Some six years ago, a beer company used patriotism as a platform to sell its swill.

Starring a man named Joe who listed a litany of defining national characteristics, the commercial used "I am Canadian" as its call to arms.

"I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American ...I can proudly sew my country's flag on my backpack. I believe in peacekeeping, not policing; diversity, not assimilation," he asserted.

His rousing oratory sparked nationalist sentiment among the most modest of citizens yet it deftly avoided the inescapable truth: someday a Caucasian male who plays hockey and drinks beer may not accurately represent the average Canadian.

Nearly 140 years after Confederation, the face of Canada has undergone a stunning transformation.

Not a mosaic, nor a melting pot, nor even a salad bowl, the influx of newcomers from all corners of the earth has woven a resilient tapestry.

If one thread runs through the length of the tapestry -- it is our shared history as newcomers.

Save for the aboriginal Canadians who first resided on this land, immigrants have left their mark on the country from the moment they arrived.

It's an uncomfortable admission that most would rather avoid making, but the word 'immigrant' has carried the connotation of the unwanted outsider.

Yet Canada welcomes more newcomers as a percentage of its population than any other country in the world. In 2005 alone, 262,236 permanent residents made Canada their home.

In the third book of a series of eyewitness accounts published in October 2006, entitled The Land Newly Found, historians Jack Granatstein and Norman Hillmer explore the stories of those who chose to make Canada their homes.

Carleton University history and international affairs professor Norman Hillmer. (Photo by studio von dulong)

"Immigrants are the nation," Hillmer, a Carleton University history and international affairs professor, told CTV.ca in a phone interview from Ottawa.

Hillmer says immigration has a long history in Canada that includes:

• The French and English who settled the country from the 17th to the 19th century
• The Loyalists who arrived in Canada after the American revolution broke out in 1775
• The Irish and Scots who came in the 19th century
• The eastern and central Europeans who peopled the west in the early 20th century

A global village

Stephen Eaton Hume, a dual Canadian-American citizen who wrote a piece for the book, says the knowledge that immigrants have contributed to the process of nation-building can keep intolerance at bay.

"Canada is like a global village now, but it's working without the kinds of sectarian violence and constant belligerence, and wartime eruptions you see in other places," the University of Victoria English professor and author told CTV.ca.

"I don't mean it's perfect at all but it somehow seems to be working -- I think you have to remember it's a country built on immigrants and has been for a long time.

"Because sometimes people lose sight of that and when you lose sight of it, you get a kind of intolerance in a society," said Hume, who moved to Canada nearly 40 years ago.

University of Victoria English professor and author Stephen Eaton Hume. (Photo by Ian McKain)

Hume, the grandson of Nova Scotia industrialist and peace activist Cyrus Eaton, says he now brands himself a Canadian even though, like many immigrants, he feels strong ties to his birthplace.

"There is still a feeling that I am American too, and I suppose I realize this in the foods I like (Maryland fried chicken, crab cakes, Mexican food, tortillas) and in the way I talk, in the Southern accent that is sometimes discernible," he says.

It wasn't always so easy to feel at peace with the dichotomy of his identity.

In the days after Hume arrived in Canada in 1967, he often found himself wishing he was back on the farm in southern Maryland where he had grown up, or in Eagle Pass, Texas where his grandparents lived.

But eventually home became his one-room apartment near Toronto's College Street, where immigrants from Italy and Portugal tended their gardens and built their lives.

"I missed the Rio Grande and the sight of families washing their cars in the shallows of the big river. I missed the smell of mesquite in the desert. But the Eagle Pass I knew, and the southern Maryland I knew, didn't exist any more. I was home," he writes of his life in Toronto.

For immigrants who leave behind their families and most prized possessions, home is not defined by a structure nor an address.

'Home' for many becomes finding room in their residence not only for their baggage, but their history, their traditions, and their stories.

A depository of stories

János Máté, a Hungary-born, Vancouver-based social and environmental activist who contributed an essay to the book, says Canada has become a depository of stories from around the world.

"We brought our family's narrative to Canada, this sort of myriad of anecdotes that comprise an essentially component of Canada's history," he told CTV.ca from Vancouver.

Máté was only fully able to reconcile his Hungarian past and his Canadian life more than 40 years after he arrived in Canada.

It was with the death of his mother that he realized his story of revolution and anti-Semitism in his native Hungary had become a part of Canada's history.

"I left Europe as János Máté," he says, stressing the Hungarian pronunciation. "I arrived in Halifax as John Mate. As a 10-year-old, I willingly relinquished the name I had known all my life, in favour of easier assimilation," Máté says.

Despite the name change, he never quite felt comfortable taking on the name of 'John,' he says.

Hungary-born, Vancouver-based social and environmental activist János Máté. (Photo by Joshua Berson

In his early 20s, he went from being "Mate" to repossessing the accents. Just about five years ago, the morning after his mother died, he declared to his family that he would reclaim the name 'János,' as the name given to him at birth.

"Interestingly enough, when I recognized the name János, I sort of felt like I was no longer an immigrant... only when I let go of that name did I truly feel like I reowned my core somehow."

The road to reclaiming his identity wasn't without its bumps.

The deplorable discrimination that he faced as a young boy in Hungary reared its ugly head under another name in Canada.

"Over here, instead of 'You dirty Jew,' it was 'You dirty DP' (displaced person)," he remembered.

He recounts the time he was beaten up by a group of Italian immigrant children with accents.

"They yelled at me 'You dirty DP -- why you no go back where you come from?' They were externalizing what they had experienced," he said.

Anti-immigrant sentiment

An anti-immigrant sentiment has long pervaded the nation's psyche, Granatstein told CTV.ca.

"Whether in the 17th century or the 21st, by and large Canadians have always been unhappy with immigration," he said.

"When the French arrived, the Indians were unhappy, when the Loyalists arrived, the French were unhappy. When people from Britain arrived, they were the wrong class as far as the Loyalists were concerned."

The same attitude, he notes, has been prevalent among Canadians in the past several decades.

"It's always the sense that newcomers aren't like us -- they're a problem, they're going to be difficult. And yet somehow the extraordinary assimilative force of Canadian society takes them and turns them into a generation of people who like hockey and know how to dress in the cold."

Granatstein says his own history is proof of this phenomenon.

Though both his parents did not attend school beyond Grade 3, both he and his brother graduated with doctorate degrees.

"That's the Canadian story," he says. "The parents arrive with nothing and their kids make it in North America. In a very real sense, while the streets are not necessarily paved with gold for the first generation, they very often are for the second or third generations."

Indeed, these streets are more often paved with hardship and uncertainty for new immigrants, he concedes.

York University professor emeritus, history department Jack Granatstein. (Photo from Granatstein's collection)

When one of his father's unmarried sisters became pregnant after arriving in Toronto from Poland in the 1920s, she was committed to what amounted to a psychiatric hospital, he said.

"Once the child was born, she was deported back to Poland, and she eventually died in the Holocaust," he said.

This story was swept under the rug in Granatstein's family. In fact he only learned about his father's sister through a cousin researching the family's genealogy some two years ago.

"I guess the other part of the immigrant experience is a kind of fear of the state. You fall into difficulty and worry if will they deport us.... So while this is a land of opportunity, there is the sense that there is some fear built into process."

Such fears were common right across the board, Granatstein found, when sifting through centuries' worth of eyewitness accounts from newcomers.

"What struck me was no matter whether they were writing in 1700 or 2006 it sounded pretty much the same -- you faced all the same problems: it was a new place; people looked at you funny; it was hard to get established; you didn't know the language... Where could you get work? How could you stop yourself getting ripped off?" he said.

"The first people in Newfoundland in the 1600s sounded not dissimilar to what a Somali writing in the 1990s would have sounded like."

Melting pot, mosaic ... salad bowl?

Canada has long considered itself safe from unrest stemming from racial divisions.

But race-related riots in some of the world's most diverse cities are prompting observers to rethink that notion.

Last fall, entire Parisian neighbourhoods of impoverished immigrants vented their frustration in several days of riots that saw hundreds of torched building and thousands of cars.

The tensions exposed an undercurrent of anger among minorities in France, laying bare the country's failure to integrate newcomers and provide opportunities.

A few weeks after those riots, Australia saw some of the worst ethnic violence in decades.

The key to avoiding civil unrest on our own soil lies in the process of assimilation, Granatstein believes.

"Some people melt right in, some people try to stay separate, my guess is over time we will become a melting pot," he said.

"If people don't want to blend in, then they are allowed not to, but it's difficult to resist forces that push for blending," he said.

Looking ahead, Granatstein surmises that the sources of immigration will be increasingly diverse, with more newcomers arriving from the Middle East and the Far East.

"The colour of Canada is going to be a light tan over the next century as opposed to white," he said.

"Certainly in the big cities -- whether this will be true in Moosonee (Ontario) is another question entirely," he added.

Hillmer urged against complacency, though, underscoring that the road to peaceful assimilation is an uphill battle.

"I think we are going to have struggles, I think there is going to be opposition and backlash, I think there is going to be racial trouble," he said. "If we get complacent we are going to be visited by the same kind of racial troubles that we've seen in Europe," he said.

Vancouver-born, Quebec City-based author Madeleine Thien. (Photo by Willem J. Atsma)

Madeleine Thien, whose parents arrived in Canada from Malaysia in the 1970s, believes the nation's success in so far avoiding such racial clashes lies in its citizenship process.

"It's a thing of equality," says the Vancouver-born, Quebec City-based author, who contributed a piece to the book.

"In other places in Europe, it's very difficult for people to get citizenship. They can live there for years as migrant workers, but cannot get citizenship," said Thien, whose debut novel Certainty was published earlier this year.

"Here in Canada, it's a different kind of equality and I think the system says when you hold citizenship, you hold the same rights as everyone else, it's a core foundational belief and it's enshrined in the laws."

Hillmer, however, believes the answer to avoiding future clashes lies in understanding that immigrants are essential to most western countries.

"It doesn't matter whether it's France or Austria or Germany, Canada or the U.S., we all need immigrants because we don't have big enough birth rates, so immigrants are a big enough necessity that we need to compete for them."

When asked how Canada has so far avoided the kinds of mass riots observed in France or Germany, the conventional answer is that "we are the moral superpower," Hillmer conjectures.

"But especially after the past couple of weeks," he says, referring to the arrest of several terrorism suspects in the Toronto-area. "Who among us is not worried about what things might become?"

The Land Newly Found: Eyewitness Accounts of the Canadian Immigrant Experience is in bookstores October 2006.