Hey everyone,
We have World Cup fever in Toronto!
Last night my kids played soccer with a professional Angolese football player outside a subway station.
On the way there we met a raucous group of South Korean superfans on the train. (“Cheer for Son!”)
Giant displays going up everywhere.
Signs popping for parades, road closures, and parties.
Our first ever World Cup home game ... ever! ... takes place in (checking watch) 56 hours.
And yes, yes, I know, FIFA is corrupt, taxpayers are on the hook for billions. I get it. I get it! But, also, how often do we—humans, I mean—throw big parties across our entire planet?
Not often enough!
So let’s get into it.
We just bought four flags to put in the four windows of our minivan.
A Canada flag, of course.
But also Portugal for my 5 year-old who has been dressing up in a full Ronaldo kit for three straight months. Every single day. Including shin pads. And he saved up months of his allowance to buy this Portugal soccer ball which he carries with him everywhere. Why? “Because Ronaldo is the best.”
We also bought Croatia and Ghana flags to honour their games in Toronto and because we just love Croatia—is any city as beautiful as Rovinj (“Ro-veen”)?—and because I’m finally starting to explore my half-African heritage. Since there’s no Kenyan team, I’m cheering for the Black Stars! I just helped Nurudeen, the Ghanaian man who ubered me across town yesterday, find tickets for Ghana-Panama ($594 CDN on StubHub for him and his son) and he’s encouraging me to come too because “It will be the best match of football you ever see! The players, they are so good. The supporters are coming! We will stand, we will have the Afro Beat, we will sing High Life, we will have a Soccer Calypso the whole game!”
We have World Cup Fever in Toronto!
One of the best reflections of our World Cup energy right now comes in this incredible feature piece in The Globe and Mail about Market Lane Public School. Yes! The very public elementary school Leslie began teaching at in 2011. I love the name, too: “Cup or no cup, the world is already here.”
I got a Saturday Globe subscription for my parents last year—get yers today!—so their brains weren’t being firehosed with solely algorithmic news (puke emoji) and as a result I am able to log in and gift two articles a month.
So I gift this article to you.
I am so lucky that every day after work I see Leslie come home energized by the vitality, connection, and love shown in her school.
Last week, she drove the Sudanese refugees mentioned in this piece to a Newcomers Assessment and the mom said to her, through Google Translate on the phone they were swapping in our van, “Canada is the dream. I wish every mother in the world was able to have her children be safe in a country like Canada.”
Amen!
What a glorious reflection of our multicultural heritage, roots, and identity. Kudos to you, Marcus Gee!
Let’s continue to celebrate, amplify, and share our glorious nation—so glorious!—as the world comes to watch.
Let us all feel and relish in our shared humanity and love over the next few weeks.
Let us enjoy and experience much collective effervescence.
Here is the piece pasted in full below and you can also read it on my blog, too.
Neil
PS. Someone forward you this? Join us right here! All my stuff online is 100% handwritten from me to you—no ads, no AI—since 2008.
Canada is going through a rough patch. Our best friend in the world is suddenly acting like an enemy. Our economic productivity and standard of living are lagging. Our famously livable cities are looking ragged around the edges. In two of our provinces, separatism is rearing its ugly head again.
But there is one way in which, for all our faults, we are doing exceedingly well. Over the past couple of generations, we have welcomed and absorbed millions of newcomers. It is the greatest success of our recent history, a glowing example in a world torn by renewed tribalism, prejudice and conflict. The 2026 World Cup is the perfect occasion to celebrate it.
The World Cup is the biggest event in the planet’s most popular sport. This year, as co-host with the United States and Mexico, Canada is putting on 13 matches: seven in Vancouver, six in Toronto.
The country that welcomed the world is welcoming the world’s game. It will be something to behold.
For a few weeks, this country will be part of a global extravaganza followed by billions. Watch parties, fan fests and victory celebrations will make Canadian streets teem with life. Throngs of visitors from soccer-mad nations as disparate as Germany and Senegal will flock to our shores. The first match, in Toronto on June 12, will feature Canada’s own national team, playing in the tournament for only the third time, this one on home soil.
Yes, the ticket prices are obscene and, yes, the cost to taxpayers is outrageous: more than $1-billion, according the federal government’s Parliamentary Budget Officer. But we need this. The world needs this.
At its best, says Franklin Foer, the American author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, the World Cup is “this incredible, beautiful, joyous festival of nationalism. Whatever rivalries and historic hatreds exist are expressed in a mostly harmless way.”
We will see that truth up close on the streets of Canada this month. Generations of mass immigration on a scale few nations have ever seen made sure of that.
You can find people from every corner of the world in Vancouver and Toronto – or Calgary, Halifax and Kitchener, for that matter. The captain of Canada’s team himself, Alphonso Davies, was born in a refugee camp in Ghana after his parents escaped a civil war in Liberia.
The result will be a multinational celebration of the world’s most multinational sport. In France, they will be flying the French flag to support their national team; in Algeria, the Algerian. Canadians will be waving 48 flags this World Cup: one for each contender – Canada included.
When asked to make their own ‘identity shields,’ Grade 4 and 5 pupils added symbols of their heritage to the mix at Toronto’s Market Lane Junior and Senior Public School. There are flags from Yemen, Antigua and Barbuda, Finland and, of course, Canada.
Twenty-first century Canada is a different kind of homeland. Not a “post-national state,” in Justin Trudeau’s mushy formulation – our sense of nationhood is strong – but a place where people can celebrate both their ancestry and their country without fear.
You don’t have to look hard to find the proof. I found it in a remarkable Toronto neighbourhood called the Esplanade, just around the corner from the headquarters of The Globe and Mail.
Tucked into a historic nook of downtown, steps from where the city was first established two centuries ago, it is a pleasant mix of townhouses, condos, apartments and co-ops holding people from all manner of incomes and backgrounds.
Its variety is astounding. The sandwich board for a local lunch spot offers chop suey, chicken soup, garlic bread and biryani, according to your taste.
New arrivals from places like the Philippines or the Punjab mix with older residents from Russia, Italy, Poland and Scotland.
Toronto has a Little Italy, a Little Portugal and a Little India, not to mention at least two Chinatowns. The Esplanade is more like Little Everywhere.
To mark the World Cup, a local arts group called Jamii (Swahili for “community”) had an ambitious idea: take photos of people representing each of the four dozen countries playing in the tournament and put them up in the neighbourhood – something that would be impossible in most places. The photos are now arrayed along the edge of a park named after a popular Toronto mayor, David Crombie.
The Scots are represented in the photo exhibit around the Esplanade.
One of them shows Jae Yang, 44, a photographer who took some of the shots in the series himself. His parents are Korean by origin. They moved to Argentina and he grew up there, living and breathing soccer the way people from the land of Maradona and Messi do. In Canada, where he moved two decades ago, he met a woman of Chinese ancestry who grew up in Peru. When this Asian-looking pair go up to Hispanic people and start speaking Spanish, says Mr. Yang, “they look at us like we have three heads.”
Jae Yang, featured in one of the photos around the Esplanade, took some of the other photos with people from the community.
He will cheer for all of his “home” teams this month: South Korea’s, Argentina’s and Canada’s. He has a jersey for each. He just hopes South Korea and Argentina don’t end up playing against each other: “That would be bad.”
Another picture in the series shows Iris Unlu, 35. She came to Canada from Turkey in 2015, intending to stay a few months and improve her English. She is still here, living happily with her Toronto-born partner and her big fluffy white dog. She relishes the freedom she has here to live her life as an openly gay woman, something she says she could not have done in Turkey.
Countries from every populated continent are represented in the photo project, from Austria to Australia, Sweden to Ecuador. The organizers even found a couple to represent Curaçao, an island in the Dutch Caribbean with a population of just 158,000 – the smallest country ever to compete in the World Cup.
To Ms. Unlu, “it’s kind of crazy mind-blowing” that they could track down people from so many places. But that is Toronto; that, increasingly, is Canada.
‘If Canada is a little bit smug, I think it deserves it,’ says Iris Unlu, with Jae Yang at one of the installations. Ms. Unlu moved here from Turkey more than a decade ago and says she enjoys the greater freedom.
Mr. Yang grew up in Argentina, which won the last World Cup in Qatar four years ago. That was the first tournament in more than three decades where Canada qualified to compete. This time, the host cities and First Nations will return the hospitality.
The scale of this change is monumental. The Toronto that I grew up in in the 1950s and 1960s was a hidebound, provincial city where a dinner out meant spaghetti, checked tablecloths and wine bottles wrapped in straw. My North Toronto high school class had precisely one Chinese guy, who stuck out like a sore thumb in the sea of kids with names such as Rogers or Roberts.
By the time I was starting to raise a family of my own, the city, and the country, had changed beyond recognition. The waves of migrants from Southern Europe who settled in Canada after the Second World War were followed by new waves from Asia: India, Pakistan, China, the Philippines, Vietnam.
The downtown school my own children attended had kids from 32 countries. In today’s Toronto, seven out of 10 students in the public-school system list their race as something other than white. They and their families speak more than 100 languages.
In the Esplanade, the local elementary school, Market Lane, has kids from every background under the sun. When one teacher asked his pupils to show on a world map where their families came from, they placed stickers from Myanmar to Ukraine, Tanzania to Chile. In the school’s senior grades, 24 per cent identify as white, 19 per cent South Asian, 16 per cent East Asian, 12 per cent Black, 7 per cent Middle Eastern, 5 per cent Southeast Asian and 3 per cent Latino. Fourteen per cent list their background as “more than one.”
Pupils come from diverse backgrounds at Market Lane Junior and Senior Public School.
Two kids whose families fled the conflict in Sudan as refugees just enrolled. The school paired them with other Arabic-speaking students, but they are already picking up English. “Good morning,” one of them, a boy, sang out to Principal Laurie Jantzi in the stairwell this week.
Many of the kids are soccer fanatics, constantly kicking a ball back and forth at recess. One teacher wants to use the school foosball table to stage a kind of mini World Cup for them.
Laurie Jantzi is the principal at Market Lane, where soccer is a passion and a pastime for many pupils.
Food writer Suresh Doss never stops being dazzled by this country’s diversity. For 25 years, he has been exploring it with his taste buds.
He came to Canada when his Sri Lankan family settled in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. His mother and grandmother were great cooks, so he learned to love food. He made his name talking about the great restaurants you can find in strip malls on the edges of town.
Today, Mr. Doss says, diners can sample fantastic dishes from all over the world in every corner of Toronto. And no wonder. In the 2021 census, close to half of the city’s residents (47 per cent) said they were immigrants. He is helping to organize a World Cup festival featuring art, music and more than 20 kinds of food, from Armenian to American.
One Scarborough supermarket that Mr. Doss likes to visit has a whole aisle just for mangoes: the big, juicy ones preferred by many Indians and Sri Lankans; crunchy, semi-ripe ones for Thais and Jamaicans; little baby ones for Colombians.
The mingling of many cultures, he says, is producing a whole range of new food offerings, from the jerk-chicken samosa to mutton-curry pizza. That mingling reaches a peak at World Cup time.
“Everyone’s cheering for their team, but they’re cheering as they’re rubbing shoulders, they’re cheering as they’re literally sharing drinks,” says Mr. Doss. If their team loses, they may start rooting for another squad they like. It’s all good in the end. Who hasn’t cheered for Brazil’s renowned crew at some point or admired the artistry of France’s Kylian Mbappé?
Simon Kuper, a columnist for London’s Financial Times and author of the just-published World Cup Fever, says the spirit of the tournament is “ecumenical.” In other words, “it’s a celebration of your own nation and it’s a celebration of the whole world, both in one.” Canada is just the place for such a party.
Near the students’ artwork at Market Lane, orange shirt symbols honour Indigenous children who suffered in residential schools. Pupils across Canada observe Orange Shirt Day each Sept. 30.
This country has not always been so welcoming. Our history is pockmarked with episodes of exclusion and racism – against the Chinese who came to build the transcontinental railroad; against the Japanese Canadians interned during the Second World War – not to mention the suffering visited on Indigenous peoples.
Even in recent years, we have seen appalling hate crimes such as the murderous assault on a Quebec mosque in 2017 and the fatal truck attack on a Muslim family in London, Ont., in 2021. Antisemitism has surged since the start of the war in Gaza. Public support for immigration has fallen from its usual robust levels, in part because of the way Ottawa botched the international-student program.
But the broad backlash against immigration that you see in much of the Western world simply hasn’t happened here. Though Canada has taken in more immigrants per capita than any other major democracy, it has no anti-immigrant political party of any note. That sets it apart from Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Australia, not to mention Donald Trump’s United States.
The fear of some skeptics that newcomers would fail to become “real Canadians” – huddling for generations in isolated, clannish pockets – has not materialized. Kids not long off the plane from some faraway place are soon sporting Raptors caps and listening to Olivia Rodrigo. In fact, one of the biggest complaints of immigrant parents is that their kids blend in too quickly, refusing to speak the language or observe the customs of the old country.
While some diasporas are anxious about rising far-right influence back home, the Esplanade exhibit aims to strike a note of hope.
Christmas trees have not disappeared. Hockey is still the king of Canadian sports. Canadians across the board, whatever their background, banded together in anger and defiance when an orange-coloured former reality-TV star threatened to make this country the 51st state. A survey last year showed that foreign-born citizens are more likely than homegrown ones to feel proud to be Canadian.
In Canada’s Ghanaian community, they will be waving Ghana’s red, yellow and green flag when its team, the Black Stars, takes on Panama at Toronto’s BMO Field on June 17. But the Maple Leaf will be flying, too. Emmanuel Duodu, president of the Ghanaian-Canadian Association of Ontario, says the tournament is a chance for members of his community to celebrate their culture and heritage without for a moment forgetting their allegiance to Canada, which he calls “the greatest country in the world.”
This Canadian success story has meaning beyond our shores. There was a time, not long ago, when it was thought that the world’s divisions would ease as the spread of trade, technology and democracy brought us all closer together. Today, common wisdom sees that as a naive, outdated notion. Countries will pursue their interests with ruthless resolve. Borders will harden. It’s not a small world after all.
Canada’s experience suggests otherwise. It is a flicker of hope in a darkening glass.
If that sounds smug or prideful, try asking someone who has come to Canada from somewhere else what they think. I did. Is it wrong to pat ourselves on the back?
Most of those I talked to were bewildered by the question. Of course Canada should be proud, they said. Places like the Esplanade are a delight to live in. Canada, for all its faults, is so much better than where we came from. Stable, free. We love it (except for the cold).
