People & Culture
Newcomers are sold a vision of a new life in Canada that doesn’t always come true
Nihal Elwan was the first to admit that she didn’t have “an entrepreneurial bone” in her body. The Egyptian-born, British-educated anthropologist, who moved to Canada in 2014 after a career in international development, even tells me she was not much of a foodie. Well, this is confusing. We’re sitting in Tayybeh, a popular restaurant and catering company in Vancouver that Elwan has owned and operated since 2017. It showcases Syrian food made by women refugees from the Middle East and has quickly become a go-to place for Arabic cuisine and community spirit in the city’s bougie westside.
Career shifts are common for newcomers to Canada, but Elwan’s pivot was shaped not by the particulars of her own journey but by those of more than 3,600 Syrians, primarily refugees, fleeing a brutal war and arriving in British Columbia between 2015 and 2016. She kept thinking, “What are these people going to do here? They’re really from very different cultural backgrounds” to B.C. and Canada. She ultimately landed on food as a bridge between the world they left behind and the one they had just entered.
Lenya Wilks also knows a thing or two about career reinvention en route to a new homeland. The Jamaica native moved to Brandon, Man., to study jazz vocals in 2016, finding her creative bliss in neo-soul, a blend of jazz and soul. Think Ella Fitzgerald meets Whitney Houston meets Anita Baker, she tells me when we meet at the office of DIVERSEcity, the immigration settlement service in Surrey, B.C. As director of partnerships and stakeholder engagement, Wilks focuses on community engagement and capacity building for diversity and inclusion work among the grassroots organizations that fall within her ever-expanding portfolio. (She also oversees child and family services and some youth programming.)
“I haven’t performed in a long time. I’ve really paused music,” she says with a discernable note of regret. “This sector is not a nine to five. You take home a lot of work.”
From two different vantage points, Elwan and Wilks have witnessed and reshaped the Canadian immigration story — as immigrants themselves and as supporters of newcomers. Their experiences reveal what immigration and refugee settlement in Canada looks like in the 21st century. For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigration to Canada was about colonizing the continent with (mostly) people of European descent. Policy shifts in the 1960s favoured skills and education and eliminated racial preference in ways that enshrined the economic benefits of immigration as a source of GDP growth, a solution to labour shortages and a pipeline to Canada’s emerging multicultural national identity. The economic case for immigration is clear, but so are the cracks in the system. Now, in this mixed narrative, women take the lead supporting other women, and newcomers of different generations and backgrounds fill in gaps in government cutbacks or policy flip-flopping on the number of immigrants admitted to Canada.
Migrants to this country have built networks of support to help weather changing attitudes to immigration. In 2024, 58 per cent of Canadians believed the country accepts too many immigrants, up 14 per cent from the previous year, which saw a jump of 17 per cent from the one before (2022). Although the majority of Canadians (68 per cent) still view immigration as a net positive to the economy, some commentators and settlement workers, including Wilks, believe the system is at a breaking point, being kept together by the goodwill and sacrifices of other immigrants who are farther along their journey into Canada.
In 2014, Elwan moved to Vancouver to join her Canadian husband, who had landed a tenure-track position at Simon Fraser University. It was love at first sight. “I remember thinking, ‘this city is gorgeous.’ It was August. It was warm, the weather was glorious, the beaches were beautiful,” she says as staff flit around us serving the busy lunch-hour crowd. She was nursing her one-year-old child when Syrian refugees began arriving in Canada. Tayybeh’s origin story took shape soon after.
“My idea was, ‘Let’s just get some money, get some Syrian women to cook for people in my building’ — really very, very basic,” Elwan recalls. The basic became intricate after a successful grant application for $500 led to a pop-up buffet-style dinner for 60 at a restaurant and then for 120 at a church.
That first pop-up dinner started with four women. Syrian women kept recommending friends, neighbours and relatives, most of whom had never worked before or cooked for anyone but their families.
“Everything that we take for granted about employment is something we had to introduce, repeat and enforce,” Elwan recalls. That means everything from the importance of punctuality to the value of paying taxes. As the business grew, so did the relationships and the community around Tayybeh — and around Elwan, who says the bonds between her and the other women go beyond the employer-employee relationship.
Maha Al Ahmad, 44, has been working as a chef at Tayybeh for five years. The restaurant has anchored her and her family in Canada. “I’m always learning and accomplishing new things,” she tells me in Arabic.
The mother of five can’t see herself living anywhere else. When pressed to explain what Canada gave her, the expression she repeated most was “feeling safe.” She recalls a trip to Germany last year that made her jittery the moment she landed at the airport. “Racism is rife there. You start in a conversation in English, and they don’t respond in English, even if they know the language. We have not experienced this in Canada.”
Elena Akfaly, Tayybeh’s kitchen manager, is about a decade younger than Al Ahmad. She arrived in Canada as a refugee in 2019 and lived in Edmonton for two years before moving to Vancouver in 2022, drawn to Canada’s West Coast by her love of the open sea. To Akfaly, Canada is “chway chway” — bit by bit — becoming home. “When someone asks me, I say I’m Syrian Canadian.”
Tucked into a low-rise between a vape shop that sells vape refills and bongs and a hair salon and spa where, as if time stood still, you can get a regular haircut for $10, DIVERSEcity’s bland exterior belies a colourful history. For almost five decades, the organization has been providing Surrey’s immigrant and refugee communities with a range of settlement services to help them navigate local resources for, among other things, housing, health, schooling, language training and employment. As Wilks shows me around the building to greet front-line workers, I notice that all but one of the dozen people I meet are women — and almost all are, themselves, relatively new immigrants to Canada.
The immigration and settlement sector is “predominantly led by women, mothers, sisters, aunts — and they do [this] because it’s a part of our nature,” Wilks tells me. The work remains under-compensated, as is often the case for the non-profit sector and for industries where women dominate, such as health care and domestic service.
I ask Wilks about the significance of having immigrants with varied Canadian work experience helping newcomers at a raw and often stressful point in their Canadian journey. Part of me is wondering about the immigrant’s lot to perform emotional labour in addition to physical. Wilks prefers to lean in on other aspects of the relationship among different generations of immigrants and refugees.
“Understanding is very important, because if you don’t understand the [immigration] journey, then you won’t understand the struggles, and you won’t be able to provide them with the support they need and the advice they will need,” Wilks explains. “It doesn’t mean that an individual who’s not an immigrant can’t do this work. It just means that shared understanding allows you to lead with a little bit more compassion and patience.
Many of the clients in DIVERSEcity (but men in particular) are caught in the classic employment trap of this country. You need Canadian work experience to get a good job, and you can’t get a good job without Canadian work experience. The disconnect has led to frustration, disillusionment and what experts refer to as onward migration. A 2024 study by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship and the Conference Board of Canada suggests that highly skilled immigrants — the ones Canada deems essential to its economic growth — are leaving in record numbers, with a third of the immigrants who leave doing so within five years of arriving in the country.
“We sell them a dream,” Wilks says, referring to the federal government and to immigrant consultants. Immigrants “were sold a dream that they can come to Canada, and they will find meaningful employment. Nobody tells them the truth: you’re going to pay thousands of dollars to be retrained or to get your credentials recognized. It may take you two to three years to even get into the field that you’re coming from.”
Wilks believes many parties have unfairly profited off packaging and selling that dream: immigration consultants, universities that have made settling in Canada after studying a recruitment tool, and governments that use immigration targets as a political and economic lever. When a friend or family member asks Wilks about immigrating to Canada, her response is a simple: “Not right now.”
My conversations with Elwan and Wilks took place three weeks before the federal elections, which were overtaken by the trade war with the United States and soul-searching into Canada’s sovereignty.
Concerns about the current political climate and a rising anti-Arab sentiment motivated Elwan to apply for her Canadian citizenship, something she had put aside to focus on Tayybeh. “I’m really anchored in this place,” she says as she points both to her restaurant and to the city outside it. “I felt that this was the right moment for me to apply, and I feel very happy and excited to be a citizen.”
This story is from the May/June 2025 Issue
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