New census data paints a portrait of a changing country, tells the story of who we are and what we cherish, and offers an opportunity to ask ourselves: how are we all going to get along?
The colourful town square just got livelier.
Toronto is a minority majority city at last, fully 51.5 per cent of us identify as visible minorities and almost half, or 48.8 per cent, do so in the GTA.
“At last,” not because this fulfils a dire take-over-the-country prophecy by “foreigners,” but because in a capitalist society, this was inevitable.
A census, like this latest 2016 data from Statistics Canada, is rarely just about numbers or about sorting and counting the people in statistically correct ways. The data shows us who we are — not just what the colour of our skin is, or the faiths that we follow, but what values we truly cherish. The data tells us stories.
It also casts light on how we under- stand race. In Toronto, for instance, should people of colour still be called visible minorities if they’re not a minority any more?
This is a messy question with no easy answers. The largest minority group in the city, now, consists of people who identify as whites. The heterogenous rest are still a coalition of minority groups, a unifying factor being that they’re not white. (This group of minorities does not include Indigenous peoples.) Ideally, humans would have no labels, but discrimination based on these identities exists; not acknowledging that would erase those discriminatory experiences.
On the Indigenous front, the data offered heartening evidence of resilience; the news that Indigenous populations are seeing an unprecedented boom in the modern history of this land.
This is due to higher fertility rates, but also the willingness of more people to identify as one of the diverse Indigenous groups; either First Nation, Métis or Inuit.
The data also draws a changing landscape. It used to be that big cities — Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal were the hubs for new immigrants, but that trend is changing, too, the data shows. The wave of recent immigrants to the Prairies more than doubled over the last 15 years.
Immigrants are going where the jobs are and visible minorities could comprise fully one-third of Canadians by 2036.
One in five people across the country are born outside of it. This isn’t new. In the early 1900s, a similar proportion of people were immigrants to the country. The difference this time is in the vast heterogeneity of their origins.
People come from 250 different ethnic origins across the country, the data shows. Asia is the biggest source of immigration, while newcomers from Africa placed ahead of Europe for the first time.
You don’t need a crystal ball to predict future trends. People identifying as Black, Arab and Indigenous — in other words, some of the most maligned people — have the highest percentage of young people. The oldest group comes from those who identify as “not a visible minority,” Chinese and Japanese.
This 2016 snapshot makes for a colourful portrait and, in these divisive times, offers an opportunity to reflect: How are we going to get along?
Who gets to speak and how will voices at the margins of the town square move toward the centre? How will we make it work for everyone and not just to prop up a few?
The data offers a clear pointer to our first priority.
Non-Indigenous populations, or around 95 per cent of us complicit in settler colonialism, owe much to those whose lands we enrich ourselves from.
While 1.7 million people identified as Indige- nous in 2016, that number is projected to cross 2.5 million in the next 20 years.
Twenty per cent of Indigenous people live in a dwelling in need of “major repairs,” compared with 6 per cent of the non-Indigenous population.
Their median personal income is just $25,526, compared with $34,604 for non-Indigenous people, while nearly onequarter live below Statistics Canada’s poverty threshold.
First Nations child advocate Cindy Blackstock said the first numbers she homed in on were that Indigenous children account for more than half the kids under 4 — a critical development age — who are in foster care. That number is rising.
“When I looked at those numbers I thought of how vital it is that Canada moves with dispatch to comply with the four existing orders from the Human Rights Tribunal to end its discriminatory funding of First Nations child welfare agencies across the country,” she said.
“One of the things that I’m calling on the government to do is to ask the parliamentary budget officer to cost out all the inequalities that First Nations children experience. Everything from child and maternal health to education to child welfare to juvenile justice. And then develop a public plan to eradicate those inequalities.”
Fixing these gaps will take billions of dollars. If we’re serious about reconciliation, and long-term development, we have to focus on the children.
As Blackstock says, “No level of discrimination of children by the government should be accepted by Canadians.” Shree Paradkar writes about discrimination and identity. You can follow her @shreeparadkar