Rishta in Toronto

How to read a Toronto profile properly

Toronto is six cities, and the word on its own tells you very little

The city was six municipalities until 1998 and in every way that matters to a family it still is. A profile that says Toronto could be any of them, and they are not interchangeable.

Scarborough, in the east, holds the largest Pakistani population in the country. Mostly it is houses rather than apartments, bought in the nineteen-nineties and two thousands by families who are now settled, with grown children and often a mortgage long since paid. North York is mixed in a way no single sentence covers: Don Mills and Bayview are comfortable, Flemingdon Park and the Jane and Finch area are among the poorest parts of the city, and they are twenty minutes apart. Etobicoke in the west, around Rexdale, Dixon and Kipling, is working and lower-middle income with a strong Somali, South Asian and Caribbean mix. Thorncliffe Park is a dense cluster of rental high-rises that functions as the arrival neighbourhood for Muslim families from across the subcontinent; an enormous number of households in Markham and Ajax today began there. The old city of Toronto, meaning downtown and the Danforth, is condominiums, young professionals and students. And York and East York in between are older, smaller houses.

Then the line that locals hear in every conversation: 416 or 905. The 416 is the city proper. The 905 is the ring around it — Mississauga and Brampton to the west, Vaughan, Richmond Hill and Markham to the north, Ajax, Pickering, Whitby and Oshawa to the east. People in the 905 very often say Toronto, because to a family in Pakistan that is the only name that means anything. It matters because it changes the household: a 905 address usually means a bigger house, a car for each adult, a commute of forty to ninety minutes each way, and children in a different school board. A 416 address more often means less space, no car or one car, and a short commute. Neither is better. They are simply different lives, and a bride moving from one to the other should know which one she is moving into.

So ask three things rather than one. Which part of the city. Is the home owned or rented, and in whose name. And where does the working day actually happen, because a man living in Scarborough and working in Mississauga spends three hours a day in a car and that is a fact about the marriage, not about the job. Our Hamilton page sets out what a long commute does to a household in more detail, and it reads the same from this end.

One more local point worth saying plainly. Thorncliffe Park and the high-rise clusters around it carry a certain snobbery in community conversation, and families searching from Pakistan sometimes read an apartment address as a judgement on the household. It is nothing of the kind. Rent in this city is brutal, new arrivals land where there are mosques, schools and other Pakistanis within walking distance, and plenty of the professional families in the outer suburbs spent their first five years in exactly those buildings. Read the education, the work and the family, not the postcode.

In Ontario, the house the couple lives in is treated unlike any other asset

Our Montreal page explains a province where an unmarried couple has almost no rights to each other’s property, and our Surrey page a province where two years of living together makes you spouses. Ontario is a third system again, and because most Pakistani families in Canada live here, it is the one most of our members are actually governed by.

Two things about it are worth any family’s attention. First, when a married couple separates in Ontario, the law does not simply split what each person owns. It equalises the growth in each spouse’s net worth across the marriage, so what you brought in is generally yours and what the marriage built is shared. Second, and this is the part that surprises people: the matrimonial home is carved out of that rule. The home the couple actually lived in is counted at its full value on separation, even if one spouse owned it before the wedding, and both spouses have an equal right to stay in it regardless of whose name is on the title. A son who bought a condo before the nikah and then lives in it with his wife has, in effect, put the whole of that condo into the marriage.

Families should hear that without alarm and without cynicism. It is not a trick; it is a deliberate protection, and it exists precisely because of the number of wives who were left with nothing after years in a house that was in somebody else’s name. But it is the single best reason in this province to write things down before the wedding rather than after. Ontario allows a marriage contract, made before or during the marriage, and courts will generally uphold a fair one where both sides had their own independent legal advice and disclosed their finances honestly. That is the right place to deal with a house the parents paid for, a family business, an inheritance, or children from a previous marriage. It is not an insult to anybody and it is not a sign of distrust. It is the same instinct that makes us record the haq mehr in writing rather than trusting memory.

Three further points, briefly, because they come up constantly. Unmarried couples in Ontario do not get the property rules at all, however long they have lived together, though support can still be claimed after three years or a child — the opposite of British Columbia, and a reason not to rely on advice from a cousin in Vancouver. A nikah performed by a person not registered to solemnise marriages in Ontario is not a legal marriage here, and the civil licence is what every bank, hospital, insurer and immigration officer will ask for. And an arbitration of a family dispute decided under religious law alone is not enforceable as a family arbitration in this province; a mosque can mediate, reconcile and advise, and families should use that help, but it does not substitute for the law. None of this is legal advice and we are not lawyers — for anything consequential, take an hour with an Ontario family lawyer before the nikah, not after.

The parents are old now, and somebody is expected to look after them

Toronto holds the first large Pakistani cohort to arrive in Canada, and that generation is now in its seventies and eighties. This is new. The families who came in the nineteen-seventies and eighties built houses, businesses and children’s careers here, and almost none of them planned for the part that is arriving now. In practice it lands on a marriage, and more often than not it lands on a wife.

Here is what the system actually provides, because families guess at this and guess badly. Publicly funded home care exists in Ontario and is organised regionally, but what it supplies is typically a personal support worker for a limited number of hours a week, not a carer in the house. Long-term care homes are heavily subsidised and the waiting lists for a good one are measured in months to years, and the culturally appropriate homes — the ones with halal food and Urdu-speaking staff — have the longest waits of all. Retirement residences are available immediately and are paid for privately, at a cost most families find startling. Everything in between is done by the family, usually unpaid, usually by a daughter or a daughter-in-law, and usually without anybody ever having agreed to it out loud.

So say it out loud, before the nikah. Who lives in the house now and who will live in it in five years. If his parents are to live with the couple, is that understood by everybody and is there any arrangement about privacy, cooking, money and her own time. If she works, who covers the hours. If there are several brothers, which of them is actually doing this, because the answer is rarely as evenly divided as the family describes it. Is there any money set aside, any insurance, any power of attorney for care and for property — and if not, now is a reasonable moment to arrange one. And if a parent is still in Pakistan and will need care there, whose responsibility is it and what does it cost each month.

Two related points. A family planning to bring elderly parents to Canada should read the sponsorship section on our Brampton page first; the undertaking is twenty years and the income test is real, and the super visa is the realistic route for most. And a woman being asked to take this on is entitled to say that she will do it with help rather than alone. Caring for parents is among the highest things our faith asks of a family. Assuming without asking that one woman will absorb it is not the same thing at all.

The American offer, and why both sides should talk about it first

No page in this country can honestly skip this. A great many ambitious careers in Toronto — in technology above all, but also medicine, finance, consulting and academia — end with a serious offer from the United States, where the salary for the same work is frequently far higher. For Canadians this is unusually easy to act on: a professional in a listed occupation can often work in the United States on a treaty permit obtained quickly, and it is common for a family to move south within a few years of marrying. Families from Pakistan, understandably, read Canada as a destination and are often blindsided when it turns out to have been a staging post.

Nobody should be criticised for taking a better job. But the question belongs in the conversation before the nikah, not in a kitchen three years later, because the consequences fall unevenly. A treaty permit is tied to the employer and to a job that matches the listed occupation; it is renewable but it is not permanent residence, and the green card queue is a separate matter entirely. A spouse brought along on the dependent status may not be permitted to work at all, so a woman with her own career can find it ended by the move. Canadian permanent residence can be lost by living outside the country, as our Canada page sets out, which matters enormously for a couple who have not yet taken citizenship. Health coverage, a Canadian pension record and employment-insurance eligibility all stop at the border. And the parents, the mosque, the cousins and the help with a newborn are all here, not there.

So ask four plain questions. Is a move to the United States something you are actively considering, or something you would consider for the right offer. Would it happen before or after citizenship. What would she do for work there, and have you checked whether her status would allow her to work at all. And where do the parents fit in that plan. A couple who have answered those four honestly can move south happily. A couple who have not will have the argument eventually, and it will be worse.

The same question runs in reverse and we see it often. Pakistani families in the United States searching into Toronto should understand that the Canadian side gives up a great deal to move: provincially funded healthcare without insurance premiums, parental leave measured in months, and residence in a country that offers a straightforward path to citizenship. Our Detroit and Seattle pages deal with cross-border matches from the southern end. Whichever way it runs, settle which country the couple will live in before the nikah, and put the answer in writing in the preferences paragraph.

The one city you need not widen from, and the three times you should anyway

This is the deepest Pakistani marriage market outside Pakistan and Britain, and most families here will find what they are looking for inside the 416 and the 905. Start there, with the city itself and then Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Ajax, Pickering and Oshawa. All of it is one labour market and one community; a proposal from Brampton to Scarborough is entirely ordinary, even if it is an hour and a half across the top of the city at the wrong time of day.

There are three good reasons to go further. The first is a narrow requirement — a particular biradari, a sect with a small presence, a hafiz-e-Quran, a specific profession combined with a specific age — in which case the whole province should be open from the first day: Hamilton and the Niagara region to the south-west, Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph an hour out, London and Windsor further down the 401, Barrie to the north, Kingston east. The second is a deliberate decision about housing, since Hamilton, Kitchener and London are substantially cheaper and a couple who intend to buy rather than rent should be looking at them seriously. The third is simply that a good match is a good match: Ottawa is four and a half hours by road or an hour by air, Montreal five hours by road, and Calgary and Edmonton four hours by air with a large and settled Pakistani community in each.

Two borders are closer than Canadians usually realise. Buffalo is ninety minutes away and Detroit four hours, which puts Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and the whole of upstate New York within a weekend drive, and New York City is a ninety-minute flight. Cross-border matches along this corridor are common and they work, provided both families understand that an immigration process sits in the middle of the marriage whichever direction it runs.

For Pakistan itself, this is the easiest city in North America to search from. Pearson is the country’s main hub, with service to Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad through the Gulf and Istanbul that fills with families every summer, and the flight time makes a wedding trip or a parent’s visit an ordinary undertaking rather than an expedition. Set your own city to Toronto, set the partner preference country to Pakistan, and the pool opens to every district there.