The Muskoka region of northern Ontario is full of lakes. It is the ideal summer vacation spot and often called "Cottage Country" because of the many family cottages (often generations old) where families come together to spend some summer months out in the rugged country. It is a combination of camping and cabin living, with the lakes nearby for swimming, canoeing and boating.
There are towns and small cities nearby, like Barrie and Collingwood, where families can enjoy some kind of high life, with cafes and sophisticated restaurants to suit all palettes, and cultural centres and movie theatres with the current shows and exhibits.
Recently, immigrant Chinese and Indians have been trying to find a stake (real estate) around Barrie, with the idea being to surge up "north" from the Toronto-Mississauga area in search of, as one interviewed Indian man said, "a safe place to bring up my family."
Part of the agenda is to have the various bus and rail systems expand their services, including adding more earlier and later hours to accommodate "commuting" workers to Toronto and Mississauga.
But I think that is a failed project. The close to two hours commute by bus/rail and about 1 1/2 hour commute by car - one way - is a long stretch. And for what?
Barrie isn't like New Market or Aurora, communities about an hour north of Toronto and closer still to Mississauga, which grew
because of Chinese and Indian immigrants. They are both more than 75% of "multicultural."
Barrie is an established city with an historic background, and with many references in its monuments and buildings of the British presence and influence in the city's origins. What Indian or Chinese would want to live with such reminders, which are far harder to eradicate than in the New Maret or Aurora regions with their "clean(er) slate" origins?
Barrie is also, as I said earlier, a cottage country go-to city with few "ethnic" influences, other than an Indian restaurant by the harbourfront, which is more of a
"gourmet" food with white tablecloths and fancy menu folders. (It does, though, smell up the small stretch where it is located, with the pungent smells of Indian curries, jarringly out of place.)
So as Chinese and Indian immigrants venture out north, they come in contact with the nature that Canadians have been familiar with all their lives and know how to maneuver.
A recent CTV new story recounts the death of a mother and young daughter who were vacationing near these lake regions in a motel SWIMMING POOL! The news headline just stated that it was a mother/daughter duo, but my immediate reaction was "these had to have been a Chinese or Indian pair, who didn't know how to swim and therefore have none of the respect for what water (even a pool water) can do.
And I was right.
Here is the story;
A Scarborough mother and her young daughter have been identified as the victims of an apparent drowning at a resort in The Blue Mountains.
Ontario Provincial Police say officers were called to the Mountain Springs Resort and Conference Centre at around 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday night.
Paramedics rushed the woman and child to a local hospital where they were later pronounced dead.
The husband and father of the victims, Yiting Gong, identified them as 34-year-old Tiffany and five-year-old Chloe.
Gong said that he arrived at the pool 10 minutes after his wife and daughter did and by that time they were "gone."
The pool had a "caution" sign up, which they had ignored.
CAUTION
This pools is unsupervised.
Children under 12 years old are not allowed within the pool area unless
accompanied by parents OR his OR her agent who is not less than 16 years of age.
The motel owner, who was also interviewed, now has this traumatic memory to deal with.
