I always wonder whether I am really a Canadian as my passport states and whether there are no differences between people like Toronto's mayor David Miller and myself. The following incidents highlight the reason why.
Once, a frantic and hysterical young lady approached me at Toronto's Pearson International Airport trying to find her grandmother who was scheduled to arrive in Toronto from a flight that had landed hours earlier.
She was understandably upset and worried at the same time.
“Could you please check the flight manifest to see whether she has actually boarded the aircraft or whether she is on another plane?'' she pleaded.
Although serving customers is the title of my job and helping people is part of my nature but a line has to be drawn between sympathy and professionalism, between the law and compassion and between the airline's strict guidelines when it comes to privacy and between extending a helping hand.
We are not allowed — under any circumstances — to give out a passenger's information, even to the police. It is against the law. Even the police cannot expect us to cooperate in this regard. They have to go through another department to get the information they need but not from us as customer service representatives.
A revelation
The young lady became upset when I politely explained to her about our passenger privacy guidelines. I was then struck dumb when she then requested to speak to a Canadian.
I thought — until that moment — I was a Canadian as everyone else.
But in her mind, I did not look a real Canadian. My skin colour and accent made her draw the conclusion that I am not a citizen of this great nation. I was someone else — a foreigner and an outsider.
A colleague at the airport reinforced that notion by asking me why I came to Canada, a Christian land, and did not migrate to a Muslim country, instead. In spite of holding a Canadian passport, speaking the language and eating the food, I still looked different in the eyes of my friend.
Although I lived in Canada for more than a decade, I felt at that particular instant a sense of isolation, a feeling of not belonging to the wider community.
— The writer is a Gulf News reader from Canada..
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