HOW CANADA HAS CHANGED.

WILLIAM WATSON

I was scrolling through Statistics Canada’s census data the other day, as one does during lockdown, and ran across the table “Visible minority, immigrant status and period of immigration, age and sex for the population in private households of Canada, provinces and territories, census metropolitan areas and census agglomerations, 2016 census.” Statistics Canada tables tend to submerge Dickensian detail but their titles are vaultingly Victorian in their length.

The table shows a total count of 34.46 million people on census day, which was May 10, 2016. Of those, 7.67 million were of a “visible minority,” which is defined as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non- Caucasian in race or non- white in colour.” The table specifies 12 different types of visible minorities. In descending population order, with their numbers in parens, they are South Asian ( 1.92 million), Chinese ( 1.58 million), black ( 1.20 million), Filipino ( 780,130), Latin American ( 447,320), Arab ( 523,235), Southeast Asian ( 313,265), West Asian ( 264,305), Korean (188,710), Japanese (92,920), “visible minority, not indicated elsewhere” (132,085) and “multiple visible minorities" (232,375).

These 7.67 million visible- minority Canadians were 22.3 per cent of the total. That is up sharply from 1961, when they were less than one per cent of the country’s population. Less than one per cent. Many white Canadians who were alive then will remember when they met their first member of a visible minority — such encounters were that rare. Now, of course, they are not rare at all and have not been for some time. In 1981 visible minorities were 4.7 per cent of the population; in 1991, 9.4 per cent; in 2001, 13.4 per cent; and in 2011, 19.1 per cent. Some pre- COVID forecasts suggested that by 2031 they may be 33 per cent of the population — from less than one in 100 in 1961 to one in three just 70 years later, a temporal distance of less than one lifetime.

In part, this is the result of natural increase but main

A TEMPORAL DISTANCE OF LESS THAN ONE LIFETIME.

ly it’s from immigration. Until regulatory changes by the Diefenbaker government in 1962 and then the introduction of the points system in 1967 by the Pearson Liberals, immigration law was mainly, as one mid- century minister of immigration explained, “a prohibition act with exemptions” — for Britain, the white parts of the Commonwealth, Europe and the U. S. Those days obviously are gone. Good riddance to them.

The Statistics Canada table I’m working from indicates that in 2016, 7.54 million Canadians were immigrants. Of those, 4.86 million — 64.5 per cent — were visible minorities. If you look only at immigrants who arrived between 2011 and 2016, 81.7 per cent were visible-minority. That ratio has been rising steadily. Among immigrants who came here before 1981, 30.2 per cent were visible- minority. Among those who came in the 1980s, 67.4 per cent; in the 1990s, 74.8 per cent; and in the 2000s, 78.5 per cent.

It could be, of course, that visible minorities have come to Canada and in the end regretted doing so. To investigate that possibility, three Statistics Canada researchers looked at the self- reported “life satisfaction” of recent immigrants — or at least “then- recent” immigrants: the study was published in 2014 — and compared it to the life satisfaction both of people in the immigrants’ countries of origin and of non- immigrant Canadians.

Life satisfaction doesn’t mean there are no problems, and it’s obviously a general measure. But in only three of 43 countries studied — New Zealand, Colombia and the Netherlands — did immigrants from those countries to Canada have life-satisfaction scores lower than the average scores in the countries they left and in all three cases the differences were slight and statistically insignificant. In virtually all other cases the differences were both large and statistically significant. For example, the average Zimbabwean in Canada had life satisfaction of 7.75 out of 10 while the average Zimbabwean in Zimbabwe had life satisfaction of 3.94 out of 10. Even when basic demographic differences were controlled for, significant positive differences remained for most immigrants — though the differences generally declined, indicating that immigrants had personal characteristics typically associated with higher life- satisfaction even in their home countries.

How did immigrants’ life satisfaction scores compare to those of non- immigrant Canadians? In a finegrained analysis controlling for personal demographics and several other socio- economic characteristics, the Statistics Canada researchers found that only four of 43 immigrant groups showed life satisfaction that was significantly lower than comparable Canadians’. The four were immigrants from Bangladesh, Bulgaria, China and Iran. On the other hand, immigrants from three countries showed life satisfaction significantly greater than non- immigrant Canadians’: Italy, Mexico and Nigeria. The study doesn’t try to calculate how many immigrants from each country were visible- minority and how many weren’t.