Strikes in Canada, Riots in France, Wimbledon, and Italians Come to Canada.
July 3, 2023 Volume 4 # 8
Strikes Big and Small in Canada
Vancouver, the busiest port by far in Canada, shut by a strike on Saturday. It is by some measure the third largest port in North America. The bulk of container traffic from China, Vietnam and other Asian countries lands in Vancouver,
Other ports on Canada’s West Coat are also hit by the strike , including Prince Rupert, the third busiest port in the country. It is also closer to Asia than other Pacific ports.
The strike will mean a backlog of containers at the already crowded ports. Stores big and small will be looking for inventory from their suppliers in Asia.
“Any strike longer than a week will be a disaster,” a senior buyer from Canadian Tire told me. “It’s especially true for electronics. There is a already a backlog.”
The Federal Government is overseeing the strike talks. But the minority Liberals in Ottawa have a deal with the labour-supported NDP to stay in power, so it’s anyone’s guess how long the ports will be closed.
Cemetery Closed by Strike.
The Mount Royal Cemetery, where my parents are buried along with and all my relatives for the last 133 years, has been closed by a strike since January. It is the largest cemetery in Canada.
The Cemetery Maintenance Employees Union turned down a deal this past week. A friend of mine went to visit his brother’s grave the other day and found the gates locked. He met a couple who had driven from Pennsylvania to visit a grave. Hundreds of bodies are in cold storage waiting for the strike to end. This only affects the Catholic cemetery; the Protestant and Jewish cemeteries are still open.
The French Mob Then and Now
Battle outside the Hôtel de Ville, by Jean-Victor Schnetz, July 28, 1830. The July Revolution of 1830 was to overthrow one French king and replace him with another.
The Hôtel de Ville in Bordeaux set on fire by rioters this weekend. The July Revolution of 2023 is to protest the police killing a teenage boy during a routine traffic stop. President Macron sent in commandos. The riots have spread to Lausanne in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The killing was tragic, the cop was arrested; it must be more than that. Riots in 1968 did in Charles de Gaulle. Can Macron survive?
Can’t Stop Oil
There is a more oil sold than the value of the top industrial metals from Iron Ore to Lead. As much as politicians and protestors might wish it away it is hard to think it is going to disappear in the next seven to ten years.
World Leaders in Artificial Intelligence
Wimbledon Starts
The Polish star Iga Świątek is favoured to win, though grass is not her forte.
Novak Djokovic won last year. Can he beat 20 year-old Carlos Alcaraz in 2023?
Lots of Money at Stake
Tallest Building in The World…in 1908.
The 41 storey Singer Tower in Manhattan only held the title for one year. In 1909 it was eclipsed by the 49 storey Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower. The Singer Tower was the headquarters of the sewing machine company of the same name. The building was torn down in1967. The Metropolitan Life Building’s title was eclipsed in 1913.
Here is a chart of the tallest building in Manhattan in the 20th century.
Moose in the Smoke Near Chibougamu, Quebec
Essay of the Week
Italians are one of the most successful immigrant groups to Canada. They started coming to Canada in the late 19th century, but there was a huge number who arrived after the Second World War. So many settled in Toronto that the district where they first lived was named Little Italy, complete with that name on street signs. Today the rich Italians, and that is a lot of them, have moved north to the suburb of Vaughan. There aren’t that many Italians in Little Italy anymore.
Several years ago I wrote a book about Sam Ciccolini who moved to Canada in the 1950s and today runs a giant insurance agency with his family. It is said they insure one commercial construction site in three in Greater Toronto.
Here are two chapters that explain how they got here.
Chapter 3
Preparing the Way
Pasquale Ciccolini sold his taxi to his brother and came to Canada in 1948. Post-war Italy was a shambles. The country was in a perpetual recession as it had to repay $360 million in war reparations; infrastructure was being rebuilt after being destroyed in the long war fought on Italian soil, and there was political turmoil as the Communists tried to take over.
The Marshall Plan, the American program to rebuild Europe and save many from starvation, was only starting, but from 1948 to 1949 Italy received $594 million of the $5 billion the U.S. spent that year, more than any other country in continental Europe, except France.
None of that money seemed to trickle down to Pescosolido. The southern and central part of Italy where the Ciccolinis lived was hit particularly hard; most of the fighting had taken place there and there was little industry, poor agriculture, and no jobs. If there was any work it was in the industrial north.
Canada beckoned, even if Italians were classified as enemy aliens after the war. Toronto was already a magnet for Italian immigrants and Pasquale found work in the construction industry through connections he had from his home village. He made 50 cents an hour, with part of his paycheque going to re-pay the $250 to finance his move to Canada, money put up by his Canadian sponsor, Giuseppe (Joe) Macciocchi, who also provided him with work.
Every two years Pasquale would return to Italy for a month to live with his family. In 1951 he took his eldest son Frank back to Toronto and two years later his second eldest son Mario returned with him to Canada as well. All three men lived together in a crowded boarding house at 595 Euclid Avenue in the heart of what was then Toronto’s Little Italy. All along he planned to reunite his family and bring them to Canada. It was a complex process that demanded time, hard work and, above all, patience.
In Toronto Pasquale was a truck driver in the construction business. He was a steady, reliable employee and only drove for two companies for his entire working life in Canada: Macciocchi Construction and Valentine Enterprises, the company he stayed with until he retired.
“The usual thing was that whoever was in Canada would work and just pile up the money and come back to Italy,” says Sam’s brother Max. “My dad came back in 1955. We were still in our small hometown of about one thousand people and he wanted to see if we could move to a place like Rome and get an apartment there. But it didn’t work out so after he came back, he decided that in the next year he was going to bring everybody to Canada, my mother and my brothers. So during 1956 we went to Rome three times for our visas and every time we went, they asked my mother questions and we all had to pass the physicals twice.”
Filomena Ciccolini chose the precise moment to book passage on the ship to New York. It was a tumultuous period; 1956 was perhaps the most dramatic year since the end of the war in 1945. There was the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, the sinking of the liner Andrea Doria, and a tuberculosis epidemic raging in Europe, perhaps the reason the Ciccolinis were given such rigorous physical examinations before leaving Italy.
They made their trip to the ship in the old Balilla that Pasquale had sold to his brother. “Our uncle drove the four of us to Naples where we boarded the ship and set sail for L’America,” says Max, the youngest of the three boys making the trip.
The patriarch of the Ciccolini family was a quiet man, devoted to making sure his family had a better life in Canada than he had in Italy. In that he was more than successful, but in his working life he never made much more than the minimum wage paid in the construction business.
“If you could have a million people in a room my father would be the last one you would notice,” says Sam. “His demeanour was very low-key and very seldom did he say anything.”
This modest, hard-working man’s goals were more than met in his lifetime. By the time Pasquale Ciccolini died in 1991 he had lived to see his family established in Canada and his sons vaulted from the poverty of rural Italy to positions of comfort and respect in their adopted country. He had truly prepared the way.
Chapter 4
Trip to the New World
Filomena Ciccolini and her three sons boarded the SS Independence in Naples on November 7, 1956. That ship carried many famous people in its day on the regular run from New York City to the ports of the Mediterranean, and those passengers included former U.S. President Harry Truman, Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, and even King Saud of Saudi Arabia. But the rich and famous were all travelling in the 484 first-class cabins. Below them were 350 cabin-class passengers, and then came the 254 tourist-class, a euphemism for third-class, well below the upper decks.
That is where the Ciccolini family was jammed, all four squeezed into a small tourist-class cabin with a porthole at sea level. Once the ship passed Gibraltar, the rough November seas of the Atlantic Ocean tossed the giant ship around as if it were a cork. Every member of the Ciccolini family became seriously seasick, everyone except Sam.
Max Ciccolini remembered a kind waiter who felt sorry for the poor Italian family. The waiter had a home recipe for seasickness: anchovies. He said it settled their stomachs, and the severity of the seasickness abated somewhat.
Sam, a young man just out of the Spartan life of the seminary, spent a lot of time away from the cabin, serving Mass in the ship’s chapel and making constant trips to the upper deck, exposing him to a world he had never seen, or even dreamed of.
“I used to go up and serve Mass in the chapel every day. Most of the time they couldn’t find me because I was here, there, and everywhere. So I’d go up to the top where all the wealthy people were and there was a swimming pool and I used to think wow, this is the way people live? That’s pretty good. The one thing that gave us a bit of solace was getting some food from the top and bringing it down to my brothers and my mother,” says Sam.
His brother Max’s recollections of the voyage are somewhat different. He remembers that his mother was worried that Sam was lost, as he had been gone for hours. But Sam was not lost; he had indeed wandered into first class and returned with food.
“While we were on the ship coming over from Italy, Sam was never around. He was either ringing the bell for everyone to go to the dining room to eat every morning,” his mother Filomena recalled almost 50 years later. She was proud of her gregarious son. “Sam always served Mass with the chaplain of the ship.”
Max was eight years old and not as adventurous as his older brother. Sam would wander off and return after several hours with tales of wealth on the upper decks.
When he finally showed up, said his brother Max, he told us that he had gone up to the first class “where everything is free; you have to see it, it’s really nice.” My mother asked how he got there and Sam said, “I don’t know; I just went up there.” So on the second day my brother Livio and I would be hanging around with my mother and Sam took off again. Now when it was lunchtime they would ring a bell that told you that you had to go to the dining room for lunch and we couldn’t find Sam. Next thing you know there he was—Sam was the bell ringer. He had gotten to know the bell ringer and he helped him out ringing the bell.”
While many people have fond memories of trans-Atlantic voyages, Sam remembers that at one point the sea became so violent all passengers were ordered to their cabins. The anchovies helped with seasickness.
Relief finally came when the ship reached its destination, New York City, on Saturday, November 17, 1956, and the passengers from tourist class were allowed on deck to behold what millions of immigrants had seen before them: the Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline.
“There you were looking at all those tall buildings and going right by the Statue of Liberty. Can you imagine? A twelve year old going by that statue? I thought I had gone to heaven and came back,” remembers Sam.
A huge number of the postwar Italian immigrants to Canada came through New York. Their first experience was an American one, doctors checking them out, and U.S. officials looking over their papers. A crisis occurred when one of the Ciccolinis’ steamer trunks began to leak. It was filled with food, oil, cheese, and salami, and one of the olive oil containers was leaking. Luckily, the family’s clothes were in their other trunk.
Sam remembers being baffled when they were handed a box lunch. He couldn’t understand why his teeth were sticking together. “It was the first time I ever had a peanut butter and jam sandwich and a Coke. It was so sweet, what was there not to like?” says Sam. It was also his first taste of soft Wonder Bread, unknown in Italy. What he didn’t like was the thorough medical examination, which this modest boy, just two weeks out of the cloistered life of the seminary, found intrusive.
It was 46 Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) that day in New York. The city was a lot colder than it had been in Italy and Sam and Max were wearing shorts. Their mother opened the second trunk and pulled out long trousers and a sweater for the rest of their trip. From the port of New York they were taken to the railway station to board the train to Toronto. It was a milk run, stopping at almost every town between New York City and the border at Niagara Falls.
Sam remembers the hard wooden seats on the train, an uncomfortable 36-hour trip in all. They finally arrived in Toronto on November 19, 1956 and were met at Union Station by their father and Francesco Biancucci, a loyal family friend from Pescosolido, who drove them through the snow-covered streets to their new home.
“I don’t know if it was a shock because we probably didn’t know enough to be shocked. But [our first impression of Toronto was] a foot and a half of snow when you got off the train?” says Sam.