It's thicker for one thing: a solid 122 pages this issue -- though thickened some by the annual "Great Canadian Gift Guide for History Lovers" which is mostly book ads, but a useful display of a lot of the current history releases, including many local works from small publishers not widely publicized elsewhere. There are more feature stories in the new look: nine of them in this issue. And Kovacs, a veteran of the Toronto publishing scene, seems to have recruited some notable names from the southern Ontario freelancer community.
The cover story, by Toronto journalist John Lorinc, a longtime planning and heritage writer, is about "the birth of modern Canada," following the end of racial quotas in immigration in the late 1960s and the start of mass immigration of diverse peoples from the Caribbean, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Lorinc has interviewed many experts on this topic for his story, and it is heartening to see how many are themselves from the multi-cultural mosaic.
Lorinc notes multi-ethnic immigration has always been controversial in Canada. For a long time mass immigration was popular with all major political parties and with Canadians in general. Yet right from the beginning, and flaring up regularly since, there have always been claims that immigrants bring crime, take jobs, and fail to "fit in." As Ujjal Dosanjh, former premier of British Columbia, tells Lorinc, "It's hard to measure the impact of these things... But it happened, right?"
Much more: museums, a new series on heritage buildings, Saskatchewan musicians, Charles Dickens in Canada. You should subscribe.
