What does it mean to be European? and Canadian?

What does it mean to be home?

"Europe" has never been just a place on a map, and strictly speaking, it is not even a continent. Geologically and physically, Europe is the westernmost peninsula of the unbroken Eurasian landmass, sharing continuous land with Asia across the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea. The "continent" label is a historical and cultural inheritance, not a tectonic fact. What we call Europe is, at its core, a concept, one that has always been made and remade through politics and borders.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, that concept was tested to its limits. The peninsula was fractured by devastation and divided by the Iron Curtain, and its people were sorted by the administrative categories of catastrophe: displaced persons, refugees, expellees, stateless persons, labour migrants. Some had survived camps. Some had lost everything to borders that moved without them. Some were simply looking for work in a world that had run out of it. Each label carried different rights, different waiting times, and a different relationship to the possibility of ever being somewhere again.

Between 1945 and 1967, more than one million people carrying these labels crossed the Atlantic to Canada. They arrived into a country that was itself unsettled, a settler-colonial state, officially English and French, built on Indigenous land, still negotiating what it was and who it was for.

The story most often told about the immediate postwar arrival in Canada moves in one direction: a room in someone else's basement gives way, in time, to a mortgage and a lawn. It is a real trajectory, and enough newcomers followed something like it that it has become the story people expect to hear. But it is not the only trajectory, and its success as a narrative has crowded out the others. It also takes housing itself for granted. Before any basement, boarding house, or apartment, there was often no shelter at all: months in immigration hostels and reception centres, or periods of being unhoused in a country that had promised arrival but not yet a room.

Single male labour migrants sending remittances home often lived for years in shared rooms they never intended as a first rung on a ladder; for them the basement was not a waystation but a rational fit with a household economy centred elsewhere, not in Canada. Apartment living, too, sits awkwardly inside a story built around the single-family home. Many newcomers, lacking Canadian credit histories or the kin networks that made a down payment possible, simply could not access mortgage markets on the settlement narrative's timeline. Others, particularly women arriving alone or heading households, chose the apartment for its proximity to work, transit, and mutual aid over the promise of suburban space. Renting for fifteen years was not a failure to arrive. It was often the more available, and sometimes the more desired, way of being in the city. Finally, some residential lives resist the record altogether. Sponsorship arrangements and doubled-up households left little trace in census categories or municipal files built to count single families, not cousins and boarders sheltering under one roof. This is worth naming as an evidentiary problem, not smoothing over: the sources behind the basement-to-suburb story disproportionately survive because those people stayed, prospered, and were later interviewed as success stories. Those who returned, who kept renting, who never settled into one administrative category long enough to be traced, left thinner archives and that asymmetry shapes the picture we inherit.

CoMe-Home traces that history, focusing on these two urban landscapes: Halifax, a port of entry, and Toronto, a growing global city. It follows the people, the policies, and the places. Halifax and Toronto sharpen the point rather than resolve it. Halifax's smaller rental market produced patterns of transience that Toronto's larger, more differentiated housing market did not repeat in the same way.

Canada has long told a story about itself as a country that welcomes newcomers.

This project asks when that story was true, for whom it held, and what it cost to belong.