“The Project is Never Complete”
A review of Lost in Canada: An Immigrant’s Second Thoughts by Lydia Perović
In Lost in Canada: An Immigrant’s Second Thoughts, Lydia Perović spends a lot of time wondering about a lot of things. Among her many wonderings, she wants to know why Canadian liberalism is so illiberal and why Toronto is such an alienating place. These are good ideas for a book, even if this book isn’t always good.
This isn’t to say Lost in Canada is a bad book. When Perović hits the nail, she drives it deep. She hammers the pretensions of Canadian liberalism especially hard. This might be because, as an immigrant from Montenegro, she has an appreciation for freedom that born-and-bred Canadians don’t always have. That’s the good of this book and why, if Canadians care to keep their freedoms, they need more outside-insiders to write critical appraisals of today’s orthodoxies.
About liberalism, Perović has much to say. She fled the Balkan wars of the 1990’s in search of a liberal democracy, made a home in Toronto, and now wonders “[h]as Canada ever been liberal?” She paints a convincing picture that what passes as liberalism might instead be a generalized disinterest in other people.
Her case study for liberalism is Toronto, “a place of people who are compelled to work and hustle more than ever, who have stopped reading books, are screen-bound, and increasingly lonely.” People keep to themselves and to their enclaves. (She pulls figures from Statistics Canada that show only five percent of Canadians are in interracial relationships—a far different reality than what corporations portray in advertising.) Developers transform the city landscape. History is reviled and revised. Few try to stop the demolition.
“Nothing is built to last,” she writes. “Buildings, clearly, but more importantly homes, friendships, marriages, jobs, careers. Entire cultures. City streets.” Canada’s most sacred liberal pieties, too, might be an accidental by-product of liberalism’s tendency to recede than advance. “Canadian multiculturalism, an idea we are proud of, in fact functions as widespread mutual indifference.” All those pot shops on Queen Street make indifference so much easier.
The melancholy and self-pity pervading Lost in Canada clouds a key point: Liberalism mixed with apathy is a suicidal draught. Mixed with action and care, it’s a stimulant, a life-giving drink: “I moved here in search of a liberal democracy, only to learn that the project is never complete, and that one can never relax and return to private life, taking various freedoms for granted.” Canadians, and Torontonians in particular, seem far too relaxed, all too sure freedom is secure forever, no effort required.
Having lived in Toronto for twenty years before fleeing for more affordable pastures, I share Perović’s view of Canada’s largest city. She is on-point about the struggles facing Toronto’s renters. Rent for a two-bedroom apartment in a decent neighbourhood in Toronto costs a third of the average Canadian’s salary. A three-bedroom, should you find one available for rent (good luck), costs about the same as a mortgage in the ‘burbs. So move to the ‘burbs. If you can’t stomach the ‘burbs, be content with a two-bedroom shoebox and a million-dollar mortgage.
Whatever Toronto was, it isn’t now. It’s built up, the old corners paved over with another glass tower. Traffic’s hell. Construction is constant. Downtown park space is inadequate for the population. You can find beauty—like a Saturday morning walk on the Island—and good people in those office towers. You can find chaos and beauty in every major city in the world, but the charm of Toronto, including the corny charisma of the now-demolished Honest Ed’s, seems bulldozed weekly to make room for another architect’s attempt at immortality. If you’re rich and family-less, Toronto’s the place for you.
Who’s to blame for Toronto’s slow-motion tragedy? Perović knows there is no easy answer, so she offers no easy answer. Instead, she notices the deepening class divide splitting the city; speculates on the decline of open, principled liberalism; touches, gently, the trouble with Toronto’s many ethnic and cultural enclaves; and mourns an arts scene that, like the Toronto International Film Festival, secures grants and sponsorships but relies on an “exploitative fandom economy” to run its operations.
For all its posturing about being an artistic powerhouse, the arts in Toronto are mostly irrelevant, ignored by everybody except the wealthy, or used by activists to sacralize their unpersuasive politics. Whatever art does exist goes unnoticed, since Canada’s top publications amputated their books and art sections a long time ago. A remnant critical culture dedicates itself to checking passports: making sure a stage play has the right number of minorities, a writer hasn’t appropriated another’s culture, a comedian told an offensive joke. (A rarefied critical culture exists on the fringe of academic journals and MFA circles, and that’s the problem.) Subway newspapers are gone. Free weeklies are defunct. Something’s got to change, and soon, or else other immigrants will have second thoughts and tell their friends and families to stay away from Canada.
Lost in Canada isn’t a single essay; it’s a collection of essays. The decision not to segregate and name the individual essays—but to pretend this book is a single, coherent argument—leaves readers to do the work of collating the pages and determining what’s besides the point. Extended summaries of stories by Alice Munro, a flyover history of Montenegro, close readings of lesser-known Canadian political scientists, and other digressions, hallucinations, and confessions run like fat through the muscle of this book. It isn’t nicely marbled. The gristle gets pushed to the side of the plate.
As I say, Lost in Canada’s most engaging moments come when Perović peers down the coated throat of Canadian liberalism and asks what ails us. Did liberalism change, or did it only realize what it was always going to become? In the shadow of oppressive lockdowns and covid-security measures, Canadians might arrive at Perović’s conclusion: that liberalism isn’t as strong as it claimed to be, and liberals aren’t as liberal as they thought they were. The prognosis and treatment get little space in Lost in Canada. They’re still waiting to be written.
“Man may be born free but in liberal democracies he’s now closely observed and his life tightly structured,” Perović writes. “Governance has spread even to human biological cells; the recent pandemic made that all too obvious.”
Lost in Canada was published by Sutherland House in 2022.
Robert Grant Price is a university and college lecturer and writer.
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