News

Canada is now home to its highest proportion of immigrants since 1931 - the year it ceased to be a British colony and stood on its own - with one in five people born outside the country, new census figures show.

The arrival of 1.1 million newcomers between 2001 and 2006, during which the national population grew by just 1.6 million, is a clear sign that the country's growth is increasingly dependent on immigration. Their sheer numbers also raise questions about Canada's ability to fulfill the promises that draw so many here.

Growing four times faster than the Canadian-born population, the 19.8-per-cent proportion of immigrants places Canada second to and gaining on Australia, which has a 22.2-per-cent foreign-born proportion that hasn't changed in a decade.

People from Asia and the Middle East accounted for the largest number of newcomers counted in 2006, at 58.3 per cent, followed by Europe (16.1 per cent), Central and South America and the Caribbean (10.8 per cent) and Africa (10.6 per cent).

Yesterday's Statistics Canada release of 2006 census figures, dealing with immigration, citizenship and language, also showed a continuing slight decline in the proportion of English and French speakers, as an unprecedented one-fifth of census respondents reported other languages as their mother tongues.

In all, more than 200 languages were recorded on census forms, with those from Asia and the Middle East - Chinese languages, Punjabi, Arabic, Urdu, Tagalog and Tamil - making the largest gains.

As for where the newcomers are settling, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver - known as MTV in Statistics Canada circles - remain the destinations of choice, though their suburbs are gaining in popularity at the expense of the cities themselves. Smaller non-MTV centres such as Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and London also took an increased share of immigration.

In Toronto, the city's share of newcomers fell slightly, to 10.8 per cent from 11.4 per cent, while neighbouring Mississauga and Brampton - which are considered part of Toronto's census area - showed respective gains of 2.2 and 4.6 per cent, fuelled by the lure of larger, cheaper homes and the welcoming environment of established ethnic enclaves.

"This raises a lot of possibilities and a lot of challenges," said Myer Siemiatycki, a professor of politics and public administration at Toronto's Ryerson University, noting that services for immigrants have typically been concentrated in the cities.

As more and more new arrivals speak neither English nor French and settle in suburban ethnic enclaves, officials will need to work harder to integrate them or risk alienating them behind barriers of language and low-paid work, observers said.

Immigrants in the five years preceding 2006 were also younger on average than the Canadian-born population, and thus landed in a job market already struggling to absorb foreign-trained workers.

"It's critically important that, as a society, we need to construct pathways for people in the various language groups to move in and out of their own community, as well as make it easier for people who are outside of those communities to move in," said Tung Chan, head of a Vancouver-based immigrant settlement agency. "We need to create more chances for people to interact, for people to dialogue and for people to understand each other."

A concern, said Prof. Siemiatycki, is that "the suburbs don't have the kind of public interactive space that the downtown core has. The subways don't exist, the jam-packed buses don't exist to the same degree. ... These are going to be important challenges for suburban municipalities to literally create spaces of interaction."

In Brampton yesterday, Harbans Singh and his son Harbir reported few problems adjusting to their new lives as they set out on a quintessentially Canadian task: buying a snow shovel at Home Depot. It was a first for the father and son, who arrived two years ago from the Indian state of Punjab.

Aside from the snow, the transition to life in Brampton has hardly been a transition, says the older Mr. Singh. He describes his neighbourhood as more than 50-per-cent Sikh-populated with more than two dozen gurdwaras - Sikh houses of worship - just a short drive away.

"We're fully connected here," he said. "Social customs, religious customs and, most importantly, language customs. ... It's all here."

Mr. Singh, his son, his wife, his daughter-in-law and granddaughter were sponsored by his eldest son, who was already living in Brampton. He says he didn't have to rely on settlement services since he already had an established network in the city.

For allophones, however - those without English or French skills - interaction will be that much more of a challenge.

In 2006, 70.2 per cent of the country's foreign-born population were allophones, up from 67.5 per cent in 2001. Cantonese, Mandarin and other dialects made Chinese the most prevalent language among them, with 18.6 per cent of allophones reporting it as their mother tongue.

That fact came to the fore in Vancouver last month, when the country's blood-and stem-cell collection agency, Canadian Blood Services, launched a campaign to boost donations from Asian Canadians. The problem is, the blood agency demands that all donors be fluent in English or French.

Agency officials said the policy is crucial to the safety of the blood supply, by ensuring donors can communicate their medical histories and understand the donation procedures and their risks, and maintaining their confidentiality by excluding interpreters from screening interviews. Chinese Canadians in the Vancouver area, whose numbers grew by nearly 40,000 during the last census period, see the rule as a needless and irritating barrier to their participation in society.

"This policy has shut out a lot of people who want to help," said Alphonsus Hui, a Chinese-born family doctor who has practised in Vancouver for more than 30 years. "If it was any other business, they would be happy to accommodate."

Indeed, such a policy is an anachronism in a country where few businesses bother any more to question the merits of adapting to a diverse population, said Michael Adams, head of the Environics polling firm and author of a new book on multiculturalism, Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism.

"We've gone beyond the tipping point of debating it, at least in our cities," Mr. Adams said.

"We have to go beyond reasonable accommodation; this is necessary accommodation, to survive."

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New in town

Immigrants are flocking to Canada's largest cities, as well as smaller municipalities in their vicinity. The following have the highest proportions of newcomers.

Arrived 2001-2006