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Chinese Canadians lead in investment
income, while immigrants outpace non-immigrants
Chinese Canadians have a higher rate of
investment income than the general population, and more immigrants have
investment income than have non-immigrants, new census figures reveal.
The findings, released quietly by
Statistics Canada last month, underscore that most immigrants do well over
time in Canada, and that Chinese Canadians do exceptionally well.
Canada's South Asian and Chinese
populations are similar in size and have similar total earnings, but Chinese
have 2.5 times more in investment income.
"The nature of Canada's mosaic has
shifted, and now the Chinese community is moving to the top of the triangle,
by virtue of their investment income and mobility amongst the second
generation," said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association
for Canadian Studies. "As well, disproportionately more Chinese came to
Canada with funds during the past couple of decades."
The new figures also show that Canadians
from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and the Philippines persistently
lag behind both the national average and other visible minority groups in
investment income. They may experience less economic mobility over time
because less wealth is passing from generation to generation.
"If you don't have a lot of
investment income, you don't have a lot to transmit," Mr. Jedwab said.
Mr. Jedwab was expected to publish a
brief study yesterday based on the 2006 census data. It shows that nearly
half (46.6 per cent) of the 945,390 Chinese Canadians over the age of 15
have investment income, compared with the national average of one in three.
Other visible minority groups fall below
the national average: 30.3 per cent of South Asians have investment income,
29.5 per cent of Koreans, 21.5 per cent of Filipinos and 18.6 per cent of
blacks.
Chinese Canadians are also enthusiastic
investors. On average, 4.3 per cent of the total income of all Canadians is
investment income - defined as interests from bonds, deposits in banks and
trust companies, dividends from stocks and mutual funds, and rents from real
estate. However, 6 per cent of the total earnings of Chinese Canadians
($26-billion) is investment income, while for South Asians it is 2.7 per
cent.
For blacks and Latin Americans in Canada,
investment income comprises just 1.1 per cent of their total income, and for
Filipino Canadians, it is 0.9 per cent. Some groups, including Filipinos,
have less investment income because they are sending money to relatives back
home.
About 38 per cent of all immigrants have
investment income, compared with 32 per cent of non-immigrants. Age, income
and education are important variables as well, with investment income
increasing over time. The census data predate this fall's global recession.
Dalton Conley, a New York University
sociologist, has published work showing the significance of inheritance
transmission in explaining the gaps in wealth between the black and white
populations in the United States.
"Immigrants are often very
conscientious when it comes to saving," Prof. Conley said. "But
there are significant differences amongst visible minority groups."
*****
Putting money into Canada
Chinese immigrants lead the way among
visible minorities in having investment income.
Percentage of Canadians who have
investment income
Total population: 24.4 million
Total population: 66.6%
Number of people with investment income:
33.4%
***
Total visible minority population: 3.6
million
Total population: 69.7%
Number of people with investment income:
30.3%
SOURCE: STATISTICS CANADA
- 2009 January 13 THE
GLOBE AND MAIL
Cultural Diversity According
to a new study by Statistics Canada the demographics of British
columbia are shifting and will have 'broad social, economic impact'.
The Vancouver
Sun on April 8, 2005 quotes the report that by
the time Canada celebrates its 150th birthday in 2017, British Columbia will
have the largest proportion of visible minorities of any province in the
country.
BC is poised to to undergo radical
demographic change over the coming 12 years as the number of Chinese,
Koreans, Arabs and Blacks skyrocket across the province.
In Greater Vancouver, the cultural shift by 2017
will be even more dramatic than that across the rest of the province, as the
majority of the people in the region, 53 per cent -
are projected to be a member of a visible minority.
| |
2001
census |
2017
projection |
| Chinese |
352,900 |
729,500 |
| South Asian |
171,400 |
317,000 |
| Black |
19,100 |
40,800 |
| Filipino |
58,600 |
139,700 |
| Latin
American |
18,000 |
37,100 |
| Southeast
Asian |
29,500 |
43,400 |
| Arab |
5,800 |
20,600 |
| West Asian |
21,800 |
69,300 |
| Korean |
25,400 |
68,300 |
| Japanese |
21,900 |
32,500 |
| Others |
16,400 |
35,100 |
| TOTAL |
740,700 |
1,533,300 |
Source: Statistics Canada
They're here for a good
time, not a long time
From wealthy foreign condo investors to broke international
students, nomads love Vancouver - and we should love them
Vancouver real estate appears not to have
taken the autumn dip many were expecting, despite the late-summer subprime
loan crunch south of the border. If you're in the market, it's actually hard
to tell anything happened.
The last time I wrote about real estate,
my wife and I had just started looking for a house with a suite that my
84-year-old father might use. We haven't found the right one, but I can
report that nothing has slowed down either. Days following that ominous
announcement of Citigroup writedowns, we tabled our first offer and it was
buried in a six-way bidding war.
There has been some notable ink on the
topic already. The Vancouver Sun flagged the record-breaking $18-million
preconstruction condo sale in the Hotel Georgia residential complex. Another
condo on Beach Avenue is listed at $18.2-million. Most recently our
"condo boom" hit The New York Times, which reported that the
average condo price in Vancouver is 75 per cent higher than the average in
Toronto.
All this is a dubious honour if you're
shopping, naturally. (Forget about subject-to-anything offers on the West
Side.) But it's occurred to me recently that my father's story may offer a
clue as to why Vancouver has shown such tremendous resilience.
He moved to West Vancouver in his early
forties, having spent his life in motion. He'd lived in Toronto, New York,
San Francisco, the Philippines. He'd travelled through Hong Kong, Vietnam,
Sri Lanka, France. He'd gone on to meet my mother in Ecuador and have five
kids between Jackson, Mich., and a little town called San Tome on the
Venezuelan savannah.
He was a nomad, in other words. And
nomads, I've come to realize, have a special affinity for Vancouver that to
this day drives our culture and our economy.
I'm speaking here both of nomad lives and
nomad dollars. The $18-million suite in the Georgia was purchased by a
Portland entrepreneur. But B.C. Real Estate Association chief economist
Cameron Muir tells me that fully half the condos sold in downtown Vancouver
go to investors. And you can reasonably anticipate that it will be
internationally mobile second- and third-home buyers who fill out the
$10-million-plus suites in such high-end, high-profile developments as the
Living Shangri-La, or the new Ritz-Carlton by Arthur Erickson, or the Norman
Foster-designed Jameson House.
You could criticize this kind of thing,
saying nomads come and go. The guy spending two weeks a year in 7,500 square
feet of five-star luxury in the clouds above Coal Harbour is paradoxically
divested of any stake in the goings on at street level. One overly rainy
winter and, sure, that condo might get dumped for some nicer waterfront in
Rio or wherever.
But the criticism is wrong-headed
ultimately, because Vancouver is defined and improved by the nomad economy
and culture that it attracts.
The simplest illustration of this may be
had by looking at another less glam, less newsworthy nomad group that has
profoundly shaped the downtown core and entirely for the better.
I'm referring to that amorphous
international mass of ESL studentry that crowd the streets and coffee shops
and mid-market restaurants of the West End and Gastown.
Fifty thousand of them wash through here
each year, about three quarters from either Korea, Japan or Latin America.
("Brazilians love Vancouver," Linda Auzins, of the Canadian
Association of Private Language Schools, tells me.)
But a key detail about this crew - beyond
the fact that they spend three quarters of a billion dollars in the city
annually - is that they are, in the vast majority, between the ages of 20
and 29.
Set aside the multimillion-dollar condo
buyers for a second, and consider how much more city-building, how much
atmosphere generation, how much spontaneous street-life germination gets
carried out by people who live in apartments too small to want to spend much
time in.
You can check out the 500 block of
Hastings or Pender any lunch hour to see this for yourself.
Here you will not only find the best
sushi in the city - I'll take Sushi Zero One or Sendai Sushi over our more
famous name brands any day - but also coffee shops that are full, sidewalks
that are jammed, air that is alive with conversation in many languages.
And does this scene link well with the
university campuses that have sprung up downtown and the new art zone
growing further east in Gastown?
Of course it does. They
all foster street life. Which fosters community. Which tends to reduce
crime. Which encourages entrepreneurship. Which contributes to people living
their lives and enacting their imaginations in public spaces. And when
people make you wince by referring to what is "world class" in a
given city, instead of Major League Baseball franchises and now-mandatory
Gehry clones, I believe it is to this rather more
ordinary string of causes and effects that they are pointing.
Bring on the nomad tribes, then: the
multimillion-dollar condo buyers and the six-month students with their
disposition to smoke in packs and cheek-kiss and inhale daily gallons of
kimchi udon.
Although, it seems my father may not be
offering his own contribution to the mix. In our last phone conversation, he
was musing about buying a camper van instead. So he could rove around, see
the province maybe. Keep on moving. - 2007 November 7
GLOBE
& MAIL

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