Cultural diversity is something we often talk about on the Prairies but, having just returned from Toronto, it is something I am convinced we know little about.
I was in Toronto for a summit about the future of weekly newspapers.
The meetings ended Friday at suppertime but I would have had to pay an additional $1,200 to our national airline to fly home that evening. So, along with several others, I opted to stay past Saturday night to get a cheaper fare.
It seems to me that there is something wrong when people are held hostage this way, and when it is often cheaper to fly out of the country than across it.
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But I digress; I was speaking of cultural diversity. We met a lot of it on our Toronto weekend.
We ate Ethiopian food and Cajun and, had we wished, we could have had French, Italian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or Korean.
We visited the Egyptian exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in company with a father and son whose features were remarkably like those on some of the panels on display.
I toured the Bata Shoe Museum with a German-speaking couple. Our taxi driver Sunday morning was from Somalia. Some of the hotel staff spoke Spanish.
Toronto never sleeps and no matter what time of day, there is traffic whizzing by and people on the streets going somewhere. Or, in the case of some of the street people we encountered, nowhere.
The whole Toronto experience served as a much-needed reminder that there is a big world out there and our little corner is not necessarily the centre of it.
This is not to minimize our problems.
In the prelude to our summit, all of us attending were asked to fill out a questionnaire about what we saw as the problems facing rural weekly newspapers.
The answers astounded me: population decline, loss of rural businesses, smaller advertising base.
That’s the Prairies, I thought. It is, but it’s also rural Canada everywhere.
In coming weeks, a group of students from New Brunswick will be visiting our community and our students will make a return trip to Atlantic Canada.
I wish we could have more of these trips, for students and for their parents and grandparents as well.
The only way to truly appreciate the immensity and the diversity of this country is to get out and experience it.
I would gladly give some of my tax money to a government that would promote cross-country and cross-cultural exchange visits.
