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Mar 26,2006 - Apr 2,2006 |
22 - How Multiculturalism Was Born
When rights and laws began to benefit Italian immigrants who faced hardships
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-12-22
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Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Julian Fantino, Elio Costa
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Friulian Julian Fantino, Chief of the Toronto Police, recounts that his first assignment, in 1969, was to drive Italians away from the sidewalks on Sunday afternoons. "You're one of them, you know how to do it," he would tell Italian-Canadians.
In those years the Blue Laws were still in force, and according to them three or more people who assembled in the open on a Sunday were considered a riotous crowd, usually dispersed with determination by the police. Sundays, in then-puritanical Toronto, were to be devoted to family and prayer, and public bars were closed.
The Italians, on the other hand, spent their Sundays in the few open bars on College Street and St. Clair Avenue, with their ears glued con to short-wave radio to follow their beloved soccer games. After 90 minutes, when the games ended, people began commenting on them. The place of choice was the sidewalk, catching some fresh air just outside the smoky bars, and soccer fans were prone to manifesting their joy or their disappointment in loud voices. The crowd became "riotous", and the police never failed to show up. "But those were not dangerous criminals," says Fantino. "They were just workers and labourers who attended soccer games as a way for completing a week of hard work and beginning the next. I was aware of this. I didn't send them away with harsh words; I just explained that this country had its laws and that everybody had to respect them. They understood and went back inside their bars, chatting about Juventus or Milan."
In the past 15 years or so, Canada had been facing a massive immigration that it was unprepared for. Along with good immigrants come some not so good, but they were easily lumped together, in accordance with the theories of the time about Mediterranean people being "the subjects most inclined towards crime." On the basis of such rudimentary ideas and with laws inadequate to the situation, young cop Fantino had to identify DPs (displaced persons) and WOPs ("without papers"), considered criminals or so.
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