When I immigrated to Canada in 1959, it was not without assistance. I was fortunate to have family already in Toronto. Thanks to my brother, Sergio, and my sister, Franca, my family sponsors, I was granted a visa. Sergio had been in Toronto for ten years and had prospered as a modest builder of homes. Franca arrived a few years before me and had a job at a bank.
I was born in 1940 in Polcenigo, in the province of Pordenone, part of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy. My mother, Anna, was widowed at twenty-one. With no money and a lien on her property, she had to leave my older brother, Sergio, in Polcenigo to work as a domestic in Como. She later moved to Rome where she met my father. My sister, Franca, and I were born and for a time we lived in Rome where my father ran a restaurant. Unfortunately, the restaurant went broke and we moved back to Friuli just before I decided to come to Canada.
Rome is very much my home, as much as Polcenigo, but I was driven to Toronto at age eighteen by the success stories of Sergio and Franca. I saw North America as the veritable promised land. With their stories in my head, I applied for a visa at the first opportunity and when I got the instructions to report for a medical checkup at the Canadian Embassy in Rome I was on cloud nine. Truth be told, Canada was just a fuzzy place on the map for me, as it was for most Italians. In our minds, it was simply a part of North America and easily confused with the United States. We all know the difference now but Canada was a young country back then with a just-emerging identity forged in two world wars in which it had fought on behalf of the British Empire.
After my checkup, I went north to the small city of Sacile, which is the main station for the American air base in Aviano, in Pordenone province, known as the Garden of Serenissima, or the Republic of Venice, to say goodbye to my mother. I was buzzing with excitement when I got on that train to begin the longest journey of my life, a grand adventure of which I had dreamed for a long time.
I rode the train west to Genova, Christopher Columbus’s birthplace, and boarded the SS Irpinia, a transatlantic ship built in 1929. It had seen better days. Operated by the famed Grimaldi family, it specialized in carrying immigrants to their new homes, which in my case was Montreal, one of the main ports of entry for passenger ships back then.
I was lucky because the SS Irpinia was small enough to slip up the St. Lawrence River. Bigger transatlantic liners carrying immigrants could not do so. They had to dock in Halifax. Passengers in Halifax were then transferred onto trains specially fitted with uncomfortable wooden seats for the forty-eight-hour journey to Toronto. I heard many stories from Italians and other immigrants of that exhausting trip, first battling seasickness and then the jarring train ride.
For those arriving in Canada in winter, it was a real shock. Not only was the sea rougher in the winter but then they had to break the ice forming on the windowpanes just to see out of the train, and even then there were days when they saw nothing but snow. It was a far cry from sunny Italy. Little wonder these trains were dubbed carri bestiami, or cattle wagons. The traveling conditions were awful. Often there were not enough seats for the immigrants on the train. Their food was bought at the port grocery store before boarding. It consisted mainly of white sliced bread, nothing like the good homemade Italian bread to which they were accustomed.
But I was entering the country at Montreal, and after a ten-day crossing, the SS Irpinia arrived on a beautiful August day in 1959. I could not have been happier. I felt like celebrating. Thirsty for a cold beer, I bought one with the few dollars in my pocket, not thinking for a minute that you might have to be a certain age (twenty-one) to drink alcohol. I was eighteen and I got away with it. Of course, in Europe we start drinking legally at a much younger age.
Montreal seemed vaguely familiar as I explored it. I visited its Cathédral Marie-Reine-du-Monde and I noted to myself that it looked similar to Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. As I admired it, I stopped to chat with a priest and in quite fair Italian he confirmed my impression. It was a quarter-scale replica of the Basilica, which, of course, I had visited often. In the afternoon I took the train to Toronto. Unlike those trains from Nova Scotia, its carriages had comfortable seats and air conditioning and it was a lovely journey. I arrived in Toronto at around 9:30 p.m. and hurried out of the station hoping to meet my family.
No one came to greet me so I grabbed a taxi and in rather poor English gave the driver the address of my uncle’s home on Perth Avenue in west Toronto where my brother and sister, Sergio and Franca, lived. My attempt at English must have been impressive because the taxi driver got into a conversation with me, convinced I was fluent. I played along, limiting my responses to a “yes” from time to time.
At my uncle’s home I found the door open but nobody inside. I learned later that in those days no one locked their doors because crime was almost non-existent in Toronto. Folks actually left money outside their doors to pay the milkman or the baker, who would make home deliveries. I knew I was in the right place when I saw on the piano a photograph of my cousin who at that time was on vacation with her mother in Italy. There was nothing to do but sit and wait so I made myself comfortable on the sofa, turned on the black-and-white TV, and watched an old movie.
An hour or so later the telephone rang. I answered it. It was my sister, Franca, and she obviously thought she was talking to my brother, Sergio.
“Sergio,” she said in a very agitated voice. “We did not find Giancarlo. They all got off the train except him.”
She was so worried and upset it took me quite a while to convince her that it was in fact me on the phone and that I was sitting on the sofa waiting for her at the house. Once she calmed down, she told me that since it was a hot night, they had gone to get ice cream while they were waiting for me. However, my train had arrived ahead of schedule and they weren’t yet back at the station when it came in. I was the first one off the train and, not seeing them, I had jumped into a taxi.
It all ended well and I started adjusting to my new life in Canada. I learned that there were many other Italians, and more arriving every day, especially to Toronto. They came because there was very little left at home. Italy, like many other European countries, had been devastated by the war. Industries were shattered, there were no jobs, and millions of young Italians were forced to emigrate. Most were from the countryside, uneducated but with a strong work ethic and a will to overcome obstacles. We emigrated to the four corners of the earth: Australia, South America, North America, as well as France, Switzerland, and Belgium.
I was a lucky man. I came to Canada because I wanted to, not because I had no choice. Almost a million of us came to Canada over a twenty-year period. At the time the immigration branch at the Canadian Embassy in Italy was staffed with former army officers who had fought in Italy and come to know the people. To them, formal education was not as important as work ethic.
At first, it was very hard for these young Italian immigrants. The first and most important thing for them on arriving in Toronto was to find a job. Any job. In those days, on meeting people, the first question was, “Are you working?” Even before, “How are you?” A job was more important than health. We had no word for “welfare” and even if one had been available, our pride and desire to make a success would not have let us utter it, much less apply for it.
With Toronto starting to grow rapidly, many of us found jobs in construction and factories. We were mostly single and those who were married had left their spouses back home in order to build an economic base before bringing them over. A lot of the men slept four to eight in a room in houses owned by earlier Italian immigrants. They were called bordanti, adapted from the English “room and board.” The lady of the house had to cook for them; do the laundry; and prepare their breakfast, lunches to take on the job, and dinner—in addition to looking after her own family. Such sacrifices were necessary to help the family pay the mortgage.
Slowly the immigrants were joined by their spouses and children or soon-to-be brides. The first dream of young couples was to buy a house, a dream that required untold sacrifices. Everyone worked. Wives worked in factories or as cleaning ladies. They got up early in the morning when it was still dark to take their children to other ladies who for a fee would look after them. Then they went to work for long hours. They returned home in the dark, picked up the children, and went home to do other household chores or prepare for the next day. Their husbands were also working long hours, returning home sometimes when their children were already asleep. I remember one worker telling me that he saw his children only on Sundays. In those days, we did not have weekends. Saturday was just another working day.
The construction industry was not as advanced as it is today and it was seasonal because of the weather. Jobs were scarce and the manpower was plentiful. Wages were low and cheating workers out of their pay was common. Paycheques came every two weeks, on a Friday, but quite often they bounced for insufficient funds and the bank usually took more than a week to communicate this news to the depositor. The upshot for many immigrant workers was that they had put in a month of brutal hours for nothing.
It was all ad hoc. Workers were picked up from assembly points and taken to the construction site in pickup trucks, each one half-covered by a cabin constructed of plywood. The other half of the truck bed was loaded with tools, picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. It was not only unsafe but very uncomfortable especially during the winter. Workers ate their lunches at the site, in the open, regardless of the weather, or in shacks full of tools and unpleasant odours.
Safety on the job was at a minimum with no helmets, no safety shoes, weak scaffolding, and poor shoring in sewer trenches and other excavations. There was no regard for human life and immigrants like us were clearly seen as expendable. On-the-job accidents were frequent, and often fatal. The prevailing view of immigrants extended beyond the construction sites in Toronto, as we soon discovered. On Sundays we used to walk on College Street or St. Clair Avenue but if three or more of us gathered on the sidewalk, we were quickly dispersed by the police on the grounds that we were an “illegal assembly.” To Toronto’s largely white, Anglo-Saxon establishment, Italians were still seen as “the former enemy.” Racism was rampant. We were called all kind of derogatory names: DPs (displaced persons), wops, dagos.
Life and health were fragile. Many prayed for good health because an illness could destroy their meagre savings. In those days, there was no medicare. We had to pay for our own doctors, hospitals, X-rays, and treatment. In some cases, the sick or injured had to resort to the support of relatives or friends.
Working conditions were bad enough that many immigrants would have returned to Italy if they had been able to afford the ticket, although the traumatic experience of their initial voyage was probably another deterring factor. For the most part, however, these were men with strong backs and big hearts. They were not quitters. Whatever life threw at them, they accepted because they truly believed that if they worked hard they could forge a future for themselves and their families. Slowly they adjusted to the climate. They fought for better working conditions and their relentless work ethic and determination eventually won the respect of all Canadians.
Today those Italian immigrants are fully integrated, prosperous and, especially, proud to be Canadians. Some who arrived as almost illiterate, unskilled laborers within a few years became masters of trades. Their productivity and skills were appreciated and valued. Many became contractors. Others built houses and, later, high-rises, and some became big land developers and are among the wealthiest people in Canada.
Similarly, those who went to work in factories often started their own manufacturing enterprises, creating jobs for thousands of Canadians. Still others opened commercial businesses such as fashion boutiques, beauty salons, and restaurants. Italian customs and tastes for wine, pizza, and espresso coffee became part of Toronto’s culture and helped to change the city from a sleepy Victorian town to a truly cosmopolitan city.
All these people were true nation builders and their contribution to the Canadian economy and culture is beyond question today. Ironically, under current rules, most, if not all, of these men and women would not be allowed to immigrate to Canada today. The law now requires knowledge of an official language and a higher education.
Let me emphasize here that I am describing the experience of Italians from about the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s. I am not directly familiar with the experience of people from other parts of Europe who also came to Canada but it is fair to assume they encountered similar situations. Thanks to all their hard work, sacrifices, abilities, and knowledge, Canada today enjoys a strong economy. Those millions of poorly educated, non-English-speaking immigrants laid a solid economic foundation for Canada, which in turn funded all the benefits we enjoy today through our social welfare and health care systems.
Those early immigrants came to Canada asking nothing of the government. They paid for their own health care and their own homes. Public housing was unknown at the time. Yet they were grateful to Canada for the opportunity they were granted to make a new and better life here, and they remain so today.
Many of the older immigrants may resent more recent waves of immigrants when they complain they have it tough. Newcomers to Canada these days can often find public housing and they have access to one of the best socialized medical systems in the world. The only complaint from some is that they have to be three months in the country before they qualify. They are also protected from open discrimination by new human rights legislation that is strictly enforced, and they are shielded from abuse in the workplace by labour laws backed by stiff fines for violations. Each wave of immigrants should thank those who came before them for blazing the trail. None of the improvements they enjoy happened by accident.
I point this out simply to illustrate how far Canada and Ontario have progressed in what really has been a short period of time. It took only a generation or two to secure social justice and benefits for all. It reinforces for me the belief that this great country is one of the best, if not the best in the world.