Yuriy’s Notebook: Canada Through Fresh Eyes

In January 2023, The Tyee published my first-person story headlined “Escape from Crimea to Canada: A Ukrainian refugee shares his story of fleeing fear to navigate a fresh start in BC.” At the time the biggest conflict in Europe since the Second World War was 11 months old. Already the tragedy had claimed more than 12,000 civilian lives in Ukraine.

As I detailed in my piece, what drove me to leave my Crimea home was “the fear felt living every minute knowing that armed enforcers might come for you. It matters zero that you are guilty of nothing. There’s an infamous statement attributed to Joseph Stalin’s chief prosecutor Vyshinsky saying, basically: Provide me a man, and a law to convict him will be found.”

But safe in Canada, challenges lay ahead. I felt marooned in a temporary rental in a quiet, suburban corner of Surrey and wanted long-term housing in Vancouver. I had no work. I’m an experienced journalist who ran a newspaper in Crimea, but my English was not great. And while I was grateful for the safety Canada provided, like most Ukrainians arriving here, I was on a special visa called Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel, or СUAET, that didn’t guarantee I could stay forever.

Two years later, I’ve been invited to share with Tyee readers how I’ve been getting along. In this and four more dispatches I’ll try to give a picture of challenges and rewards for a new immigrant. While I can’t speak for all recent arrivals, I am tied into a network of fellow Ukrainians who exchange information and feelings about making headway in Canada. You’ll hear from some of them as well.

Foraging for shelter and pay

When my “Escape from Crimea” article appeared, I was surprised that it resonated widely and even was nominated for one of B.C.’s top journalism prizes. Although I did not win, I was not upset. The Webster Awards dinner and uplifting speeches from other journalists and Premier David Eby made my evening.

Six months before that event, in April 2023, I got lucky and was able to move from Surrey to Commercial Drive, a neighbourhood I love for its social life and delicious food. The best that many Ukrainian immigrants can hope to land in Vancouver’s wildly unaffordable housing market is a basement suite. But thanks to coincidence and patience, I managed to find an apartment with a beautiful view of the North Shore mountains from the bedroom window. How I managed this and why it is so difficult for immigrants to find decent housing in Vancouver I'll tell you soon.

The next challenge was finding a job. I started doing this in advance, six months before moving to Canada. I looked for vacancies that matched my experience and education, and sent out dozens of resumés. Very quickly I realized that few employers here really want someone without Canadian education and local working experience.

I attended WorkBC courses, where they taught me how to write a resumé in the Canadian style and how to properly conduct a job interview. I wasn’t sure how much those tutorials would help, but at least they offered a sense of progress, allowing me to not fall into despair as several months spent searching for work turned up few opportunities.

I also enrolled in English classes, challenging ones. Ukrainians with СUAET can attend free language courses, but they are usually not intensive and are mostly online. If I wanted to write pieces in English for local mass media, I would need more serious schooling.

As a journalist, I understood the value of going right to the boss with questions. So I wrote a letter to Helen McGregor, the superintendent of schools and CEO of the Vancouver School Board. I was surprised to get a response shortly from her office. She sent me to South Hill Education Centre on Fraser Street.

After testing, I was assigned to an English composition course taught by an exceptional instructor named Daniel Pontalti. I am grateful to him for providing an amazing excursion into the marvellous world of literature, writing and grammar that lasted several months. It was the best educational experience in my life. I actually ran to school in anticipation. Later, even when I had two full-time jobs, I preferred attending Daniel's class to the rare opportunity to sleep for a few hours.

This school is attended not only by adult immigrants but also by Canadians who need additional credits from school. Therefore, it was interesting to notice how different the behaviour of teachers and students in Canadian schools is from the post-Soviet ones I was familiar with. Here, the relationship is less formal; the teacher is more of an older friend and assistant, not a gendarme. Students freely leave and enter the classroom without asking the teacher and can even eat and drink during lessons, which was surprising to me.

Busing to beauty

During the time I was unemployed, I had a lot of spare time. My first impressions of Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, therefore, are a swirl of moments spent riding buses, trains and ferries, and arriving at scenic destinations I’d looked up on the internet even before leaving Crimea.

I've travelled a lot in my life and learned that glorious photos and videos rarely match the real views. But I was not disappointed by what I saw of this place with my own eyes.

For good reason, Vancouver is one of the most Instagrammable cities in the world with iconic views of downtown with blue water, green trees and white mountains in the background. Maybe you who’ve lived here for a long time take it for granted? Believe me, when I went out into nature here for the first time and saw the view from Cleveland Dam, I was impressed. A huge waterfall and a forest covered with ferns. Emerald grass fading into turquoise water crowned by the snow-capped peaks.

In the following months, I visited many more nature spots. Every time, whether in Deep Cove or Lynn Canyon, at Jug Island Beach or Buntzen Lake with Swan Falls, I never ceased to be amazed by the natural beauty.

I was impressed, as well, by the professionals who drove me there. It seems to me that there is an unofficial competition among B.C. bus drivers to see who can start and stop the most abruptly. I soon mastered the skill of holding on tightly with one hand and catching tourists flying around the cabin with the other.

I also was surprised to hear so many passengers say thank you to the driver when getting off the bus. In Europe, this can be heard only in small towns where everyone knows the driver personally. Sometimes it strikes me as comical. As passengers exit from the back door of the long double 99 B-Line or R4 bus, they quietly say thank you, out of habit. I don’t exclude the possibility that drivers have superpowers and hear words of gratitude from such a distance, but I understand that people say this mostly automatically.

Speaking of road culture, I want to compliment Vancouver drivers. They deserve a place in the Guinness World Records book as the drivers with the fastest reaction times in the world! The average human reaction time is three-quarters of a second, but I’m sure that your reaction time is two times faster.

I base this on the experiment you run involving flashing green lights in Vancouver; I have not seen such “a miracle of urbanism” in other countries. Typically, in other places, I’ve known a flashing green light to warn that in a couple of seconds it will change to yellow and red signals. But in Vancouver, the traffic light can blink green for a long time, and then, at the most unexpected moment for the driver, instantly switch to yellow.

I confess that when I began driving here, I urgently braked every time the green flashing light changes to yellow, which undoubtedly forced the drivers behind me to use profanity. But over time, I learned to relax and calmly drive through a yellow light, as most local drivers do. Spare a bit of tolerance for the immigrant trying to merge with Canadian traffic as well as culture.

I once asked a local guy how he felt about green flashing lights (which in fact tell drivers they are approaching a pedestrian-controlled crossing). He said, “As someone who grew up with these, I love them. I love them as a driver and love them as a pedestrian and a cyclist. I had no clue there was a different meaning elsewhere though. But honestly, except in places where there’re placed every block, they work great. Way better than the yellow flashing lights for pedestrians that cars never obey.”

In the early days, SkyTrain looked to me like something from the future. I had seen fully automated driverless trains at many airports and on several short lines in London and Copenhagen, but I found it impressive to encounter a big city’s transit system humming along with no drivers. I was completely shocked when I found out that the SkyTrain system began operating 38 years ago!

And yet, I do have a question. Last January, when the temperature in Vancouver dropped to -14 C, I kept wondering why so many SkyTrain ground stations are open to the weather. In summer, perhaps, passengers enjoy a light sea breeze, but in winter, when there is frost and arctic wind it seems like unnecessary punishment.

Comparisons with Europe

When I lived as if I were a roaming tourist, Vancouver seemed to me a lovely, relaxing city with polite citizens harmoniously coexisting with nature. When I’ve been in Europe, I noticed immigrants are more generally viewed with suspicion. In Vancouver I quickly stopped feeling like a stranger.

Still, there are some aspects of Europe that I admit I prefer. Canadians spend most of their free time with their families in their homes; Europeans prefer to spend their evenings having dinner in a restaurant or walking in public places.

In Europe you can get everywhere by bus or train. Having tried that while based in Vancouver, I quickly understood a car can feel essential if you want to visit Whistler or other nice places outside the city.

After filing hundreds of job applications, finally I was invited to my first interview. On my first try I hit the jackpot and got a job working for the City of Vancouver. No doubt a big victory, even if it came with a strong aroma. I landed an Operations Worker II position in the sanitation services department in Vancouver.

My make-believe tourist’s life changed when my job as a street cleaner began. It placed me in corners of the city that weren’t recommended on travel websites.

While it was pleasant to be dispatched to a city beach to gather debris left over from attendees of a fireworks display, more often my work had me moving at night through back alleys of the downtown. As I’ll expand upon in a later letter in this series, my employment offered a window into Vancouver places, and lives, that most residents, it seems to me, prefer to pretend don’t exist.

Every coin has two sides. For me it was new to encounter so many homeless people and the trash-strewn spaces they inhabited. It startled me to see some people take hard drugs in public on the streets, not even hiding from the police. As I made my rounds, it seemed the smell of weed was everywhere. So people smoke weed at bus stops and even near playgrounds. The number of people living desperately without shelter, and those using drugs in public places, is far higher than anything I encountered in Ukraine or other places I’ve visited in Europe. I’ll have more to say about this in a future dispatch.

Count me, today, among tens of thousands of Ukrainians who have moved to Canada over the past three years. Like me, they have faced difficulties with visas and finding housing and work. They have lived not knowing whether they would be able to extend their stay in Canada indefinitely.

And for many, the challenges, culture shock and uncertainties take a toll. Many of them decide to give up and move to Europe. Next week, I will attempt to give you a better sense of why.

This series is supported by funding from the Hummingbird Foundation.