Photo by Vince LaConte

In Toronto’s Chinatown, an average morning goes on as usual, with longtime business owners setting up shop and elderly residents chatting loudly in local bakeries. But underneath the mundanity lies change. When onlookers enter the Chinatown landmark, the famous Dragon City Mall, the sight of its empty shops and corridors with the occasional elderly passersby may be a surprise. Dragon City Mall’s plight is representative of the larger trend that Chinatown is facing: one of demographic decline.

According to the 2021 Neighbourhood Profile, the number of ethnically Chinese people living in Chinatown was the lowest it had been in over a decade, dropping by almost 25 percent since 2011. This means that, after years of being a deeply entrenched and treasured enclave in the city’s downtown, the neighbourhood may be on the verge of a major shift. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Chinatown hasn’t always stood where it is today. It used to be located on York Street before growing larger and spreading north to Elizabeth Street. Later, two thirds of it were razed to make way for Nathan Phillips Square and a new City Hall. Chinese Canadian community leader and restaurateur Jean Lumb campaigned to preserve the remaining third of the neighborhood, which eventually moved to where it is today. Many of the old signs of the Chinatown on Elizabeth Street are still there if you look carefully. Lumb would go on to travel to Vancouver and Calgary to aid in efforts to save Chinatowns there too, the only woman organizer to do so.

And now, after surviving a forced relocation to its current home at Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Chinatown’s Chinese population is not a majority in the neighbourhood. While there are a number of reasons for this, the trend is partially due to the decline of new immigrants moving to the area. When many Chinese immigrants moved to Canada in the late 19th century, most were poor workers from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong seeking new opportunities. The picture today is undoubtedly different. Many new immigrants are students or people coming from upper-class backgrounds. The change in demographic wealth also led to more Chinese immigrants favouring suburban towns over downtown enclaves. Although household income is on the rise in Chinatown, some residents see this as a bittersweet outcome.

Donna, the owner of a local salon called Hair Magic Cut located in the ageing Chinatown Centre mall, has operated her shop for 23 years, raising her kids in the neighbourhood. When asked about the statistical change in Chinatown, she said that while she welcomes any new arrivals to the neighbourhood, the hub of Asian culture that the neighbourhood represents is still deeply important to her.

In an herb shop right across from the salon, the owner, Ms. Zhou, gave another perspective on Chinatown’s past and future. “When I first started up shop in Chinatown 20 years ago, the leading population was the Vietnamese. Once they gained wealth they went north to the suburbs. Now it’s the Fujianese population’s turn. The supermarkets you see around here are all owned by them,” she says. The current demographic decline can be seen as a part of Chinatown’s larger story, one of immigration for opportunity before ultimately graduating to what’s often regarded as a higher status in Toronto society. The changing conditions in Chinatown are partially due to the success of the suburban Chinatowns that arose in the ’90s, namely the City of Markham. In contrast to Toronto’s Chinatown, the amount of Markham residents who identified as Chinese in a survey of visible minorities grew by roughly 40 percent throughout the 2010s, while the facilities and restaurants catering to this population are far newer and greater in number.

However, moving from Chinatown to the suburbs has gotten harder. Due to the rising cost of living, and with it, rising rent over the past decade, Ms. Zhou says fewer young people are inclined to run small businesses like hers.

Still, Chinatown is falling behind its suburban counterparts. Although this can be chalked up as the result of the declining Chinese population in the area, the issue runs deeper than a natural pattern of migration. The rising cost of living is making it harder for the neighbourhood to attract young families. Recent threats of gentrification to its long-standing businesses and restaurants worsen the situation.

Community members are still determined to preserve what’s left of Chinatown. Around the same time developers bought and razed the longstanding Chinatown dim sum restaurant Rol San in 2023, a group of organizers formed a land trust to protect the neighbourhood from further gentrification. To improve business and prioritize the neighbourhood’s culture, the Toronto Chinatown Business Improvement Area (CBIA), formed in 2007, hosts many events and festivals. The CBIA’s annual Toronto Chinatown Festival typically draws over 250,000 visitors, according to their website. (CBIA representatives did not respond to This Magazine’s requests for comment.)

It is clear that Chinatown may never return to its previous status as the city’s pre-eminent centre of Chinese culture. Many different groups have come and gone after successfully searching for opportunity and wealth. Still, Chinatown is losing its ability to sustain working-class people seeking opportunity. The decline of the Chinese population is not the cause of the neighbourhood’s decline; it’s a result of gentrification and the rising cost of living. These issues are causing the neighbourhood to lose its accessibility to newcomers.

A common sentiment organizers working to save Chinatown share is their pride and happiness in the neighbourhood; not only for its prime real estate, or convenience, but for its community. Even now, with the emptying malls and a gradual loss of traditional businesses, there is hope that a piece of Chinatown’s unique history and spirit can still be preserved through the change.

A First Nations-led initiative in Manitoba will receive $19 million from the federal government to set up much-needed diabetes-related foot care services in the communities. The initiative is vital considering numbers showing that First Nations experience diabetes at a rate 4.2 times higher than the general population, but 34 of the 63 nations in the province had no diabetes service.

Alison Loat. Photo courtesy Samara Canada.

Canadians are giving up on their political system. Voting participation is at historic lows; the number of people who vote for the winning party is now routinely outpaced by the number who don’t vote at all. Most young people don’t vote—63 percent of people under age 24 didn’t cast a ballot in 2008—and that bodes ill for the future of Canadian democracy.

Alison Loat, director and co-founder of Samara Canada, is determined to get to the bottom of this increasing political disengagement.

Samara, based in Toronto, was founded in 2008 and has since been dedicated to the study of how Canadian citizens engage, or don’t, with their democracy. Their most attention-grabbing project so far was a series of “exit interviews” with former members of parliament, which uncovered a wide variation in what, exactly, MPs think their jobs are. The foundation has also hosted a series of talks on the future of journalism, and the role it plays in shaping civic life.

“The hope is to create a bit of a community,” Loat says, to “tell the stories of Canada in a compelling way so that citizens will engage with them.”

Loat is currently developing Samara’s next project, the Democracy Index, a report card on the health of Canadian politics and civil society. Expect a few “Needs Improvement” marks—dismal youth voter turnout, for instance—but Loat says the purpose of the index is also to highlight the things that are working well. The point, in the end, is to get citizens talking about the democratic system of which they are a part. “Any way that I can creatively influence and help the development of this country,” Loat says she’ll do it. “Because I think it’s a great place to live.”

— Victoria Salvas

Can $20,000 payments to recent grads prevent Saskatchewan from becoming the "Land of the Living Old"?

It hasn’t been easy being Alberta’s neighbour these last few years. While Canada’s economic wunderkind enjoyed double-digit growth, next-door Saskatchewan saw the near-disappearance of the family farm and watched 35,000 residents in five years flee to other provinces. So when the Conservative Saskatchewan Party swept to power in 2007, promising a $20,000 tuition rebate for recent graduates who settle in the province, it looked like the final desperate act for a province one blogger dubbed “land of the living old.”

The generous rebate “signals to post-secondary graduates from across the country and beyond that Saskatchewan is the best place to establish their careers and pursue their goals,” Saskatchewan’s advanced education, employment and labour minister, John Norris, says. The program originally started up in January 2008, promising rebates to just grads of Saskatchewan universities, but it has since been extended to out-of-province graduates of post-secondary institutions, thanks to the province’s thriving economy. The rebates do have a few catches. The money is paid out gradually over seven years and graduates of shorter, cheaper technical programs actually receive around $3,000 to $6,000. But the biggest catch of all is that the full bonus is available only if students graduated in 2010 or later. Graduates from 2006 are only eligible for a mere $5,000.

For many, though, Saskatchewan offers something better than a generous rebate: jobs. As most provinces panic over rising unemployment, Saskatchewan jobsite saskjobs.ca shows more than 6,000 unfilled jobs. For the approximately 460 out-of-province arrivals from the graduating class of 2008, who received their first cheques this spring just as Canada’s youth unemployment rate hit an 11-year high, Saskatchewan may be just the perfect cure for the recession.

The province has yet to decide how long it will continue with the program and whether the bonus will keep people in the province, especially if Saskatchewan’s economy begins to suffer, is also an open question. But for now it looks like Saskatchewan—which lured many original residents with a bargain of 160 acres for $10—is once again the land where opportunity is as wide open as the prairie. That should at least make for a better slogan.

Illustration by Alexei Vella

Baby boomers: drop the watercolours, back away slowly

In last spring’s flimsy caper comedy Mad Money, an uneasy truth lingered beneath the slapstick thievery and rolling-in-greenbacks hijinks: the fabled baby boomers, now hitting their early 60s, have no idea how to deal with the diminishing returns of their impending senior citizenship. Pardon me if I gloat.

The film opens with Diane Keaton and Ted Danson, a greying upper-class couple with grown children, flitting around their vast, over-decorated home like panicked pelicans, wattles and all. Ted’s character has lost his job, and Diane’s has never worked. They contemplate getting jobs for which they are overqualified (or simply too self-important) to perform, but are so horrified by this prospect that when Diane finally does get a crappy job, her desperation and complete disbelief in her change of fortune leads her to go on a gluttonous crime spree.

Watching Mad Money, it occurred to me that, as a post-boomer, generation X-er, echo baby — choose your own term — I have performed many jobs “beneath” my education or class standing. And so has everybody I know.

In fact, I can’t think of one person from my generation who has not spent at least half of his or her adult life gainfully underemployed — typically by boomers with a third, or less, of our education and credentials. For clarification, I am, according to most demographic standards, a near-boomer. I prefer the term “post-boomer,” thank you, if the B-word must be used.

I was born in 1965, the year traditionally cited as the end of the post-WWII baby boom. But I have always considered this calendar system woefully imprecise. Boomers are a cultural phenomenon — as they like to tell us every single day — and not a demographic one.

A boomer is someone whose first “English Invasion” pop music crush was the Beatles. Mine was the Sex Pistols (and that’s one hell of a telling gulf). A boomer fondly remembers his or her first colour television. A post-boomer remembers the day the cable was hooked up. Boomers were taken to Expo ’67 to get their first taste of culture on a grand scale. Post-boomers were taken to … well, nothing.

One of the first bitter lessons we postboomers learned about the adult world is that once a boomer has all the cake he or she wants (practically free university tuition, full universal health care, bountiful entry-level jobs with minimal qualifications, CUSO), they don’t put the rest of the cake in the freezer for a future sweet tooth — they take a hammer to it and shove the mush down the garberator.

But now boomers are edging toward their golden years and you can see the fear steaming out of day spas and rumbling across golf courses like a charged purple haze.

Naturally, they’ve turned a timeless reality into a fresh business opportunity. Bookstores are packed with how-to-age books for boomers. The ever-resourceful Moses Znaimer has dubbed his own pre-walker days his “zoomer” years and created a magazine to sell the brand. Radio stations are converting to Age of Aquarius nap-time programming, and televisions are flooded with gardening and travel shows.

Sherry Cooper’s bestselling The New Retirement: How It Will Change Our Future (the hubris of the boomers demands that everything they do be declared “new” — what next, The New Death?) attempts to counter boomer mortality anxiety with recipes for “wellness” management and, most important, investment profit maximization (one suspects the two goals are mutually inclusive).

According to sherrycooper.com, “boomers will redefine retirement with great energy and creativity, working well beyond age 65 and mostly by choice…healthy goal-driven boomers will seek purposeful leisure…” Am I the only person who finds that paragraph terrifying?

Working “well beyond age 65”? Swell. That’s great news for the economy, transnational trade, all levels of government, the civil service, the CBC, academia, the arts (I could go on here, but it’s too depressing). Seasons 30 to 40 of The Vinyl Café ought to be a riot.

And what exactly is this futuristic-sounding “purposeful leisure”? I read that quote to a fellow post-boomer artist, and he stopped cold, gulped, and said, “Oh God, now they’re all going to be artists … watercolours are back.”

While I don’t condone violence, I can condone a reasonable, humane culling of the aging herd. They don’t have to actually die, just virtually pass away. And here’s how: if you are a boomer, stop. Just stop. Stop working, stop acquiring, stop micro-managing your (and my) universe, stop sucking the life out of popular culture, stop going outdoors in those ghastly Crocs and Tilley Endurable hats, and, please, stop talking about how you’re eventually going to stop and, instead, stop. Now.

You’ve had a good run, flower children, longer than anybody else’s, but the bloom’s off, it’s last call at Alice’s Café, time to relocate. I hear P.E.I. is nice, and it has a convenient bridge. The kind that locks at night.