FIRST PERSON | I spent years feeling like an outsider in Canada — until my children helped me see it as home

FIRST PERSON | I spent years feeling like an outsider in Canada — until my children helped me see it as home

For decades, Magdalena Olszanowski has seen herself as a Pole living in Canada, not a Canadian. That all changed when her Montreal-born children began questioning their identity, forcing Olszanowski to confront her own sense of belonging in Canada and to reconsider the cultural divide that had long shaped her perspective.

I spent years feeling like an outsider in Canada — until my children helped me see it as home

“What is so wrong with being Canadian?” my nine-year-old child inquired during dinner. “We are Montrealers. We are Canadian.” My skin crawled. I have always perceived myself as a Pole residing in Canada, not as a Canadian. I constructed a barrier around myself based on my experiences of immigrating to Toronto from Warsaw, Poland. In 1990, shortly after the fall ...