Behnaz Rahbar – Newmarket | Titre Mag: Sometimes, understanding how profoundly immigrant life has changed over a generation does not require statistics. You simply have to step outside. I live in Newmarket today. A few minutes from my home is Ali Agha, a Persian grocery store where I can find almost anything I would expect from a supermarket in Iran. Across from my home is Sweet Aroma, where I can find familiar Persian pastries. At the bank, a doctor’s office, a hospital or a store, encountering another Iranian is no longer unusual. Sometimes I hear Farsi before I have even spoken a word myself.
For someone arriving in the Greater Toronto Area today, none of this may seem remarkable. For me, having arrived in Canada 26 years ago, the transformation is extraordinary. When I came to Canada in 2000, we first settled in Markham, around Steeles and McCowan. The Iranian community was much smaller then. There were perhaps three or four Persian restaurants we knew, a handful of grocery stores, places such as Garni for bread and pastries, and a small store called Exo where we could find Iranian films. These were more than businesses. They were small points of connection to a place we had left thousands of kilometres behind.
Communication with Iran was different too. International phone calls, calling cards, cost and time differences shaped our contact with family. There was no WhatsApp, no daily video call and no social media feed offering an immediate window into life back home. When you immigrated, you really did become distant.
Over the next 26 years, that distance began to change. New waves of Iranian immigrants arrived, families grew and the community expanded beyond Toronto and North York into Richmond Hill, Markham, Aurora, Newmarket and other parts of York Region. Today, my everyday experience is that across much of this area, I am rarely more than a five or ten minute drive from a Persian restaurant, supermarket, pastry shop or another Iranian business.
Even familiar names from Iran began appearing here. Haida Sandwich opened in North York, bringing with it memories for generations of Iranians who knew the name back home. The familiar name Bibi, long associated with one of Tehran’s best known pastry shops, also appeared in the Iranian community’s commercial landscape. For an immigrant, encounters like these can carry meaning far beyond food. A familiar sign, a box of pastries or the taste of a sandwich can suddenly bring back something left thousands of kilometres and many years behind. What travelled across the Atlantic was not simply food. It was memory.
Perhaps the most meaningful change, however, is language. Farsi is no longer confined to home. I hear it at banks, stores, medical offices and in everyday encounters. One of the less discussed realities of immigration is how much of yourself you initially have to translate: your name, your food, Nowruz, your humour, even the city you came from. As a community grows around you, some of that constant need to explain yourself disappears.
The numbers reflect that growth, although official figures and community estimates differ considerably. The 2021 Canadian census recorded 200,465 people reporting Iranian ethnic or cultural origins. In March 2026, Iranian Canadian MP Ali Ehsassi told the House of Commons that Canada’s Iranian community numbers approximately 500,000 people. Technology has narrowed the distance as well. Today I can wake up in Newmarket, video call Iran within seconds, shop at a Persian grocery store, speak Farsi during my day and watch something released in Iran that same evening.
None of this eliminates homesickness. People, streets, memories, sounds and the places where we grew up cannot simply be recreated elsewhere. But the nature of distance has changed. Canada has not moved any closer to Iran. The kilometres are exactly the same. I left home 26 years ago without realizing that, slowly, over all those years, home was also finding its way to us.
Editor’s Note: This is an abridged English version of the original article published in Persian.
