’m always offered milk with my tea, unless I’m eating in a Chinese or Japanese restaurant (where plain green tea is the default, as is traditional).
Our posh hotels do a traditional British Afternoon Tea service, too, complete with crumpets and clotted cream and lots of fancy-shmancy varieties of black tea.

3. You cannot buy Heinz baked beans or anything similar, apparently Canadian beans are overcooked and contain lumps of pork fat.
I have a can of Heinz baked beans in my cupboard right now, actually.

4. Bread and pies are completely different to those in the UK.
Define bread. Wonderbread? Crusty white sourdough bread? Baguettes? Ciabatta buns? We also have pita, naan, bagels, and lavash, if that’s what suits your fancy.
As for pies, we do have a smaller selection of savoury pies than you’d find in the UK, but it’s not hard to find a pub with steak and kidney pie on the menu.
Aside from non-porky baked beans, milky tea, and steak and kidney pies, we also have bangers and mash, fish and chips (with mushy peas!), and more curry than you can shake a stick at.
The only British foodstuff I’ve yet to find here is a chip butty… but be damned if I can figure out why anyone would eat one of those in the first place.

5. You are frowned upon if you make any kind of positive remark about your country of origin.
What makes Canada such a wonderful place is the sheer diversity of our population. When we talk about our country being a Cultural Mosaic, we mean it.
In Toronto, we have neighbourhoods named after their immigrant populations - Greektown, Little India, Little Italy, Chinatown, Little Jamaica, and more. In one day, I can go for authentic Chinese dim sum, go shopping for sari fabric in Little India, have goat curry roti for lunch from a West Indian shop, have an espresso at an Italian cafe, grab a pint at the British pub while I watch a football match, and then finish the night with a greasy gyros from Greektown. People are never encouraged to forget where they’re from, and I’ve never seen anyone get grief for saying good things about the old country.
That’s why I’d never live anywhere else in the world… not for all the milky tea in Buckingham Palace.

10

I think maybe the person who told you this was one of those people who starts every sentence with “Well, in England…”, or “This would never happen in England…”, etc. That can get old pretty quick, no matter what country you are referring to and where you are. If people perceive you are feeling superior to them, they generally won’t like that.

Anyways, Canada is a lovely country, but some amount of adjusting and assimilating is necessary when moving to any new place, I think.

11

My in-laws are Brits who emigrated in the late 60’s. They’ve stayed without reservation. Well, stayed until my FIL got transferred to work in the US. At one point they had their British passport, landed immigrant status in Canada and a US green card (work permit). Unfortunately, the lawyer they were paying to maintain their landed immigrant status in Canada failed his obligations and they will have to start again, when they move back to retire.

To your questions:

  1. Immigrants are generally seen as welcome, since they want to be here.

  2. You can find tea more easily here than the US, but it isn’t proper English tea. It will be more similar to a tea you’d get at a Little Chef.
    The phrase “Tea? I’ve just put kettle on.” is unknown here.

  3. Groceries are different. They will take some getting used to. There are ethnic food aisles at most major grocery stores which have a ‘British’ section which may have ‘proper’ beans.

  4. Bread is still easy to find (local bakeries are the best bet). Pies are hard to come by. We picked up a couple of Melton Mowbrays here last month and they were horrible. Proper English Fish and Chips are also hard to come by.

  5. A lot of people are proud of their heritage as well as proud of Canada. Despite being Canadian, many proudly display the flag of their fatherland.
    The phrase “Sod off.” may be an appropriate response to someone who has difficulty hearing positive things about another country. That phrase is uncommon enough that the point is understood, but not taken as vulgar. (BTW, we say “fanny pack” instead of “bum bag”.)

12

The idea that you can’t get English breakfast tea with milk in Canada is pretty funny. I had some for breakfast this morning at my bagel shop in New York City, and Canadians are a hell of a lot more into tea than Americans.

I thought this thread would be about the economy or something. Not whether you can get a common sort of tea that you can get in every English speaking country in the world. It’s Canada, not the moon.

13

Speaking of Canada’s diversity, I was recently surprised to find out the country’s Governor General was Haitian.

14

Yeah, well she’s a Canadian - of Haitian heritage - to us!

And she’s very well liked by the majority of the population, regardless of political partisanship, and completely and utterly void of any ethnic or racial slants.

15

Many years ago, at one particular job I worked at, I fielded some really strange questions from Americans about Canada that I would have thought were a joke if not for the fact that they were dead serious. I’m talking the whole polar bears and igloos and perpetual arctic winter thing. (Honestly, one guy asked if we kept polar bears as pets. When I explained we have more ordinary pets, he even said, “But don’t your dogs like freeze to the poles when they piss on them?”)

Not to call out Americans specifically (the company I worked for didn’t deal with anyone further afield) but it just shows that people all over can have pretty strange ideas about what goes on in other countries.

16

Fifth generation Canadian here. Of British extract. If Walker in Eternity is trying to rile up Canadians, this is just the way to do it . . . call us intolerant in anyway . . .

Except for (sadly) the issues of First Nations people - we seem to do a pretty stellar job of being both sophisticated and accommodating.

17

Be aware that immigration to Quebec has its own rules.

18

Assuming Canadian beans are like American beans, somebody once said that “pork and beans” was the most truthful advertising in the world - there’s a pork and a lot of beans. :slight_smile:

19

There is no ethnic pecking order in Canada. Everyone is exactly equal to everyone else, and everyone in every race is absolutely perfect.

The tea you can buy in grocery stores and in a café is probably different than what you’re used to. Depending on where you live, you might be able to get products from home, though. There is an entire aisle of tea at my local Safeway - I’d hope you’d be able to find something there.

I think the various beans have been covered already. You can always make your own, anyway.

We have the best wheat and flour in the world here. If our bread is different, it’s because it’s better. :slight_smile: The pies are different, though, as far as I know. Sorry.

As touched on earlier, I think the people telling you that may have been bragging on their own country a little too much, until Canadians got sick of it. We love talking with people from other countries and how things are different there; what we’re not especially in love with is people who went out of their way to come to Canada, then seem to only talk about how their country is better than Canada. If your home country was so great, what are you doing here, is my feeling on that.

20

That’s us, the scary part of the Commonwealth.

There’s around 300,000 births in Canada every year. Meanwhile over the past 10 years or so we’ve had about 2,000,000 immigrants arrive. There is historically an affinity for British culture and immigrants but that is quickly fading in the more urban areas.

You can get tea anywhere. Whether or not you’ll like it is probably more dependant on the water than the country. Hell I drink earl grey or orange pekoe at work and home all the time

Go look in the ethnic food section for “British Food” and see what you can find. You can however get Salad Cream and HP Sauce so there’s always that to comfort you.

Possibly…it is a different country after all. Bread tends to be light and airy though it is easy enough to get denser breads at the various grocery stores. Pies, as mentioned, are typically fruit filled deserts. Youc an get meat pies, brydies and others at “Scottish/Irish stores” and fish and chips varies by what kind of fish and where you’re buying it from.

Well I suppose it depends on how much of an ass you’re being at the time.

Make your own.