Chal­lenge Your Beliefs (Notre-Dame Church, Ottawa)

The more a coun­try wel­comes immi­grants, the more local beliefs will be chal­lenged, in one way or another. It seems pretty log­i­cal to me. Expose your cul­ture to new­com­ers and even though they will even­tu­ally blend in, the orig­i­nal cul­ture will be slightly trans­formed, lit­tle by little.

More and more coun­tries won­der about their “national iden­tity” and whether it is lost through immigration.

But news­pa­pers often for­get to report on immi­grants’ point of view. We change too.

As a French, you’d think my cul­tural val­ues are some­what close to Cana­dian val­ues. After all, I grew up in a sec­u­lar devel­oped coun­try and my mother tongue is one of Canada’s two offi­cial languages.

Yet, some of my core val­ues were chal­lenged at one point or another after I moved to Canada. I had to recon­sider what I had been taught as a French. What I had blindly believed in for all the years I spent in France. What had been passed on to me by my par­ents and by the edu­ca­tion system.

Even the slight­est things.

Let’s start with some­thing obvi­ous: reli­gion. I’m an athe­ist. I grew up in a sec­u­lar soci­ety: France is very proud of the fact church and the state are sep­a­rated. You’d think I expe­ri­enced very lit­tle cul­ture shock in Canada — yet, I have. As I have already men­tioned a few times, the impor­tance of reli­gion in people’s life in North Amer­ica sur­prised me a lot. I was also shocked to see that a few beliefs, that were made ille­gal in France, were con­sid­ered as “reli­gions” and were per­fectly legal in Canada. For instance, the Jeho­vah Wit­nesses and the Sci­en­tol­ogy Church are “cults” accord­ing to the French law. But in Canada, they are just reg­u­lar religions.

So I started won­der­ing: was France going too far with sec­u­lar­ism, or was Canada way to lenient?

On another topic: pub­lic health. France and Canada are both devel­oped coun­tries with high life expectancy and some­what sim­i­lar health sys­tems. You’d think both have the same kind of reg­u­la­tions, norms, rec­om­men­da­tions and so on. Well, no quite. For instance, in France, you can buy raw milk (unpas­teur­ized) cheese since French con­sider it’s the bac­te­ria that gives the cheese the flavour. But in Canada, it is ille­gal to sell unpas­teur­ized milk in the name of hygiene. So, do French put their health at risk, or are Canada stom­achs just not strong enough?

It is true that French have a kind of amoral atti­tude to all things epi­curean. Where should I start? Well, no (enforced) legal drink­ing age, fatty “gourmet” food such as foie gras and char­cu­terie, smok­ing… French do enjoy life and they rebel against any­thing that doesn’t look “nat­ural”, such as “junk food” and genet­i­cally mod­i­fied crops. Canada, on the other side, is more on the cau­tious side and has tough­est food safety poli­cies. Yet, I know at least three or four peo­ple in Canada with severe food aller­gies — none in France. This allergy trend in North Amer­ica has always puz­zled me. Obvi­ously, there must be some kind of envi­ron­men­tal fac­tor trig­ger­ing them, yet on many grounds Canada seems so much safer and health-conscious than France!

On the health topic again, med­i­cine on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are quite dif­fer­ent. Some­thing sold over-the-counter in France may be by pre­scrip­tion only in Canada and vice-versa. In France, phar­ma­cists have the right to give med­ical advice while in Canada they can’t. Both coun­tries have their own alter­na­tive med­i­cines: home­opa­thy in France, chi­ro­prac­tic in Canada.

As a patient and as a new­comer, it can be very con­fus­ing to learn that the med­i­cine you used to take for a cold is a “nar­cotic”! And on the other side, being pre­scribed some­thing con­sid­ered as “strong” med­i­cine back home is weird. Who to believe?

Social norms are also dif­fer­ent. Let’s take edu­ca­tion. Both coun­tries have dif­fer­ent views on what put kids’ safety at risk. For instance, baby walk­ers are pro­hib­ited in Canada but are still very com­mon in France. I know some immi­grants who had their imported baby walker con­fis­cated at the cus­toms! One big debate is also about spank­ing. Last year in Canada, sen­a­tors approved a bill that could see par­ents charged for spank­ing their chil­dren. As a French, I found it very weird. Obvi­ously, beat­ing a kid is wrong but I see a big dif­fer­ent between child abuse and spank­ing… On the other side, I was shocked to learn that some schools in Canada, includ­ing in the “quiet” Ottawa region, had a “no back­pack rule” for fear that kids will smug­gle weapons and drugs. I know this is meant to cre­ate a safer envi­ron­ment but I can’t help won­der­ing how we got there in the first place.

The list goes on and on: pretty much every aspect of your life is chal­lenged in some kind of way. As an immi­grant, it’s often dif­fi­cult to keep a good bal­ance between adopt­ing your new country’s way of life and still retain­ing some of your beliefs, val­ues and habits — after all, it’s not because you immi­grated to Canada that every thing is great here and must be done the Cana­dian way.

As for me… well, I won’t stop eat­ing unpas­teur­ized cheese, that’s for sure!

How about you? Any val­ues, habits etc, from your new coun­try you didn’t adopt? Any­thing you find just plain weird?

Related arti­cles:

1. I Belong Here… And There Too
2. 3 Unex­pected Con­se­quences of Immigration
3. Two Soli­tudes And One Loneliness
4. 8 Things More Expen­sive in Canada than in France
5. 5 Things Canada Taught Me