MADRID: Moe Attalah is a jolly man with an infectious laugh and the biggest heart of anyone you’ll meet.
He’s also the proudest Canadian you’ll ever come across.
“I came to Canada in 1976 with C$13 [Dh36.81 at today’s rates]in my pocket,” he recalls. “That was it.”
At the time he was 32, a Christian who had owned three restaurants in a Muslim quarter of Beirut, a city at war within itself. The killing and fighting was too close. His brother, Samir, was a journalist working in Montreal. Attalah packed his suitcase and fled his homeland.
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One the first day he arrived, he got a job working as a waiter for C$1 an hour.
“Canada gave me everything,” he says. “It allowed me to be a successful businessman, to have a family and children, and I am so proud to be a Canadian.”
Attalah is now retired from owning a chain of restaurants and catering outlets in the west end of Ottawa. And during that time, he has raised and given away countless thousands of dollars to charities and needy causes.
“Canada allowed me to be successful,” Attalah says. “I am only passing on what came to me.”
Right now, a little over six million Canadians were born somewhere else — one person in five nationally.
Today, Canada turns 150. But through its history, it has opened its doors to immigrants and refugees, welcoming them with open arms and offering open spaces across the world’s second-largest country to settle.
‘Draft dodgers’
According to the Canadian government, there have been at least 30 separate waves of migration to the nation that shares the world’s longest undefended border with the United States to its south. Indeed, in 1812, five decades before Canada’s confederation, the US and British fought a brief but bloody war along the borders of what is now the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Now, however, the disagreements are settled more on ice rinks, basketball courts or baseball diamonds in a fierce sporting rivalry between the two nations.
But there have been tensions.
“I didn’t want to be forced to join a military and fight in a war that I didn’t believe in,” Toby Kaufmann recalls.
Today, the 70-year-old former teacher and erstwhile writer lives in Pickering, a bedroom community in the eastern suburbs of Toronto.
In 1965, he was a high-school graduate in Chicago and his number had just come up in the US military draft. He has notice to turn up to US Army basic training and would most likely be shipped off to fight in the jungles of Vietnam.
“The US considered us criminals, draft dodgers,” he recalls. “Back then, there were 40,000 of us living in Canada. The Canadians didn’t consider us criminals. We were heroes for not fighting. We were just like other immigrants.”
For more than 20 years Kaufman couldn’t return home — he faced immediate arrest for stepping foot on US soil.
Instead, he worked in a car factory, studied, went to college and settled into his new life just 100 kilometres from the homeland that wanted him to fight and kill.
“Canada is a peaceful nation. Yes, it went and fought in Afghanistan but [then Prime Minister Jean Chretien] refused to invade Iraq,” he said.
Helping other nations
“Its political leaders seem far more attuned to helping other nations and creating the conditions for social harmony rather than telling other countries around the world how to live their lives.”
After the Second World War, Canada opened its borders to 250,000 displaced people from across eastern Europe.
In 1956, when the Soviet bloc cracked down in Hungary, 37,000 were welcomed into Canada. Similarly, when Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia, 11,000 migrated there.
After tens of thousands were displaced in the aftermath of the collapse of South Vietnam, Canada took in boat people. It’s the only nation to receive a United Nations Refugee Agency Nansan award for taking in 60,000 boat people.
And when Sri Lanka was ripped apart in Civil War, 114,000 conflict refugees made Canada home. At the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, Canada offered to take in 40,000 annually — with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcoming Syrians as they landed at Toronto airport.
