by Ruth » Wed Nov 16, 2005 5:29 pm
#ed_op#DIV#ed_cl#I graduated 2 years of college with $20,000 of debt. I luckily did qualify for OSAP, not because I am an immigrant, but because I was an adult student and wasn't making a whole lot of money beforehand. I had to get financing from the bank on top of my OSAP, and I had 4 part-time jobs.#ed_op#/DIV#ed_cl##ed_op#DIV#ed_cl#One of my jobs is in the Jewish community, and the staff there are quite multi-cultural, the boss is a Canadian Jew, the 2 longest-standing employees one is a British Jew, the other is a French (France, not Quebec)Jew, his son works there - his son is 21 and anti-Judaism so he considers himself plain old Canadian, and an Israeli Jew. Of the non-Jewish staff there is me who is English, another woman who is Yugoslavian, one woman from Guyana (she is Hindu), another woman who works on occasion is Afghani and one Canadian fellow. The Afghani woman's husband and sister have also worked there in the past, they are Muslim. The sister speaks Persian, Hindi, English and one other Indian dialect. Everyone gets their religious holidays off, but the only ones that are paid are your regular old statutory holidays. So out of the entire staff of 10, 3 were born in Canada, sounds to me like these immigrants are working and contributing to taxes!#ed_op#/DIV#ed_cl##ed_op#DIV#ed_cl#The Afghani family in particular have worked very hard to help bring more of their family over, you can sure understand why they want to!#ed_op#/DIV#ed_cl#