If the commercials are to be believed, there is nothing more Canadian then a Tim Horton’s donut shop where coffee is served to hockey moms and seniors on cross-country road trips.
On the Tim Horton’s on the corner of Van Horne and Victoria in the midst of Montréal’s multicultural neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges, quite another Canadian scene is playing out. At 10pm, the space has been transformed into an immigrant community centre. Over a dozen Filipino men are playing chess while a few tables of Bengali men are reading and discussing the Bengali newspapers.
With three mosques, three temples, 21 synagogues and 15 churches, Côte-des-Neiges has become a cliché for multiculturalism or interculturalism (depending on who’s speaking) substandard housing, and community organizing.
A place of arrival for many, the neighbourhood, originally two francophone villages, in the 19th century, an has seen waves of people come and go. To many people, though, it is home—a crowded home– the most densely populated neighbourhood in Montréal with over 100,000 people, over half who were not born in Canada.
sujatadey 