This started out as a response in the comment thread attached to the July 22 post, but it got kind of long so I'm enlarging it even more and making it a post in its own right.

Adrian from Australia (Austradrian?) commented that Canada seems to have a relatively open immigration policy, at least compared to Australia. That's probably true - and many people from all over the world know that Canada is easier to immigrate to than the United States.

Canada knows that it's a big, empty country with a less-than-replacement-level birthrate. They also had a fairly restrictive and racist immigration policy for the first half of the 20th century that has left a fair amount of residual guilt that they're still trying to make up for. That's also why they introduced the Cosmo quiz points system, since they wanted the process to be less vulnerable to the potential biases of individual immigration officials.

Canada seems to expect different things from its immigrants than the United States does. The dominant metaphor here is not the US-style "melting pot", but a "cultural mosaic", where each ethnic/cultural group maintains its distinct identity, but together they make a pretty picture. It's probably just as much of a fairy tale as the melting pot idea, but at least the ideal is not, "Prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile."

Part of this innate Canadian tolerance for diversity comes from the whole Quebec issue. These days its seen as an English/French cultural division, but before the 1960s it was really more of a Catholic/Protestant religious division (the majority of the English settlers here were hardcore Calvinist Scottish and Scotch-Irish types). Whichever it is, Canada has had more experience with managing a multicultural society with no clear majority culture (as opposed to one with a dominant group and a few minorities thrown in for flavor) than most places. Of course, the converse of this multiculturalism is the continual and often excruciatingly boring agonizing about, "what does it mean to be Canadian?" As far as I can tell, the Canadian cultural identity is almost wholly composed of wondering what the Canadian cultural identity is, along with frequent assertions that whatever it might be, it's damn well not anything at all like the American cultural identity.

The current per capita immigration rate in Canada is about twice what it is in the US. Most of those immigrants end up in Toronto, which is now about half foreign-born (for comparison, New York City is about one-third foreign-born). This of course means that the restaurant scene here totally rocks. You can get fantastic and often dirt-cheap ethnic food of nearly every variety. Except Mexican - good, cheap, like-your-abuela-would-make Mexican food is one of the things I really miss about the US. It was in Toronto that I learned (the hard way) that eating at a burrito place entirely staffed by Pakistanis is probably a bad idea.