The World Cup is the biggest event in the planet\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
The country that welcomed the world is welcoming the world\u2019s game. It will be something to behold.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s own national team, playing in the tournament for only the third time, this one on home soil. <\/p>\n
Yes, the ticket prices are obscene and, yes, the cost to taxpayers is outrageous: more than $1-billion, according the federal government\u2019s Parliamentary Budget Officer. But we need this. The world needs this.<\/p>\n
At its best, says Franklin Foer, the American author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, the World Cup is \u201cthis incredible, beautiful, joyous festival of nationalism. Whatever rivalries and historic hatreds exist are expressed in a mostly harmless way.\u201d <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
You can find people from every corner of the world in Vancouver and Toronto \u2013 or Calgary, Halifax and Kitchener, for that matter. The captain of Canada\u2019s team himself, Alphonso Davies, was born in a refugee camp in Ghana after his parents escaped a civil war in Liberia. <\/p>\n
The result will be a multinational celebration of the world\u2019s 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 \u2013 Canada included. <\/p>\n
Twenty-first century Canada is a different kind of homeland. Not a \u201cpost-national state,\u201d in Justin Trudeau\u2019s mushy formulation \u2013 our sense of nationhood is strong \u2013 but a place where people can celebrate both their ancestry and their country without fear.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
New arrivals from places like the Philippines or the Punjab mix with older residents from Russia, Italy, Poland and Scotland. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n The Scots are represented in the photo exhibit around the Esplanade.<\/p>\n To mark the World Cup, a local arts group called Jamii (Swahili for \u201ccommunity\u201d) 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 \u2013 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. <\/p>\n 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, \u201cthey look at us like we have three heads.\u201d <\/p>\n He will cheer for all of his \u201chome\u201d teams this month: South Korea\u2019s, Argentina\u2019s and Canada\u2019s. He has a jersey for each. He just hopes South Korea and Argentina don\u2019t end up playing against each other: \u201cThat would be bad.\u201d<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Jae Yang, featured in one of the photos around the Esplanade, took some of the other photos with people from the community.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 Cura\u00e7ao, an island in the Dutch Caribbean with a population of just 158,000 \u2013 the smallest country ever to compete in the World Cup.<\/p>\n To Ms. Unlu, \u201cit\u2019s kind of crazy mind-blowing\u201d that they could track down people from so many places. But that is Toronto; that, increasingly, is Canada.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The downtown school my own children attended had kids from 32 countries. In today\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Pupils come from diverse backgrounds at Market Lane Junior and Senior Public School.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cmore than one.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cGood morning,\u201d one of them, a boy, sang out to Principal Laurie Jantzi in the stairwell this week. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Laurie Jantzi is the principal at Market Lane, where soccer is a passion and a pastime for many pupils.<\/p>\n Food writer Suresh Doss never stops being dazzled by this country\u2019s diversity. For 25 years, he has been exploring it with his taste buds. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cEveryone\u2019s cheering for their team, but they\u2019re cheering as they\u2019re rubbing shoulders, they\u2019re cheering as they\u2019re literally sharing drinks,\u201d says Mr. Doss. If their team loses, they may start rooting for another squad they like. It\u2019s all good in the end. Who hasn\u2019t cheered for Brazil\u2019s renowned crew at some point or admired the artistry of France\u2019s Kylian Mbapp\u00e9?<\/p>\n Simon Kuper, a columnist for London\u2019s Financial Times and author of the just-published World Cup Fever, says the spirit of the tournament is \u201cecumenical.\u201d In other words, \u201cit\u2019s a celebration of your own nation and it\u2019s a celebration of the whole world, both in one.\u201d Canada is just the place for such a party.<\/p>\n This country has not always been so welcoming. Our history is pockmarked with episodes of exclusion and racism \u2013 against the Chinese who came to build the transcontinental railroad; against the Japanese Canadians interned during the Second World War \u2013 not to mention the suffering visited on Indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n But the broad backlash against immigration that you see in much of the Western world simply hasn\u2019t 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\u2019s United States.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n While some diasporas are anxious about rising far-right influence back home, the Esplanade exhibit aims to strike a note of hope.<\/p>\n The fear of some skeptics that newcomers would fail to become \u201creal Canadians\u201d \u2013 huddling for generations in isolated, clannish pockets \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n In Canada\u2019s Ghanaian community, they will be waving Ghana\u2019s red, yellow and green flag when its team, the Black Stars, takes on Panama at Toronto\u2019s 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 \u201cthe greatest country in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a>Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Ghana and Panama will play each other in Toronto soon to see who emerges from Group L, which also includes England and Croatia.<\/p>\n This Canadian success story has meaning beyond our shores. There was a time, not long ago, when it was thought that the world\u2019s 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\u2019s not a small world after all.<\/p>\n Canada\u2019s experience suggests otherwise. It is a flicker of hope in a darkening glass. <\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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). <\/p>\n \u201cIf Canada is a little bit smug, I think it deserves it,\u201d said Ms. Unlu, the woman with the big white dog. <\/p>\n The rest of us have become so accustomed to Canada\u2019s brilliant human mosaic that it doesn\u2019t impress us any more. Like a guy who works in a cafe overlooking Niagara Falls, we no longer see the marvels outside our window. But there is really nothing quite like it anywhere else. <\/p>\n The Canada that will be on display during the World Cup is a wonder of the modern world. Let\u2019s not grumble about the crowds and the noise. Let\u2019s share a drink, wave a flag and cheer.<\/p>\n A World Cup to watch: More from The Globe and MailThe Decibel podcast<\/p>\n Investigative reporter Greg Mercer pored over FIFA\u2019s contracts<\/a> with Toronto and Vancouver, and told The Decibel<\/a> what he learned about the division of costs and rewards. Subscribe for more episodes.<\/a><\/p>\n Resources for the fans<\/p>\n Where to watch the World Cup in Vancouver and Toronto<\/a><\/p>\n Map: Which roads are closed in Toronto and Vancouver<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ZLPNHRPVXJG4HKUDYK6AIZZW4M.JPG\")
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