John Offutt's daily commute takes him through two Torontos, each a world unto itself.
He starts off from his comfortable Rosedale home, three doors down from power couple Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman. He drives north through Moore Park, Leaside and Lawrence Park, solid upper-middle-class neighbourhoods of million-dollar houses, green parks and schools flush with resources from parent-run fundraisers.
He drops off his 17-year-old son at the Crescent School, a century-old private boys school. He travels through the Bridle Path, passing the mega-mansions of Toronto's elite. Then he emerges into the middle-class world of Don Mills, with its neat bungalows and townhouses.
Finally, he arrives at his destination: Thorncliffe Park, a dense pocket of high-rise apartment towers near the Don Valley Parkway and Don Mills Road. He passes doughnut shops, Middle Eastern restaurants and a huge Goodwill store. He sees women in headscarves or saris carrying their groceries and men standing by idle taxi cabs. It is just across the valley from Rosedale, a few minutes as the crow flies, but the chasm could hardly be wider.
Mr. Offutt, 49, quit his job as a high-earning real estate agent and developer five years ago because he wanted to make a difference. So he became a schoolteacher. Fate landed him in Thorncliffe Park Public School, the biggest elementary school in North America, with close to 2,000 students.
It is an amazing place, pulsing with high spirits and good intentions, and Mr. Offutt is by all accounts a great teacher, donating his time to coach basketball and soccer and even setting up a Grade 3 yoga club. In his neat kindergarten classroom, eager kids cluster around him on the carpet as he teaches them the many ways to say "well done" in English.
But the challenges at the school, and in the neighbourhood, are formidable. No less than 95 per cent of students speak a first language other than English. Many start in Mr. Offutt's class speaking no English at all. The names on the board reflect their South Asian, often Muslim heritage: Owais, Junaid, Ismail, Saad, Hamza, Hafeez, Afra.
The question that occupies Mr. Offut's attention and haunts the city's future is a stark one: Will they succeed? Will the latest generation of immigrants to Toronto climb the ladder of success that ends in mainstream, middle-class Canada? Or will they become trapped in immigrant ghettos, turning Toronto's two solitudes into a lasting reality?
A recent Toronto Board of Trade report shows that, in 2005, recently arrived immigrant men could expect to earn 63 per cent of the incomes of Canadian-born men, down from 67 per cent in 2000 and 85 per cent in 1980. That is a shocking decline.
The paradox is that immigrants arriving with much better education than they did a generation or two ago now have a much harder time finding jobs. Niranjana Damani used to practice medicine in Saudi Arabia. Now she is a resettlement worker with a tiny office in Thorncliffe Park school. The neighbourhood of 30,000 is full of people like her: doctors driving cabs, PhDs delivering pizza. "Our country is missing out on all this talent," she says. "Few will succeed; many will fail."
John Tory, the former provincial Conservative leader, recently came across 300 people lining up for 100 jobs advertised by a suburban food-packing plant. Perhaps 25 of them were white. To know what Toronto will be like in future, he said in a speech, "we must ask ourselves where those 300 people I saw in line, and thousands more like them, will be in 25 years." He called integrating the two Torontos the single biggest challenge facing the city in coming decades.
All is not lost. Places like Thorncliffe Park are full of eager, hard-working, ambitious people. The streets are generally safe, even after dark. Schools, government agencies, charities and people like John Offutt are doing their best to give newcomers a leg up.
But when Mr. Offutt arrives at school after his trip from the other Toronto, he can feel the magnitude of the task. "Those kids are as much Canadian as the ones over in Leaside," he says. "To the extent that we don't set them up to succeed, it will become a huge cost."