• Visible Minorities

The steady growth in the Lower Mainland's multicultural population is producing a 'really cool city' full of diverse music, food, ideas

You could call Arlene Kwan a woman of the world.

The 36-year-old is tri-cultural. She is of Chinese ancestry, but was born and grew up in Calcutta and has been living in Canada since she was 17.

"I'm a mixture," she notes with a laugh.

Her cosmopolitan background makes her the embodiment of the new, emerging Vancouver, a city that has been completely transformed by the rise of visible minorities.

Between 1981 and 2001, the population of the Lower Mainland, including Mission, Pitt Meadows and Langley, grew by 716,870; the growth in visible minorities was 550,355, which works out to 77 per cent of the population growth. The region stretches from the North Shore east to Langley Township.

In 1981, 13.9 per cent of the population was classified as visible minorities; the 2001 census found the visible minority population had soared to 36.9 per cent, the highest percentage in Canada.

This may be just the beginning. Demographer David Baxter projects greater Vancouver will grow by another 1.1 million people by 2031, and the vast majority will be visible minorities.

He predicts a new, exciting city will emerge from Vancouver's multi-cultural mix, particularly when the children of the immigrant wave grow up.

"Vancouver's going to be the coolest place in the world in 10 years when all these people hit the labour force, the music stream and the cultural stream," he said. "It's just going to be great: These kids are going to define a new culture."

Kwan concurs.

"You do see that happening," said Kwan, who works at the Roundhouse Community Centre in Yaletown.

"People from all these different cultures, they are becoming one. They're not saying, I'm this or that. They say, 'I'm Canadian.'"

Kwan is an example. Her parents are originally from Canton, China, and moved to India in 1950. Looking for a better life for their children, they immigrated to Canada in 1983.

Kwan said there was a bit of culture shock at first, but she quickly adjusted. And she thinks she did find a better life.

"The freedom you have here is way more than there," she said. "Women there are extremely restricted.

"It's just not the same. I wouldn't be expected to be doing what I do now, like driving. You're not even allowed to write a bicycle, although I did. You don't wear shorts, it's a taboo, but I did. Things like that. I was expected to have an arranged marriage and have 10 kids by now, you know?

"There's always a place for somebody here. In other cultures and other cities in other places, it's just so stereotypical, you know? Here they assimilate you, and people are open to a lot of things - different foods, languages. I love it." ?

Almost half the Lower Mainland's visible minority population is Chinese, with 342,665 people, or 47 per cent. South Asians -- East Indians, Pakistanis and Punjabis -- are number two at 164,360, or 17 per cent.

But immigrants are coming from all over. There are 57,025 Filipinos in greater Vancouver, 28,850 Koreans, 24,025 Japanese and 22,865 Vietnamese, along with 20,490 Iranians, 7,515 Fijians, 5,495 Mexicans, 4,680 Jamaicans, 3,380 Lebanese and 2,545 Afghans.

Chris Friesen of the Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia says his organization served people from more than 70 different countries last year.

"We just received our first Uzbekistan client," said Friesen. "We received a couple of Palestinian families recently -- we've never received them before. And a refugee from Malawi in southeast Africa."

Baxter thinks the diversity of the new immigrants is a big plus.

"It isn't a single group," he said. "We're not talking about San Antonio, where essentially it's Anglo and Mexican. We're talking about an enormous diversity. I think that's one of things that made the Canadian cultural experience work."

Baxter points out there is also enormous diversity within minority communities.

"The Indian community's cultural roots are much broader than India," he said.

"You talk to the very large Ismaili community here, their life experience and frame of reference was Africa. You go to the restaurant on Kingsway, Rubina Tandoori. Somebody from India will say that's African food. It isn't really, it's [just] African style."

Monty Jang of the Chinese Cultural Centre thinks the waves of immigration have benefited Vancouver "in every way."

"A lot of people brought in good culture, such as the rich Chinese culture," he said.

"Also, many new immigrants brought in a lot of expertise in their professional field. They also brought in a lot of money into the country to develop things, and created a lot of new jobs."

The Lower Mainland's visible minority population is slightly bigger percentage-wise than Toronto's (36.9 per cent to 36.8).

But Toronto has more immigrants (defined as people who were foreign-born), 44 per cent to 37.5 per cent. There are more foreign-born people in Toronto (2,033,000) than the total population of greater Vancouver (1,967,480).

Toronto's total population is 4,647,960. In sheer numbers, it has a bigger Chinese population, South Asian population and Filipino population than the Lower Mainland.

The most striking difference between the two cities is the number of blacks. Toronto has a black population of 310,500, greater Vancouver has 18,405 -- just under six per cent of Toronto's black population. Montreal (139,000) and Ottawa-Hull (38,185) also have much bigger black populations than Vancouver.

On the other hand, the Lower Mainland has a much bigger aboriginal (native Indian and Metis) population than Toronto, 36,860 to 20,300. Winnipeg has the largest aboriginal population in Canada, 55,755, followed by Edmonton (40,930) and Vancouver. Aboriginals were not considered a visible minority in the census data.

The census also found new immigrants are much more likely to settle in cities. Ninety-four per cent of immigrants in the 1990s were living in Canada's census metropolitan areas, and 73 per cent moved to Canada's three largest cities, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Eighteen per cent (324,800) moved to Vancouver.

"B.C. is the second-most-popular destination of immigrants coming to Canada after Ontario, and they're basically all coming to the greater Vancouver area," Friesen said.

Why? Friesen rhymes off a number of factors: better employment opportunities, existing cultural communities and support networks, better infrastructure and resources, and English-as-a-second language classes.

"Many of the resources to assist immigrants and refugees to settle are in the Lower Mainland, so you get about 80 per cent of immigrants and refugees settling in the Vancouver area," he said.

Baxter said the rise in immigrants is due to changes in the Immigration Act in the 1980s.

"There was greater acknowledgement of the skills component, and greater acknowledgement of declining birthrates in Canada," he said.

Baxter said Canada needs immigrants if it wants to grow.

"Within six years, Canada's population will not grow without immigration," he said. "Our natural increase, the difference between births and deaths, last year was the lowest we have had since 1946."

The source of immigrants has changed drastically from the 1950s and 1960s, when Europe was the top source for immigrants. But declining birth rates in Europe and an aging European population mean the waves of European immigrants to the new world are largely a thing of the past.

"The migratory population is overwhelmingly young, and that overwhelmingly young population is no longer in Europe," Baxter said.

"According to the UN, the population of western Europe under the age of 45 is projected to shrink by 20 per cent over the next 20 years. Europe doesn't have this huge supply. The typical woman in Italy has 1.1 children during her lifetime. There aren't thousands of young people in Italy to immigrate here. It's just a matter of supply and demand."

Asia now is far and away our main source for immigrants, with about 74.4 per cent in 2001, compared to 10.5 per cent for Europe.

But the sources of Asian immigration also fluctuate. In the early 1990s, the main source of Chinese immigration was Hong Kong. Taiwan took over for a couple of years in 1996-97, and now the main source is mainland China. In 2001, 9,518 mainland Chinese moved to the Lower Mainland, compared to 1,861 from Taiwan and only 623 from Hong Kong.

Lillian To of SUCCESS (the United Chinese Enrichment Services Society) also said there has been a shift in Chinese immigrants, from relatively affluent people who came in as business investors to middle class professionals like engineers, high-tech types and people who work in financial services.

One of the surprises of the census is how Koreans have surged into fourth place in the visible minority category.

Baxter calls Koreans a "sleeper group" that many Vancouverites first noticed when thousands of Koreans celebrated downtown during soccer's World Cup last year.

"Nobody ever talks about them, and yet they're really, really significant for our immigration flow," said Baxter.

"The United States has been gradually creeping up the list as a source of immigrants for British Columbia, but a lot of that appears to be Korean trans-migration -- Korean people who first immigrated to the United States. If you remember all the Rodney King rioting [in Los Angeles], they burned Korean stores."

Friesen said there are lots of small ethnic communities quietly developing in the Lower Mainland. In the last year, Immigrant Services helped out 238 refugees from Afghanistan and 178 from Africa, primarily Sudan.

"There are a lot of smaller, emerging, ethnocultural communities in the Lower Mainland that we haven't seen in the past," he said. "Burmese, Congolese, Sierra Leonese, Colombians. They are settling primarily in the Vancouver/Burnaby/New Westminster/Surrey/Tri-City area."

Former ambassador Martin Collacott ignited a storm of controversy last September when he authored a Fraser Institute report that said the high number of immigrants to Toronto and Vancouver was causing tension that could result in race riots.

But Baxter dismisses Collacott's arguments. To Baxter, the melting pot approach of the United States has produced a lot of tension, but Canada's multi-cultural approach has been a great success.

"There's no tension here," he said. "If you take a look at multi-culturalism in the United States, L.A. and New York are almost as diverse as we are, but there's enormous tension within that. Their diversity, everybody kind of feels like it's imposed. It feels like a tile wall.

"Ours feels like this river. Sometimes it's warm, sometimes it's cold, but it's going somewhere, it's changing. That's why multi-culturalism worked."

Multi-culturalism has worked so well, many feel the term "visible minority" has become obsolete.

"We live in a society where the function of our society is very much based on values," said Baxter.

"You're pro-globalization, you're anti-globalization, you're a vegan, you're a carnivore. What we believe defines us.

"In 10 years we will not see the use of that term [visible minority]. Not because we've all become sort of the same colour, but rather because the colour won't tell us anything, it won't be a defining variable. 'Visible minority' was a white culture's attempt to deal with defining change. A Euro-centric culture. That won't be the case in the future."

"I don't it's the visible minority, it's the majority now," says Kwan. -   2003 February 7  Vancouver Sun      by John Mackie

Land of Ethnic Diversity

The portrait of Canada that emerged from the ethnocultural census data released Tuesday only confirms what you see if you walk down Denman Street, stroll through the local mall or cycle the dike in Richmond.

We are a more racially and ethnically diverse people than we have ever been. Yet despite all the changes, Canadians now more than any other time in our history are identifying themselves only as Canadian -- not hyphenated Canadians, not British or Chinese or Italian or French.

As David Baxter of the Urban Futures Institute noted, the fastest growing "ethnic" group in Canada is Canadian. In the 2001 census, 39 per cent of residents identified themselves as Canadians compared with only 31 per cent in 1991.

What this means is that the notion of what our country is, what it means to be Canadian and even some of the terms we've been using like "visible minority" are as obsolete as dial telephones and typewriters.

Many of our notions of what Canada is were formed by a book written by University of Toronto professor John Porter in 1965. That book, The Vertical Mosaic, was the sociology textbook for several generations of Canadian university students and it defined the country in terms of its two charter groups -- the French and the English -- and the power balance between the two.

In less than 30 years, the country is no longer anything like Porter's tower of tiles where the English and French dominated a decreasingly important group of other ethnic groups. We are no longer a country in which the two founding peoples hold the power, the influence and the money. We are no longer a country where most immigrants are white and come in at a lower socio-economic level that "may be improved or it may be a permanent caste-like status as it has been . . . with the Chinese in Canada."

We are now a country where the term "visible minority" is becoming meaningless because "minorities" account for nearly 60 per cent of Richmond's residents and nearly half of all the people in Vancouver and Burnaby.

As Canada has changed, it's also becoming increasingly meaningless to talk about multiculturalism and ask people their ethnic origin. In 2001, a quarter of all Canadians -- 11.3 million people -- traced their roots to more than one country. There's no indication that the trend is reversing and if anything, the blurring of colour and race is speeding up.

Seven per cent of all Canadian couples are mixed race -- 30 per cent more than a decade ago. Take that walk through the mall and you'll quickly realize it's a trend that won't end soon.

And if a growing number of Canadians can no longer draw a straight line to their cultural past, it's time to demolish the bureaucratic silos that force Ukrainian dance troops to compete with Chinese lion dancers and Scottish country dancers for grants from a federal multiculturalism department.

But the portrait of Canada drawn from the census numbers is not uniform. There are great regional gaps. The Prairie heartland and the Atlantic coast, for example, have felt few of the effects of last decade's immigration because overwhelmingly immigrants -- 94 per cent -- chose to live in big cities and most especially in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, where three-quarters of the immigrants settled.

Greater Vancouver is now the second most ethnically diverse city in North America, just after Toronto and ahead of New York City and Los Angeles. Yet in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Abbotsford and even behind the so-called tweed curtain of Victoria, close to 20 per cent of the residents were born outside Canada.

Surprisingly, there's no great identity crisis now. It's not like the last half of the 20th century, when there was a seemingly endless search for Canadian identity that siphoned off much of the time, money and intellectual energy of academics, politicians and bureaucrats. It's not like the 1960s, '70s and '80s, when each week seemed to bring another conference or a commission of beetle-browed experts determined to describe, dissect and define what it meant to be Canadian.

Canadians may still not be able to write an essay describing the nature of Canada or what it means to be Canadian. More than ever before, we're standing up and defining ourselves as being Canadian, not British, not Chinese, not Italian or German.

It's worth noting, however, that Canadians very nearly didn't have the chance to identify themselves as Canadians in the 2001 census. Ottawa bureaucrats and politicians wanted to remove Canadian from the list of choices, forcing people to think of themselves in hyphenated and multi-hyphenated terms.

While the census data only confirms for Vancouverites what we see every day on the streets and buses and in schools and community centres, it's not what federal politicians and bureaucrats see when they walk down the streets in Ottawa-Hull.

The national capital has been largely untouched by its own immigration policy, which in the past decade has made such a dramatic change here. Only 17.6 per cent of Ottawa-Hull region's residents were born outside Canada and just over 14 per cent of the residents are classed as visible minorities. It's a region where bilingualism and biculturalism remain more strongly resistant to the pushes and pulls of diversity than the metropolitan areas of Canada.

But federal bureaucrats and politicians have to get outside the Ottawa cocoon.

The burden of immigrant settlement can't continue to only be borne mainly by taxpayers in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

The cities need help to pay for programs like English-as-a-second language. Provinces such as Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec need money to provide training spaces for professionals to help them meet Canadian standards.

It's time for Ottawa to leave the 20th century behind.

Maybe among this year's new crop of political leaders, someone will realize that most of us live with multiculturalism every day, so we don't a federal program to promote it.

Maybe someone will realize that bilingualism has gone on well past its best-before date and it's multi-lingualism that should be on the new list of national dreams. -  2003 January 22    Vancouver Sun     by Daphne Bramham 

Canada's multicultural mosaic more colourful, crowded than ever: 2001 census

Nearly two million new immigrants in a decade and a deepening spectrum of visible minorities: not since the Great Depression has Canada looked so colourful - and so crowded.

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."  - James McCarten   Canadian Press      21 Jan 2003

• Vancouver:  Effortless Asian Metropolis
• Top 100 Chinese Canadians 
• Life in Vancouver
• White Stream Does Not Equal Mainstream

Copyright ©  2008
By opening this page you accept our Privacy and Terms & Conditions