In this country, public education has traditionally been looked upon as the great leveller, as the vehicle that gives all students an equal chance to succeed. But the state of ESL services in Canadian schools — and the existence of such high ESL dropout rates — raise troubling questions: Why are ESL students struggling in school? Do these students have the same chance to succeed as their Canadian counterparts? Are we in danger of creating an immigrant underclass in Canada, one fuelled by persistent dropouts?

The 2001 census redrew the demographic portrait of Canada's largest cities. For years, anyone living in Toronto or Vancouver recognized that these cities served as magnets for newcomers. But the census — and the social change that it mapped — still managed to awe Canadians.

Three million people in Ontario called themselves immigrants in 2001. In the Greater Toronto Area, 40 per cent of residents told Statistics Canada that they spoke a first language other than English. Toronto is made up of more immigrants (44 per cent) than Los Angeles (41 per cent), Vancouver (37 per cent) and New York City (36 per cent).

In British Columbia, 1 million people — more than one-quarter of the overall population — said they were foreign-born. The vast majority lived in Vancouver and other cities on the Lower Mainland, where fewer than half the residents consider English to be their mother tongue.

With more immigrants landing in Canada with fewer English skills, the demand for English-as-a-second-language classes has skyrocketed. In Calgary, ESL enrolment has more than tripled since 1992 to 14,000 students. In Coquitlam, B.C., the number of students enrolled in ESL jumped 580 per cent during the 1990s to 5,178 students from 761. In Vancouver and Surrey, almost one-quarter of the entire school populations are now studying ESL.

But it's not simply ESL programs that school boards finance. With the influx of ESL students come demands for translation services so that parents can be informed of school events; bilingual tutors to help ESL students in their first language; cultural liaison workers to bridge cultural and religious divides; and new classroom materials comprehensible to those who have not grown up in Canada.

School boards have also been forced to wrestle with unusual problems. In Richmond, B.C., so many Chinese immigrants have enrolled in some schools that the ability to absorb English by listening to native English speakers has been lost. Students are being sent into the community to learn English.

In Toronto, the board had to develop a program to assist older high school students, oftentimes refugees, who were arriving without the most basic of academic skills.

For Canada's big-city school boards, the biggest challenge created by immigrant students remains the provision of English-as-second-language instruction. For the students, it is an essential service. As Hetty Roessingh says: "You can't do chemistry, and you can't do physics and you can't do social studies without English." Indeed, it is the acquisition of English that gives immigrant students the chance to pursue their dreams in Canada.