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.

Dimitri Nasrallah’s Hotline (Véhicule Press) transports readers to mid-eighties Montreal when weight-loss centres were a burgeoning industry, and “body image” and “health consciousness” were terms just entering the vocabulary of self-care. Muna Heddad, a French teacher by trade, takes a job as a hotline phone operator at meal delivery company Nutri-Fort when no school will hire her. An immigrant escaping the Lebanese Civil War, she has little alternative if she is to provide a semblance of security for her son, Omar, following her husband’s disappearance from the war-torn streets of Beirut.

Nasrallah, who teaches creative writing at Concordia University, elaborated on his decision to set his novel in the heyday of hotlines.

“There’s always an unsophisticated idealism baked into the possibilities of new mediums,” he says. “A little later on, everyone comes to a consensus about usage and conventions. But there’s a window of time in which people are still figuring [out] what can be done, and that was when this era of the hotline became appealing. It’s an obscure technology now, but in its heyday it spoke to that universal need to connect with others in ways we’ve emulated since with the internet and social media.”

Known for his politically charged writing in books like The Bleeds, Niko, and Blackbodying, Hotline sees Nasrallah taking inspiration from his own childhood, articulating some of his mother’s experiences working as a weight-loss call operator.

“The people who call Nutri-Fort’s hotline and speak to Muna experience the shame that comes with fatphobia,” he says. “They’d dedicated themselves to meeting the many expectations Canadian life was throwing at them, and along the way they gained weight, which set them even further back from where they wanted to be—that consensus ideal of happiness that hangs over all of us,” Nasrallah says.

“For Muna, xenophobia brings a similar shame, of not understanding the way the game is played here and the sense of being manipulated by circumstances [she doesn’t] yet understand. That shared sense of shame makes her sympathetic to the voices she counsels on the phone.”

Muna fears that her Quebecois clients struggling with loneliness and bereavement will sever their ties with her if they discover that she is a French-speaking Arab. This balancing act of appearing sympathetic to callers who would not deign to speak to her outside of a professional scenario is the lamentable if commonplace dynamic at the centre of the novel.

“The anxiety over these two forms of visibility—body image and race—were paired together for me by that situation,” Nasrallah explains. “It was only much later as an adult that I began to see how the two were linked and fit into this larger context of unattainable ideals that are a part of North America’s social fabric.” Nasrallah notes that fatphobia and xenophobia are both fears of the body. “Both come from the same intolerances and are hardwired into the social construct. Both devalue how people see themselves.”

At a time when borders are reopening and immigration numbers to Canada are beginning to rise following disincentives to travel, Hotline documents how social issues newcomers face have root causes that have not been completely addressed four decades later.

“In every historical setting in fiction, there has to be some resonance back to the current moment, something that connects the reader to the material and helps organize the story so that parallels emerge and serve to give the narrative layers of meaning,” Nasrallah says. “When we draw from the past, it’s to understand the present moment, and organize some understanding out of the parallels we see.”

Photo courtesy Mifrah Abid

“Where are you from?”

It’s a grating question for many racialized individuals, one that podcaster Mifrah Abid wants to turn on its head.

“I was not born here, so I don’t mind it so much, but I understand the implications of that question,” says the former English lecturer from India. “‘Where are you from?’ as if you don’t belong here.

“I’m going to ask the same question to people—not as a source of shame or embarrassment, but as a source of pride.”

As the host of Across Her Table—the podcast Abid produces with her husband, Javed Shaikh—Abid has been asking that question since spring 2020.

Launched soon after Ontario’s first pandemic lockdown in April 2020, the interview-based podcast features conversations with women, many of whom have Muslim and immigrant or refugee backgrounds.

It was around this time that Abid earned her TESOL certification, and was trying to land a job. With little to do, her husband, an ardent fan of podcasts, suggested they start one.

Abid thought about what she would want as a listener and realized she didn’t hear stories about immigrant, Muslim women—“at least not this intersectionality, all in one place.”

She has since featured pioneering women and community leaders with this background on the show’s first two seasons. A third season is set for release in fall 2021.

She’s interviewed advocates and non-profit founders, such as Rabia Khedr of Disability Without Poverty; Dot Health CEO and founder Huda Idrees; journalist Ginella Massa; and The Great Canadian Baking Show winner Raufikat Oyawoye-Salami.
She’s also invited youth guests to the show, like NASA intern Schanze Sial.

The conversations, at once nuanced and lighthearted, explore the complexities of identity and celebrate the wins of Muslim women.

“[These women] are unabashedly people of colour, they’re immigrants or children of immigrants. They’re also Muslim—some of them visibly Muslim,” says Abid. “But they’re also unapologetically Canadian.”

That these identities are not mutually exclusive is one reason it’s important to tell their stories, Abid explains. “The more stories you hear from one community, the more it normalizes their experience. It’s not foreign anymore,” she says. “What we don’t know, we tend to fear. And what we know, we tend to accept more easily.

“If there are enough stories in pop culture, in writings, in music, in art—if there is enough Muslim representation—people hopefully will be less scared and less fearful [of us too].

“And that, in turn, will probably make Muslims less scared because of how [things] are going nowadays,” she added, alluding to the attack on a Muslim family in London, Ontario, in June 2021.

Now working as an anti-Islamophobia and anti-racism advocate for the Coalition of Muslim Women of KW, Abid says the podcast is an extension of her work.

“Where you’re from is a source of great history, culture, context, tradition—and you bring that to the table,” she says. “You bring that in your cuisine, in your range of experiences and how you can empathize with different people. It’s beautiful.”

Photo by Javid Suleman.

In January, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that restricted immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days, stopped refugee admission for 120 days, and banned all Syrian refugees indefinitely. Days later, a federal judge blocked the ban. That didn’t stop Trump, who unveiled a revised ban in March that continued to prevent immigration from six of the seven countries; two more federal judges have since blocked parts of it.

As the situation continues to unfold, many are calling on the Canadian government to suspend a U.S.-Canada pact called the Safe Third Country Agreement, which stops refugees who arrived in the U.S. first from claiming status in Canada, and vice versa. Zool Suleman, a Vancouver-based immigration, refugee, and citizenship lawyer and advocate against racial profiling and Islamophobia, explains.

Was the Safe Third Country Agreement ever an issue before Trump’s executive order?

There have been studies that show Canada’s immigration and refugee system is much more generous than America’s, that our system allows for much more due process and justice rights, and that our definitions of social groups and refugee conventions are broader. The effect of the agreement was that those who arrived in America first were disadvantaged in the type of refugee claims they could make. So, there was some disquiet before the latest presidential changes in the U.S., but there wasn’t any large galvanized movement.

Do you think Canada should change the agreement?

I think Canada should definitely consider suspending the agreement until it has verifiable guarantees from the U.S. that refugees will get full and fair hearings, access to legal counsel, it will not detail children, it will not separate families. It’s not to say to America that there should never be a Safe Third Country Agreement; it is to say that the current conditions of asylum processing in America are of concern to Canada, and therefore Canada wants to be sure that those individuals who make claims in America and are barred from making claims in Canada, are receiving a full, fair hearing with all of the procedural and legal safeguards that are necessary.

Do you see that suspension happening in the near future?

I am doubtful, because I think the current American administration can be vengeful, and Canada is aware of the economic consequences of seeking a suspension.

What else could Canada be doing to improve the situation?

Canada could take a more liberal view of the exemptions to the agreement. So for instance, if there are individuals who aren’t minors or don’t have family in Canada that perhaps fit into a more a needy exemption—they’re escaping from torture, or they’re escaping from certain kinds of abuse, or they’re escaping or seeking asylum from predominantly Muslim majority countries. Canada could set up additional categories of exemptions. But of course, it would need American co-operation.

Have you been hearing from people in the U.S. looking to come here?

Yes. I would suggest most established refugee and immigration law practitioners have been getting a significant increase in inquiries, but they fall into different groupings. There are people who are in America for a short time, who perhaps initiated a refugee claim, but after the change in administration, fear they will not get a fair hearing. There is a second group that has made refugee claims, has not been successful, and are not feeling like they will get a fair immigration processing. There’s also a group who are undocumented in the sense that they’ve lived there for a very long time and might have American family members, but are feeling like they cannot count on a fair system for immigration determination. These are nationals from Mexico, Central America, India, Asia. We’re seeing more and more of those people, who the Trump administration refers to as the illegal immigrants. That group would be blocked because they would have been in America for a long time.

How big of a role do you think public opinion plays here?

I think the government of the day can help form public opinion, but I don’t think it can overcome public opinion. I am becoming concerned by the number of polls that seem to suggest that Canadians are hitting a point where their generosity is feeling overextended. The government should be having a conversation with Canadians rather than projecting that it is some kind of leader in refugee and immigrant protection, but then not being able to follow through.

What do you think is driving those concerns?

We can’t discount issues of Islamophobia and race. There’s also a sense that to share means there’s less. And a lot of people are too scared about their day-today economic security to get into that dialogue.

CORRECTION: The previous headline for this story incorrectly referred to the Safe Third Country Agreement as the Third Safe Country Agreement. This regrets the error.

The United Nations has declared this month Human Rights Month, with December 10 marking Human Rights Day. Consider it perfect timing: JayU’s fifth-annual human rights film festival kicks off tonight in Toronto, celebrating and visualizing human rights through 12 thought-provoking documentaries.

JayU founder and executive director Gilad Cohen says the program this year is especially holistic and representative of current issues getting coverage in the news, such as immigration, the refugee experience, homelessness, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights.

“We’re seeing a lot of talk lately about immigration and undocumented people, and we tend to think a lot of times this is affecting people in the U.S.,” Cohen says. “I’m excited for tonight to be able to turn that conversation into a local one and speak to someone who has been dealing with those challenges here at home.”

Specifically, the festival is premiering two films that deal with undocumented people and immigration: the Canadian premiere of Don’t Tell Anyone and the world premiere of Stateless, which focuses on a Canadian-born man who lost his citizenship after it was revoked by the government four years ago.

Cohen says attendees can look forward to films that talk about mental health in a more unconventional way. He recommends the film Prison Dogs, which tells the story of New York inmates that train puppies to become service dogs that are then handed over to war veterans suffering from PTSD.

In an effort to diffuse the heavy subject matter that comes with human rights issues and counter those feelings, each screening ends with a Q-and-A that Cohen says he hopes ensures people aren’t leaving the cinema depressed or overwhelmed in the safe space of the cinema, and that people can debrief together.

JayU has also partnered up with over 15 community organizations that will be present at the festival and have been chosen alongside films that deal with similar challenges, such as the AIDS Committee of York Region, Horizons for Youth, and Lifeline Syria.

“I hope that people walk away inspired,” Cohen says. “What we’re hoping is that people take what they feel after the film and take the time to speak to some of these community partners and find ways to contribute to some of the solutions that are already happening here in the city.”

If you go: The festival takes place this weekend, opening tonight at 6 p.m. Tickets are as low as $10 and all access passes are available for $30.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

We Ukrainian-Canadians landed east of Edmonton in 1892 and have never stopped extolling the wisdom of our forebears in choosing to settle on “free lands” in an apparent “wilderness” on which railway track had been fortuitously laid for our benefit. Years of the familiar litany of perseverance, fortitude, and sacrifice followed, and, hey, presto! rolling fields of wheat and canola on farms so big they look like the kolkhozes of Soviet yesteryear. In the cities, we have other fruits of great-great-grandbaba’s resilience: our Ph.D.s and QCs, our SUVs and time-shares, our cabinet ministers and comedians on CBC TV.

We visit the ancestral graves in rural church yards: headstones written in Cyrillic we no longer know how to read. We vote for politicians with Ukrainian last names who send us Easter and Christmas greetings in our community newspapers in Cyrillic—that they can’t read either. We send our kids to Ukrainian dance school (great costumes) because we are so damn colourful. We eat perogies and send money to orphans in Ukraine (there are a lot of them) and wear Remembrance Day poppies because, you know, we’re proud Canadians.

Ever since we Ukrainian-Canadians climbed up from bohunk status to poster kids of multiculturalism in the 1970s, we have scarcely changed our tune.

Just watch the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Museum’s promotional video. In it are horse-drawn wagons, onion-domed churches, a grain elevator, a young woman in a babushka weeding her garden. The amiable narrator in a woolen flat cap tells us that a visit here is “a way for Albertans to learn about their past.” This is substantial hogwash.

The implication is that, prior to the prodigious investment of our labour, the land had been useless, unproductive, and uninhabited. Albertans learn nothing of the fact we took homestead title on land ceded to the Crown by the Cree. They will learn nothing of the remarkable success of Ukrainian-Canadian socialists and Communists in organizing immigrants not on farms but in the packing plants, the mines, the extra gangs on the railways of western Canada.

Next year is the 125th anniversary of those first homesteads in now-legendary Edna-Star settlement east of Edmonton. It’s an ideal opportunity to reboot the narrative, especially since, with the virtual erasure of socialist, suffragist, and anti-racist contributions to that story, the unsuspecting Albertan at the Heritage Village has no idea the “settler” identity is so complex. How a landless family in bare feet on an Edmonton station platform could also be unwitting squatters on Indigenous land. How we now struggle to remember great-grandbaba’s stories of the “Indiany” who were hired on at harvest time, stories told once and never again. How nevertheless we would call this land mother and give thanks for it through our labour in the face of economic despair and dispossession. How some forebears skipped the homestead and worked as ditch-diggers in Edmonton, inspired by Wobblies from Montana to go out on strike. How the settlers’ children became school teachers in the back of beyond, the necessary bridge between ancestral folk customs and more-British-than-thou patriotism.

I could go on. The alternative stories are legion, and I am learning some of them as I prowl through my own family’s “archive,” which includes that ditch-digger, those schoolteachers and even a great-uncle who was deported from Canada as a radical, went back to the ancestral village and later hanged himself. They offer us the wonderful opportunity to turn our attention to our stories not in nostalgia but in critique and re-imagination. The future has the potential to be a whole lot more interesting than our mythologized past.

I’m here—I hope—to meet Anawa, a Cameroonian mother in indefinite detention, and her son, who was born in the facility. Alpha must stay with his mother at all times, even when she’s in the shower. While she carries his weight, she must also live knowing that her daughter, Tracy, not yet 10, is growing up without her in Nigeria. Anawa is imprisoned for a simple, all-too-common reason: coming here, to Canada. She hasn’t been charged with a crime and has not had a trial. She’s held because Cameroon won’t issue travel documents for deportation and Canada will not set her free for apparent fear she’ll disappear.

Anawa’s story is as much a national tragedy as it is the result of a decade of degradation in the manner in which Canada treats those people who flee oppressive circumstance in hope of refuge. A system that—over the past nine years under the federal Conservative government—has gone from bad to worse. It’s the result of policy that continually seeks to remove basic rights to those our federal government considers outsiders. It’s thanks to a persistent messaging campaign to brand people as undesirable—or worse, criminal. Today, the walls of detention centres like the one in Rexdale act to hide the mistreatment of the disenfranchised and promote a culture of fear. A culture that often prevents the mistreated from speaking about their experiences with the media, or anyone.

So I wait.

IT’S A STICKY DAY in early May, and I’m sitting in a slowlyfilling courtroom at the Ontario Court of Appeals. I’m here to watch as the End Immigration Detention Network (EIDN) and a team of lawyers appeal a ruling denying habeas corpus to immigrants in detention. Basically, they want the court to prove that indefinite detention is justified. Even for the experts, the legal framework proves difficult to navigate. “I don’t know every section [of immigration code] anymore,” one of Anawa’s lawyers tells the court. “I used to know it all, but it’s been amended so much I just can’t keep up.”

IF THERE’S BEEN one constant since Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party came to power, it’s change. Policy has changed rapidly and seemingly at random, with the consistent misdirection acting as an obstacle for immigration lawyers and experts. “Every month is a change,” says Loly Rico, the president of the Canadian Council for Refugees, “and every month is a cut.”

In nearly a decade of conservative power, Canada has gained an abysmal record in caring for those seeking asylum—the most egregious of which is arguably our country’s new and unusual habit of indefinitely detaining refugee and immigration claimants without providing any documentation as to why. In fact, in July the United Nations Human Rights Commission Report chastised Canada for this very practice.

Take Anawa’s case. Facing female genital mutilation, she fled Cameroon to Finland, then to the U.K. and, eventually, to Canada. By that time, she was pregnant with Alpha. Lacking official documentation and identification, upon arrival she was put in the detention centre where she and Alpha now live. She has no release date.

Laced through the policy upheaval is also a shift in the tone in which Canada speaks about refugees. This government is openly hostile, introducing terms like “bogus claimants” and “abusing our generosity” to the public lexicon. Rico, once a refugee herself, says “[Refugees] are not coming because of what we have. They’re coming because they need protection.” Syed Hussan of the EIDN echoes that statement: “The idea that Canada, or any international agency, gets to decide who is and who is not worthy of safety is absurd.”

Stripping a claimant’s humanity with such language allows abuses of power to slip by—and become a norm. Anawa’s lawyer, Swathi Sekhari, worries whenever a client speaks to the media. “The [Canadian Border Services Agency] can be quite subversive with their actions,” she says, “I would say even violent.” Guards can punish detainees for speaking out—either in the yard with verbal abuse or, at times, in detention reviews. “All of a sudden you can be declared as being uncooperative,” she adds.

MANY TYPES OF IMMIGRATION have felt the effects of structural decay—including migrant workers and caregivers. Hussan, who’s also with the organization No One Is Illegal, says that to focus on one stream or another is to confuse the problem. “People are just people trying to move,” he says. When people are fleeing oppression their only concern is getting out, and they will choose the path they think is most likely to help. Each stream has its own pitfalls. Migrant workers, for example, don’t have their housing covered under workplace safety laws even though they’re forced to live where they work.

I’M STARTING TO REALIZE I won’t get to speak to Anawa. It’s my third time visiting the detention centre—a place that, in anything but name, is a prison. While I sit on this side of the glass, she’s being herded back from lunch where Alpha may have been playing with a new friend. He has to make new friends a lot. Most of them move out eventually, into a world he doesn’t understand. Each time I’ve gone I’ve seen her warm, welcoming face and his unbridled pent-up energy as he bounds around the visitation area. She corrals him as she tells me she can’t talk. Not today. I’ve been waiting a while, but at least I get to drive home after. For the time being, she’s already there.

In post -9/11 Canada, such incidents are alarmingly common, especially as mainstream society perceptibly shifts toward Islamophobic attitudes—ones that have been encouraged and fostered throughout the federal Conservative government’s near decade reign. Harper’s government, says Jamal, now a 22-year-old international relations graduate from University of British Columbia, is responsible for capitalizing on such Islamophobic sentiments within Canada and turning that fear and hatred into actual policy and law.

From talks of a niqab ban, to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments about finding radicalized teenagers “whether they’re in a mosque, or somewhere else,” the Islamophobic rhetoric of the Conservative government is, today, more overt than ever. The latter comment—implying that mosques could be hubs for violent radicalization— prompted negative reactions and demands for an apology from the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association, and NDP leader Tom Mulcair.

After the attacks on the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January, Harper warned Canadians that an “international jihadist movement,” had declared war on us. It was a statement that undoubtedly spread irrational fears of a foreign threat—ones that could then justify privacy-infringing, human-rights-abusing legislation. After all, what was Harper’s solution to this so-called declaration of war against the West? Promising more anti-terror laws, such as the dangerously problematic Bill C-51 recently been passed into law.

“Bill C-51, under the guise of increased ‘security,’ seeks to criminalize dissent from the general population,” says Jamal. “While it will disproportionately affect many different marginalized groups and activists, Muslims will surely be one of these groups.” Jamal’s concerns are not unfounded, nor uncommon. Along with many outspoken Canadians, human rights groups, such Amnesty International and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, have expressed their concerns over C-51, which will allow surveillance of anyone caught under the broad and vague new definition of terrorism or of sympathizing with terrorists.

“The term terrorism has also become very broad with bill C51,” says Farheen Khan, a NDP MP candidate, advocate and author. “Anything and everything that’s anti-government is now a threat to national security.” Like Jamal, Khan has also experienced Islamophobia. Shortly after 9/11 she was attacked by a man in her apartment building, first in the elevator and then out in the hallway. Khan wears hijab and is, therefore, visibly Muslim. The man told her that “Muslims are being bad in the world and I’ll show you what that means.”. Khan says she got away after a few minutes by pushing the man away and knocking on the first door she saw. She writes about the experience in her book Behind The Veil: A Hijabi’s Journey To Happiness.

Despite mainstream, white perceptions, these types of incidents didn’t simply simmer out after the immediate post-9/11 anti-Muslim paranoia. To respond to the increase in Islamophobic hate crimes, the National Council of Canadian Muslims has created an online hate-crime tracker. Islamophobia, says Khan, is on the rise. “The reason for that is the government legitimizes that behaviour,” she adds. “His [Harper’s] rhetoric suggests that it’s okay for Canadians to behave in a particular way towards a certain group, towards the Muslim community.”

For immigrants looking to become citizens in Canada, the rise of Islamophobia can be discouraging. “The Conservatives under Harper have turned Islamophobia into a legitimate election platform, one that I fear could catapult them into victory,” says Mohamed Aamer, a 20-year-old international student at University of Toronto studying chemistry and neuroscience. Aamer hopes to become eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship. He describes the fear-mongering sentiments echoed by the Conservatives as “Republican-esque,” and insists Harper is pushing an idea that by not voting for the Conservatives a person is somehow voting in favour of Islamic extremism.

Though there is bubbling frustration with the use of Islamophobia as a campaigning tool by the Conservative government, many are setting their sights on October 19, election day, in the hopes that Canadians may begin to reverse some of the damage done

The day of action is organized by the End Immigration Detention network, and comes a few days after the B.C. Coroners Service announced that it will launch an inquest into the death of Lucia Vega Jimenez, who died two months ago after attempting to kill herself while in detention at a Vancouver Airport holding centre.

The death has highlighted the need for a change to the Canadian Immigration laws as Harsha Walia, of No One Is Illegal Vancouver, told The Star “An independent, transparent and public inquest is a necessary first step to shine some light on the secrecy that has surrounded the tragic death of Lucia. However, an inquest alone is not sufficient to address the impunity with which CBSA operates. The devastating consequences of policies like indefinite detention, mandatory detention and administrative detention in Canada need to be scrapped.”

Walia also told the Star that while an independent complaint and investigation process is crucial to the civilian oversight of the CBSA, political and legislative changes are needed to ensure the agency is accountable and transparent to the public.

Canada is the only western country that has no limit to the time an immigrant can be detained. This is a stark contrast to many other countries, such as the U.S. and those in the EU, which have strict laws that limit the maximum time to only 90 days. The Canadian procedure states that as long as the individual in question has a “monthly detention review meeting,” he or she can be detained indefinitely. This has resulted in some people, who cannot be returned to their home country due to circumstances outside their control, being incarcerated for over a decade.

Each city protest will be focusing on different issues within the current system of immigration. Toronto’s protest will concentrate on ending indefinite detention because, says  Tings Chaks, the Toronto protest organizer, it has the largest number of migrant inmates. The Star reports that according to border officials, roughly 600 people are on immigration hold at a given time throughout the year. Of those, it adds, about 10 percent have been detained for over a year.

The petitions demand four major changes to be made to the Immigration Law that would make the system closer to international standards:

Freedom for the wrongly jailed: Release all migrant detainees who have been held for longer than 90 days.

End arbitrary and indefinite detention: Implement a 90-day “presumptive period”. If removal cannot happen within 90 days, immigration detainees must be released. Presumptive periods are recommended by the United Nations, and are the law in the United States and the European Union.

No maximum security holds: Immigration detainees should not be held in maximum security provincial jails; must have access to basic services and be close to family members.

Overhaul the adjudication process: Give migrants fair and full access to legal aid, bail programs and pro bono representation.

We hope the petitions will be enough to convince the government that change is needed, so more extreme protests, such as the 191 migrant detainees who went on hunger strike last year, will no longer be necessary.

Then Ismail joins a writing class at the University of Toronto where he meets Fatima, a girl the age his daughter would have been, who also belongs to his Indian Muslim community. When Fatima’s parents kick her out because they learn she’s queer, Ismail’s near-empty house presents a convenient (if not entirely comfortable) solution. Meanwhile, Celia, a recent widow, moves into the house across the street. Celia, battling her grief and her Portuguese community’s strict rituals of widowhood, finds herself drawn to Ismail. Ismail, who mostly shuns (and is shunned by) his neighbours in Little Portugal, finds he’s less fractured in Celia’s company. As Ismail’s relationship with the two women deepens, his demiexistence gradually fills with ripe, rewarding chaos.

With a quiet, inward-looking analysis of Ismail’s life, Farzana Doctor‘s Six Metres of Pavement asks how mourning can make way for grief when it’s cemented in by guilt, and if memories can be defanged. Simmering in the background is a remarkable portrait of immigrant Toronto. As an Indian in a Portuguese neighbourhood, Ismail is a double immigrant, and the narrative marks the myriad ways Ismail experiences the city as insider-yet-chronic outsider. With this second novel, Doctor confirms her adeptness at burrowing deep beneath the surface of things—and her gift for relating her findings with humour and grace.