This is a very nice street we live on, in a middle-class neighbourhood of a middle-class city of a middle-class country. We share the street with a collage of other types of home-owners; each house slightly different than the others, although they represent tract housing. People have stamped their values and personalities on the homes they live in. It is a short street of single-family houses; many detached, others are town homes or condominium-type homes.

The people living in them make their livelihoods as civil servants, blue- and white-collar workers, military officers, health and legal professionals, truck-and-delivery drivers. By and large it is a friendly street. Those living on the street are a fairly representative group of Canada's immigration inheritance, originally hailing from Russia, China, Egypt, Bangladesh, India, and Eastern Europe, with a sprinkling of French-Canadians among the third-generation Anglos.

Most people are warm and friendly, while some exhibit a wariness born of their experiences in their countries of origin. The least-friendly tend to be those with a long history of life in Canada, those whom we could classify as native-born, though not of aboriginal extraction whose mother-tongue is jealously French. If, in this majority-English-speaking enclave, they are addressed in English, they take immediate umbrage.

The barometer of my awareness is awakened and refreshed each time I agree to represent a local or national charity, volunteering to go out in my neighbourhood to canvass door-to-door for charitable funding that will inevitably help the entire community. I have developed, over decades of observation, a yardstick of assessing peoples' values and priorities and social consciences; or lack thereof.