Acceptance!

During the Easter holiday, I spent two weeks in Canada. A delayed flight and a huge jet-lag prevented me to attend the class the following Monday. So instead of writing about the contents of that class, Ms. Kelly asked me to write something about those two weeks, linked to the course obviously.

A few weeks before, we had some discussions in the classroom about Merkel saying the multicultural society has failed. Canada is the contrary and universally known as one of the most multicultural, successful, societies. But why?

The country counts a very high number of immigrants and people of different ethnic origins. With the most recent census, approximately 32% of the citizens said their ethnic origin is Canadian. That's only a third of the total population! Also worth mentioning is that Canada houses around 10 percent of the refugees worldwide. With these numbers, we can state that even a born and bred Canadian is a minority in his own country.

As a result of this, people seem to accept diversity, and even see it as a typical thing for their country. Also the government is very pluralistic, with one of it's most important realizations being the Multiculturality Act (1988), a law which is aimed to preserve and enhance the multiculturality within the country.

While I was there, I was traveling alone. Just booked my flight-tickets, hitchhiked a bit under 1500km and slept were I ended up each night, all low-budget. I know many people don't like this idea of traveling alone, but I can only recommend it. If you ever have the chance, give it a try. Traveling alone is one of the most social things you can do because you're forced to get in contact with other persons instead of just hanging out with the people you already know, and it makes the experience quite intense.
By doing that, I had the chance to meet and speak with a lot of people. It also confirmed some of the points I wrote in the previous paragraph.
More than half of the people I've met there claimed they had a different origin then Canadian. But when asked if they knew a lot of other persons with the same origin, almost everyone claimed they only knew a handful of those people. This is a big difference with how it's here I think. I didn't witness a lot of real ghettoization. Here, I often get the feeling that immigrants like to stay around people from the same country. Why? I'm not sure, but I often think it's because that is the place where they feel accepted.
In Canada, and other countries that share the pluralist way of life, the general acceptance towards differences, not only ethnically but also on subcultures, hobbies,
 and activities, opinions,... , makes people feel a lot less stressed and pressurized I think. There was a huge "live and let live" mentality which made people do what they enjoy, not what society thinks they should enjoy.

Traveling here was a very interesting experience and the biggest difference with all other countries I've been to was that I couldn't find anyone who disliked living there. It's the first time I saw that while traveling. The biggest complains I heard were that the winters can be quite long, or that taxes can be quite high, quickly followed by stating that they still think it's worth it because people get a lot in return for these taxes.
I guess the general acceptance towards others is a key factor in people being happy, because everyone spends less time getting annoyed by others or on the other hand worrying that they could possibly annoy anyone else. That's something we can learn from...