Rishta in Vancouver

How to read a Vancouver profile properly

Almost nobody here can buy a house, and that is a marriage question

This is the most expensive housing market in North America and it has been for a long time. A family in Pakistan reading a Vancouver profile usually pictures a house, a garden and a car in the drive. The reality for most young couples in this region is a rented apartment, or a suite in a relative’s house, or a very long mortgage on a small condominium bought with help from both sets of parents. None of that is a failure and none of it says anything about the person. But it changes what a family should be asking, and it should be asked before the wedding rather than discovered after it.

Three arrangements cover most households here. The first is renting, often for many years, which is ordinary and carries no stigma in this city whatever it would mean in Lahore. The second is the family house with a suite in it — a basement or ground-floor apartment, legal or otherwise, usually rented out, and so common that people call it the mortgage helper. A great many Pakistani families in Surrey, Burnaby and Coquitlam carry their mortgage on that rent, and a bride may be joining a household where there are tenants downstairs and a shared laundry. The third is the couple who live with his parents, in a house bought twenty years ago when it was possible, with no realistic prospect of a place of their own in the same area.

So ask plainly. Owned or rented, and if owned, by whom — the son, or his father, or the parents jointly. Will the couple have their own front door, and if not, is that for a year or for the foreseeable future. Is there a suite, is it tenanted, and who manages it. What is the monthly housing cost against the household income, because a mortgage here can take a very large share of two salaries. And the question families skirt: is anybody expecting the bride’s side to contribute to a down payment. Our nikah nama guide is the place to deal with that properly; an informal expectation about money is the single most reliable source of bad feeling in the first year.

Then the question that follows from all of it. A noticeable number of Pakistani families in this region eventually leave — for Calgary, Edmonton or Ontario, where the same income buys a house — and that decision usually arrives two or three years into a marriage, when a second child makes the apartment impossible. If one side is thinking about it, say so now. A woman who marries into Vancouver expecting to stay near her own family, and finds herself in Alberta at twenty-nine, has a reasonable grievance. A couple who planned it together do not.

When the income is commission or a contract, not a salary

More households here live on income that arrives irregularly than in any other Canadian city on this site. Real estate agents, mortgage brokers, insurance agents, car and furniture sales, independent contractors in the trades, consultants, and the very large film and television workforce that works show by show. A profile that says real estate agent or producer can mean a household earning extremely well or one earning very little, and the title alone will not tell you which.

Read it the way a bank reads it, because a bank is the most sceptical reader such a household will ever meet. For commission work, the useful figure is the average of the last two or three years as declared on tax returns, not the best year and not a number remembered out loud. Ask how many transactions in the last twelve months, because in real estate a great many licensed agents complete very few, and the income distribution is far more uneven than families imagine. Ask whether the licence is current and who the brokerage is. Ask what the costs are — fees, desk costs, advertising and a car are all paid out of commission before anything reaches the household. And remember that this market is cyclical: a good year and a bad year can differ by a factor of three, and the bad years arrive without warning.

For project and contract work — film and television above all, but also contract roles in technology — the questions are different. How many weeks did you work last year, and how many the year before. Is there a union, because a union crew position carries rates, hours and sometimes benefits that a non-union one does not. Are the hours the brutal ones this industry is known for, because a fourteen-hour day for months at a stretch is a fact about a marriage. And is there anything behind a gap — savings, employment insurance eligibility, a spouse’s salary.

None of this is a reason to decline a proposal, and our Calgary page makes the same point about an industry that runs in cycles. Irregular income is not unstable income if the person handling it is disciplined, and plenty of commission households here are considerably better off than salaried ones. But a bride and her family are entitled to understand the shape of the money before they agree, and specifically to know what the household does in a thin year. The one practical warning: a household with irregular, self-reported income has a harder time with every official process — a mortgage, a lease, and above all sponsoring a spouse from Pakistan, where the paperwork expects documented income.

The least religious province in Canada, and what that means for children

British Columbia has the highest proportion of people reporting no religion of any province in the country, and the practical effect on a Muslim family is real. There are fewer mosques here relative to the population than in the Toronto region, they are further apart in a region that is spread out and slow to cross, and there is nothing resembling the network of full-time Islamic schools that a family in Scarborough or Mississauga can choose from. Friday prayer in the middle of a working day is genuinely difficult for most people here in a way it is not in Thorncliffe Park. Families in Pakistan rarely think to ask about any of this, and then a daughter arrives and finds that the community she expected is a forty-minute drive away.

This is not a warning against the city. It is a list of things to settle out loud, because two people who have never discussed them often discover in the fifth year that they wanted different childhoods for their children.

Which mosque does the family actually attend, and how often. Is it close enough that children will grow up inside a community, or is it a place the family visits at Eid. Where will the children be schooled — the public system, one of the small Islamic schools, or a weekend programme alongside it, and who will do the driving. Will there be Quran teaching at home, and by whom. What is expected of a wife in terms of dress and practice, asked directly rather than inferred from a photograph, as our United States page sets out for the same question. And the one that gets forgotten: what language will the children speak. Urdu or Punjabi or Pashto survives in a household here only if somebody decides it will; a grandmother who cannot talk to her grandchildren is a common and avoidable sadness.

The honest counterweight is that this region has a long-established community that has built most of what it needs — mosques in Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond and Coquitlam, Eid prayers that fill halls, halal shops, Islamic schooling for those who seek it out, and a very large Muslim population across the South Asian, Arab, Iranian, Somali and Bosnian communities. It is there. It is simply not around every corner the way it is in the Toronto region, and a family moving here should choose where it lives with that in mind rather than discovering it afterwards.

A will made in British Columbia will not necessarily do what you wrote in it

Our Surrey page deals with what British Columbia law does when a marriage ends in separation. This is the other half of the subject and it is peculiar to this province, so it belongs on a page that families across the Lower Mainland will read.

In most of Canada an adult of sound mind can leave their property to whomever they wish. In British Columbia they cannot, quite. A spouse or a child of the deceased — including an adult child — may apply to the court to vary a will on the ground that it does not make adequate provision for them, and the court has a wide discretion to rewrite the distribution. This province is almost alone in extending that right to independent adult children, and claims are not unusual.

For a Muslim family the collision is obvious. A distribution drawn up on the pattern of Islamic inheritance, which allots fixed shares and gives a son and a daughter different ones, is exactly the kind of will a disappointed child can ask a British Columbia court to vary, and there have been cases in this province where such wills were varied. We are a matrimonial service and not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. But a family with a house, a business or children from more than one marriage should know that the subject exists, and should take proper advice from a lawyer in this province who has dealt with it before, rather than copying a form from the internet or from a relative in another province.

Two practical points that come up on this site constantly. Dying without a will at all leaves the law to divide the estate on a statutory formula that will almost certainly not match what the family intended — a spouse takes a preferential share and the rest is split with the children — and for a blended family the result can be severe. And several of the largest assets most families hold, including registered retirement savings and life insurance, pass by the beneficiary named on the plan rather than by the will at all, which means the single most useful hour a newly married couple can spend is checking that those forms still say what they should. Marriage does not revoke a will in British Columbia, so a will made before the wedding, naming a previous spouse, stays exactly as it was until somebody changes it.

A corner of the country, and the three ways out of it

Search the whole Lower Mainland from the first day, and begin with Surrey rather than with Vancouver itself, because that is where most of the Pakistani households in this region are. Burnaby, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, New Westminster, Richmond, Delta, Langley, Maple Ridge and Abbotsford all belong in the same search; the region is one labour market and one community, and an hour across it is unremarkable. Vancouver Island — Victoria and Nanaimo — adds a little more, with a ferry or a short flight in between. Kelowna and the interior add a little more again.

Even taken together that is a modest pool, and this is one of the pages where we say plainly that most families should widen. There are three directions. Alberta is the obvious one: Calgary and Edmonton are ninety minutes by air with large, settled Pakistani communities, the same time zone, and a steady traffic of families moving between the two provinces already. Ontario is the deepest pool in the country — Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton and Hamilton — five hours by air and three time zones east, which makes the telephone calls awkward and the pool worth the awkwardness. And the border is two and a half hours south to Seattle, with the whole of the American west coast beyond it; our Surrey page sets out what a cross-border match involves.

For Pakistan itself, be realistic about the journey, because it affects how a family plans a wedding and how often parents can visit. Vancouver is the far side of the continent from Pakistan and there is no short way: the routes run one stop through the Gulf or Istanbul, or eastward through Toronto, and the whole trip is a long day and a half with a twelve-hour time difference at the end of it. Plan the meeting trips properly and in advance, use video calls heavily in between, and understand that a parent flying out to help with a new baby is a serious undertaking from here rather than a casual one. Set your own city to Vancouver and the partner preference country to Pakistan, and the pool opens to every district there.