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Ontario Minister Michael Coteau. Photo by Tom Mathew.
I’m early for my interview with Ontario Minister Michael Coteau, so I sit and wait at the Tim Hortons around the corner from his Queen’s Park office in downtown Toronto. In the span of 20 minutes (over a coffee and some potato wedges), I hear at least three different languages spoken, and see people of all races, ages and ethnic backgrounds, from the older Persian woman who asks me for help connecting to the WiFi, to the diverse group of schoolboys frantically gathering quarters to buy the franchise’s collectible hockey cards. It’s your typical Tim Hortons. Typical Canada.
Minister Coteau’s experience growing up in Toronto’s multicultural neighbourhood of Flemingdon Park in the 1980s mirrors what is now common in the country’s cities (and Tim Hortons alike): different cultures, different tongues and different faiths, living side by side.
As I sit down with Minister Coteau to chat about his Canadian journey, starting with his early upbringing, I’m struck by his extensive childhood memories; they obviously made a big mark. “My neighbourhood was made up of people from around the world. We had the Chessmans from Holland, the De La Cruzes from the Philippines, the Alafoginannis and Tonis from Greece, the Niles from Barbados and the Yus from Korea, to name a few,” Coteau recalls. He himself was born in Huddersfield, England, to a British mother and father from the small Caribbean island of Grenada. They immigrated to Canada in 1976 when he was a child.
Growing up multicultural
For Coteau, the description of multiculturalism — a cultural mosaic of diverse ethnic groups, languages and cultures living harmoniously as one — is a wonderful picture, but a one-dimensional one that misses a more nuanced reality, back then and still today. After rattling off the names of his old neighbours, he explains to me, in the same breath, that while the multicultural neighbourhood of his childhood allowed him to learn about and get along with people from different cultures, it also was the beginnings of him seeing separations taking place as a result of ethnic and socio-economic status.
“I saw streaming take place, although at the time I didn’t know what it was,” Coteau says. He’s referring to the practice that separates middle school students into university-bound academic level classes or the more hands-on applied options.
“Kids were going to different classes, different schools, so your observation starts to kick in, you see the separation starting to happen [between classmates of different ethnic backgrounds], but you can’t explain it, you don’t know the technical terms for it,” he says.
Other Flemingdon Park friends of Coteau’s were increasingly getting into trouble with the law, dropping out of high school and worse. It wasn’t until a friend of his father’s gave him $40 to apply to university that Coteau even considered post-secondary education as an option available to him.
He applied to Carleton University with a paltry 62 per cent average. He was accepted thanks to an open-door policy at the university at the time that allowed all students entry to Carleton, but restricted further study to those who did well during their first year.
And so Coteau was determined to do well. He studied political science and Canadian history, while also studying the university system and how to succeed within it. He got involved in student council, a fraternity and student politics, becoming president of the Carleton Young Liberals. It’s where he also met his future wife, Lori.
Before teaching English in South Korea for two years, Coteau kicked off his career as an assistant for a government office after completing university. But he had always had a passion for politics, sparked by an incident in his youth when he called on local politicians to protect kids who were playing on an unsafe outdoor pool, icing over in wintertime. So, after returning home to Canada, he took his first step into the political ring himself, as a school board trustee.
Becoming political
As a trustee and later vice-chair of the Toronto District School Board, Coteau worked to support after-school programs for children and brought forward nutritional changes that increased awareness around student hunger. The impact he made as a trustee for eight years fuelled his political desire further, and he ran in the general election in 2011 to become a member of provincial parliament (MPP). He won, representing the riding of Don Valley East, which includes Flemingdon Park, the very neighbourhood he grew up in.
The junior MPP was promptly given the additional duty of parliamentary assistant to the minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport, and, in 2013, he became a minister himself, taking on the portfolio of Citizenship and Immigration first, then back to Tourism, Culture and Sport.
Re-elected in 2014, today Coteau is minister of Child and Youth Services and the minister responsible for Anti-Racism. He leads the Anti-Racism Directorate, formed in 2016 to increase public education and awareness of racism, as well as to combat the systemic racism that exists in government policies, programs and services. They are not easy portfolios, but Coteau, a father of two daughters, is leading them with a fighting spirit and a drive to change things not only for his kids — his “most important mandate” — but all kids in Canada, regardless of their ethnic background.
“Life is kind of like a game of monopoly,” Coteau says, responding to my question on what is driving him to fight injustice and racism. “Imagine playing a game of monopoly and all the property has been already bought, and they say to you, ‘Now you can play.’ So you jump on the board. Now, what’s going to happen to you is, eventually, you’re done. You can’t win.”
He goes on. “Society is the same, everything is bought. And you have groups of people — Blacks, ethnic communities, Indigenous communities — who want to play, but the system is set up in a certain way that it’s difficult to move on the board, let alone understand the rules. I want to level the playing field for racialized communities so they can have a better opportunity to play. It’s just about fairness.”
Putting a dent in racism
As a politician, Coteau knows he may only have a short window to enact change, and he acknowledges that his mandate to end systemic racism is impossible. “I can’t just stop racism,” he admits, emphatically, “but what I can do, is have a real dent in its trajectory, and call it out for what it is.”
His efforts have included the first-ever address to the Economic Club of Canada on the issue of racism in the country, and introducing Ontario’s first-ever piece of legislation addressing anti-racism, on top of all his efforts over the years in advocating for free tuition for low-income families, the collection of race-based data in schools, and the empowerment of racialized young people through mentorship and other programs.
“I still go into rooms and see myself as the only Black person in the room,” Coteau admits. But he never feels like a token, and his efforts speak for themselves. “I want to be able to walk out of here knowing I did the best job possible to have people be able to better understand each other.”
Last year, the Anti-Racism Directorate hosted 10 public community meetings across the province to hear Ontarians’ perspectives and recommendations for fighting systemic racism. I was at one of those meetings and remembered the hundreds of people, the nuanced dynamics, and the heated and hurt emotions that packed themselves into that small Regent Park auditorium on a rainy day.
As messy and chaotic as some say those initial meetings were, it’s hard to imagine them having gone otherwise. They were a raw, uncomfortable yet invaluable opportunity for people to try to understand each other. It’s in meetings like these where that one-dimensional notion of multiculturalism gets honest, where people from different ethnic and economic backgrounds can have their voices heard, sharing their experiences of unfair practices and racism, even in a country like Canada.
“At the end of the day, people want to be here [in Canada]. To feel safe. To be able to raise a family. They want to be able to buy a house and maybe go on vacation once in a while. Retire peacefully. Make sure their kids are set up for success,” Coteau says. “There may be differences [among us], but we all want the same things.”
In hopes of encouraging newcomers to feel more comfortable speaking about the struggles they’ve encountered, the Indian-born author wrote The Better Monsters, her debut book of poetry.
Indian-born Sukhjit Singh is one of those people who has an upbeat, positive attitude that makes you think anything is possible. It’s why he was named an RBC Top 25 Canadian Immigrant back in 2013, after only being in Canada for three years. And it’s no doubt why the career and settlement specialist with Peel Multicultural Council in Mississauga has now written a book to share everything he has learned, overcome and contributed as a Canadian immigrant.
Singh, who is today an avid immigrant mentor, speaker and community volunteer, including as chair of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship – Peel Chapter, decided to write the book to share his experiences and help other newcomers.