New census numbers on immigration and ethnic origin released Tuesday by Statistics Canada suggest the country is living up to its reputation as a place where diversity is embraced, not erased.
But if the latest signs of ethnic tension are any indication, those numbers – four times as many visible minorities in the 1990s, a percentage of foreign-born residents second only to Australia and several areas where minorities are now the majority – also indicate a growing need to get along.
Four million visible minorities, 13.4 per cent of the total population, called Canada home during the last decade of the 20th century, compared with 1.1 million or 4.7 per cent in 1981, the numbers show.
All told, 5.4 million people reported being foreign-born, comprising 18.4 per cent of the total population – the highest since 1931 and a full percentage point higher than the ratio five years ago.
Only Australia has more foreign-born residents – 22 per cent. In 2000, 11 per cent of U.S. residents were born outside the country.
“What struck me is how immigration is shaping the mosaic,” said Statistics Canada analyst Jane Badets.
Despite the growing influence of Asian countries on Canada’s face and voice, the impact of decades of European immigration is still plainly visible, Badets said.
“When I look at the mosaic, I still see the British, the French, the English, the Irish, the Scottish – all those top 10 ethnic origins of all Canadians,” she said.
“But I also see the European immigration that’s come – the Germans, the Italians, the Ukrainians, and I see the new groups . . . emerging among the top 10 ethnic origins.”
The trend suggests Canadians will find out in coming years just how racially unified their country is, said Jeffrey Reitz, a professor of immigration studies at the University of Toronto.
“Race relations is going to become a more central issue in Canadian society in the future; I think that’s really a foregone conclusion,” Reitz said.
“Where in the last 30 years or so gender has been a big topic, I think that’s going to eventually be replaced by race relations. That just seems to be inevitable.”
Ekuwa Smith, senior research associate Canadian Council on Social Development, said many immigrants have been
marginalized by stereotyping. She said there’s a need for more education to change these attitudes.
“We have immigrants coming in and most of the knowledge that the general public has about them is all stereotypes,” she said. “We have to teach people that these people speak English, they speak French, they are highly educated, they are hard-working people.”
Given the facts, she said, “I think people would be much more inclined to be warm or to help to integrate these people into the society rather than the hostility and the isolation that we see.”
In 2001, there were 1.8 million immigrants in Canada who arrived during the previous decade, 6.2 per cent of the total population, compared with 1.1 million – 4.3 per cent – in 1991.
Of those, 61 per cent reported speaking neither English nor French most often at home; a surprising 9.4 per cent reported having no knowledge of either official language.
Visible minorities represented a towering 73 per cent of the immigrant population who arrived during the 1990s, a huge jump from the 52 per cent of those who arrived in the 1970s, the agency said.
If that trend continues, one in five Canadians will be a visible minority in 2016, up from 13 per cent in 2001. In some places, minorities are already the majority: 59 per cent in Richmond, B.C., and 56 per cent in Markham, Ont.
Immigration Minister Denis Coderre said the tendency of newcomers to congregate in major urban centres must be addressed.
“The challenge will be to encourage immigrants to settle in other regions of Canada to allow all parts of the country to benefit from immigration,” he said.
He and his provincial counterparts are working on ways of luring people to smaller communities.
Canada has long nurtured its reputation as a peaceful, welcoming champion of multiculturalism, home to the mosaic instead of the melting pot, a country defined by its people rather than the other way around.
But Reitz said recent history is full of examples that suggest Canada is no less prone to racism and hatred than anywhere else.
“Race problems, when they really come to the surface, have usually been around for so long that at that point it’s really difficult to do much about it,” he said.
“I’ve had the impression that the public has really turned away from this issue in the last five to 10 years.”
Take Toronto, which now boasts one of the highest percentages of foreign-born residents in the world, according to Statistics Canada.
Social workers there say it’s often difficult to overcome the barriers between ethnic communities and the agencies designed to assist newcomers.
Sometimes, when new immigrants already have an ethnic community to turn to, it often feels as though they’re not interested in participating in anything else Canada has to offer, said Jane Rogers, who works with Toronto’s WoodGreen Community Centre.
“But when you start to work with them and get to know them as individuals, you realize that’s not the case.”
“I think people are just basically people,” Rogers said, “and if you give them an opportunity to know them on an individual basis, you can do a lot to sort of break down those barriers.”
There are still those trying to build those barriers back up.
On Monday, Toronto police said they’d been monitoring a Jan. 11 concert in a west-end suburb hosted by neo-Nazi white supremacists and featuring a variety of so-called “hate rock” bands.
Even the police are embroiled in racial tensions with members of the city’s black community – an issue experts expect more Canadian cities to wrestle with in the coming decades.
A legal dispute has already erupted between Canada’s largest municipal police force and Canada’s most widely circulated newspaper, the Toronto Star, over a recent series of articles that suggested police treatment of visible minorities is consistent with racial profiling.
And then there was the jarring vandalism – fires, smashed windows, spray-painted epithets – that marred several Canadian mosques and synagogues after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
“It shook some Canadians out of their complacency, to realize just how close to the surface racism really was,” said Karen Mock, executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.
“There was this veneer of treating people’s neighbours and colleagues with respect, but suddenly, Muslim women . . . were afraid to go out of their homes.”
Funding for educational programs that promote human rights and anti-racism efforts has been declining in recent years, the result of complacency about racism in Canada, Mock said.
She cited a Hindu temple in Hamilton that was razed by fire in the days following Sept. 11 – police say the arsonists mistook it for a mosque – as the sort of ignorance those programs are designed to deal with.
“I think people realized that the programs had eroded in some areas; they said, ‘Uh-oh, we still need this,’ because there’s another generation of people who haven’t been exposed to human rights education,” she said.
“We need to continue these kinds of initiatives and not just fall back on our laurels, because of the human nature to fear the stranger.”
The incident in Hamilton proved so disconcerting that the city launched Strengthening Hamilton’s Community, an initiative with community leaders to develop long-term strategies to repair some of the damage.
For its part, the federal government is straining to keep up with Canada’s ever-evolving tapestry of ethnic backgrounds.
Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, who’s hosting a diversity and culture forum next April to help revamp Canada’s cultural policies, has vowed to help “visible majorities” earn a higher profile in corporate boardrooms and the public service, where they represent just six per cent of employees.
“When it comes to achieving full equality, we are falling far behind,” Copps told the National Council of Visible Minorities in a speech last year.
“When it comes to being told we just can’t find the qualified people, I have no patience. When it comes to institutional roadblocks for visible minorities, I do not and will not understand.”
Of the more than 200 ethnic origins in Canada, the three largest visible minority groups in 2001 were Chinese, Asian and black, accounting for two-thirds of the visible minority population.
The Chinese were the largest visible minority group in 2001, surpassing the one million mark for the first time with 1,209,400 people, 3.5 per cent of the national population and 26 per cent of all visible minorities.
Some 860,100 people identified themselves as Chinese in 1996.
There were 917,100 people who identified themselves as South Asian in the 2001 census, up from 670,600 in 1996. They comprise 3.1 per cent of the total population, and 23 per cent of the visible minority population.
The number who said they were black was 662,200 in 2001, up from 573,900 in 1996. Black people comprised 2.2 per cent of the total population, or 17 per cent of visible minorities.
A significant proportion of the visible minorities on the East Coast are blacks, making up 57 per cent of the visible minorities in Nova Scotia and 31 per cent in P.E.I.
Many are descendants of black immigrants who arrived along with the French, British and Scottish settlers of the British colonial era, as well as slaves who escaped along the Underground Railroad or were freed by the British in colonial America in return for their labour or willingness to fight in the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812.
“Although North Americans don’t often see it this way, from the perspective of many people around the world, race is a big deal,” said Reitz.
“It will be interesting to see whether Canada as a country is able to resolve racial issues that are arising here better than the world as a whole does it.”
Not even the census-takers themselves are immune from modern-day sensitivities about race.
Some of the ethnic origin questions on the 2001 census were rephrased as a result of complaints from some people of mixed heritage, said Secretary of State (Multiculturalism) Jean Augustine.
But no major organizations have ever objected to the collection of the data, said Augustine, who defended the practice as necessary to an accurate portrayal of Canada and its people.
“I think that Canadians realize that we need to have that information,” she said. “We need to know who we are, we need to know where we live, we need to know where we congregate . . . All of those things are important to us.”
© Copyright 2003 The Canadian Press