DOUGLAS TODD
New Canadian census data reveals the term “visible minority” has become virtually meaningless across Metro Vancouver.
The region’s five largest municipalities now have fewer whites than people of colour, which means Caucasians are the “visible minority” in Richmond, Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam and the city of Vancouver.
The 2016 Canadian census data on ethnicity and immigration, released Wednesday, also shows the foreign-born population of Metro Vancouver has risen to 44 per cent, led by people from China, India and the Philippines.
The fastest-growing cohort of foreign-born residents in Canada, meanwhile, is made up of international students and temporary foreign workers, who now comprise more than 77,000 of Metro Vancouver’s population of 2.4 million.
Across all of Canada the foreign-born population hit 22 per cent in 2016. That’s the highest proportion of foreign-born residents in Canada since 1921, when most immigrants came from Europe. Now 62 per cent of immigrants hail from Asia.
However, regional differences are crucial to understanding the story of immigration in Canada, which, along with Australia, takes in the world’s highest per capita rate of newcomers.
The census shows almost two of three immigrants to Canada move to Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal (although there has been a modest shift in the past five years to the Prairies).
In Metro Vancouver and other Canadian cities the dramatic rise of foreign-born residents and the expansion of various ethnic groups has had political implications.
Even though federal immigration policy is developed on a national basis, the fact most immigrants choose the country’s three biggest cities creates local infrastructure challenges — particularly in regards to jobs, English-as-a-second-language programs, transit use and rent and housing.
Various studies have shown immigrants are increasingly struggling financially and at learning English or French, while tending to use urban transit more than domestic-born residents and buying houses at a higher rate than the Canadianborn. Meanwhile, the rapidly rising cohort of foreign students relies heavily on rental housing.
While mayors complain of having no influence over the federal government’s immigration policies, those issues have become especially significant for Metro Vancouver, along with Toronto, which now have arguably the highest percentage of foreignborn residents of any major cities in the world.
Since the strong majority of newcomers to Canada are from Asia, it explains those cities’ large proportion of people of colour, many of whom are second generation.
Across Canada, according to the census, the visible minority population has reached 7.7 million, or 22.3 per cent of the population. That’s seven times the number reported in 1981.
Both Vancouver and Toronto are known for the way people of different ethnic backgrounds are able to coexist with a minimum of tension, at least compared to more rivalrous regions of the world.
And that will continue to be important, because, as a result of migration flows, Greater Toronto now has fewer whites (48.6 per cent) than “visible minorities” (51.4 per cent).
Metro Vancouver is basically in the same boat as Toronto, with virtually equal numbers of whites compared to visible minorities (which is the term employed by Statistics Canada, while Americans tend to use “people of colour”).
The census shows that 51.1 per cent of the population of Metro Vancouver is Caucasian, while 48.9 per cent belong to a visible minority, a jump from 45.2 per cent in 2011.
The largest visible-minority groups in Metro Vancouver, by far, are people of Chinese, South Asian and Filipino ancestry.
On a municipality-by-municipality basis in Metro Vancouver, Caucasians now account for fewer than one out of four residents of Richmond (23.7 per cent).
Whites have also declined to 36.4 per cent of the residents of Burnaby, 42.5 per cent of the population of Surrey, 48.4 per cent of the residents of the city of Vancouver and 49.8 per cent of those who live in Coquitlam.
Frank Graves, president of Ekos Research, who has been conducting polls on Canada’s contentious migration issues, says increasing immigration rates appear, generally, to be “softening” Canadians’ attitudes to ethnic diversity.
At the same time, Graves said, polling shows a portion of Canadians have a negative attitude toward high immigration. They’re the people, Graves said, who are “more economically vulnerable.”
The census results on immigration are being released a week before the federal Liberals release their new immigration targets, on Nov. 1.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015 raised immigration levels to 300,000 per year, even while studies show immigrants are not doing as well financially as they did in the 1990s.
The federal NDP wants immigration rates raised further. But the Conservatives have urged the Liberals to find better ways to find good jobs for Canadianborn residents, match immigrants to regional skill shortages and influence more newcomers to move to smaller population centres.
Regional differences are crucial to understanding the story of immigration in Canada.