Canada’s embrace of diversity works

With the release of the latest numbers from the 2016 Canadian census, it may be time to change the nation’s official motto.

To the well-known phrase, “From sea to sea,” try adding the word “diversity.”

While it’s been obvious for decades that people from every corner of the planet are moving here, new census statistics show how much their presence is increasingly felt everywhere.

Large urban centres such as Toronto and Vancouver remain important destinations for newcomers.

In fact, visible minorities are now the majority in Toronto.

But in recent years, more and more immigrants are planting roots in smaller municipalities as well as the large cities. These are positive trends. More communities are benefitting from the energy and enterprise brought by newcomers.

And Canada’s acceptance of immigrants is succeeding at the very moment when many other countries are tightening their borders.

The census shows that out of the 1.2 million immigrants who arrived in Canada between 2011 and 2016, the majority – 61.8 per cent – were born in Asia.

Seven of the top 10 countries of birth for newcomers in that period are in Asia: the Philippines, India, China, Iran, Pakistan, Syria and South Korea.

In 2016, nearly five decades after Canada replaced discriminatory immigration rules with more liberal ones, visible minorities made up more than a fifth of the country’s population – 22.3 per cent.

And while Ontario still welcomes 39 per cent of newcomers, 17 per cent of them settled in Alberta in 2016, up from 6.9 per cent in 2001.

Indeed, in the past 15 years immigration to the Prairies has doubled.

The significance of these developments transcends mere statistics.

Under the misrule of President Donald Trump, the United States is far less welcoming to newcomers than it was.

Anti-immigration sentiments are rising in much of Europe, too.

But both in terms of the number of immigrants it admits yearly and the percentage of the overall population they represent, Canada must be judged one of the world’s most open countries for newcomers. To be sure, Canada is not perfect.

There is prejudice here. Too many people face discrimination based upon the colour of their skin, the accent of their speech or the way they dress.

But consider that Canada has freely chosen to walk the path of diversity.

Consider that the federal New Democrats recently became the first national party to elect as their leader a member of a visible minority group – Jagmeet Singh, a practising Sikh.

Consider that Calgary recently re-elected Naheed Nenshi, a Muslim, as its mayor.

Don’t forget, too, that between 2011 and 2016, a total of 26,550 Syrian refugees found sanctuary in this country, thanks not only to the federal government but to private Canadian sponsors.

And last week, Ottawa announced that it will significantly raise the annual target for immigration and accept 340,000 newcomers a year by 2020.

From sea to sea, the face of Canada is – literally – changing.

And most of the time, it’s wearing a smile.