Immigrants from Afghanistan take part in a Canadian citizenship class last June at the Afghan Women's Organization in Toronto.Moe Doiron/The Globe and Mail
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Canada's largest cities have always had quite distinct personalities. But as they come to rely more and more on immigration for population growth, the differences between them are growing even more pronounced. And that is bound to have broad implications for politics and public policy.
A new report from TD Economics underscores the extent to which Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver each depend on different sources of immigration. In Toronto, the main source of new immigrants is India; in Montreal, it's Algeria; and in Vancouver, Chinese immigrants outnumbered those from India two to one between 2006 and 2011.
This is changing not only the faces of these cities. It also changing their characters, too, as immigrants from different parts of the world tend to have different religions, politics and cultures. That, in turn, influences the Canadian-born populations in those cities, who are sensitized in different ways, depending on the countries that supply their immigrants.
The TD report draws on data from the 2011 Census and Statistics Canada's National Household survey from that year. While the raw numbers have been available since last month, when the NHS was released, TD's economics department has neatly packaged the data to compare cities.
One of least appreciated population trends of recent years is the extent to which Montreal is growing even more distinct from the rest of the country as newcomers from North Africa (particularly Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia), Haiti and Latin America come to dominate immigration to Canada's second-largest city. Elsewhere in Canada, immigrants from those parts of the world are less common.
Of the Greater Montreal Area's 3.8 million residents, fully 22.6 per cent are foreign born. While that is a much lower proportion than in either Toronto (46 per cent) or Vancouver (40 per cent), the share of immigrants in Montreal grew much faster between 2006 and 2011 than in the two other cities. It jumped two percentage points in five years, compared to 0.3 points in Toronto and 0.4 in Vancouver.
By drawing heavily on French-speaking countries for immigration, Montreal has retained its French character with 63.3 per cent of the population counting French as its mother tongue. In the Greater Toronto Area, English is the mother tongue of only 53.8 per cent of the region's 5.6 million residents.
Interestingly, 249,000 Montrealers speak Spanish at home – making Montreal home to the largest single block of non-official language speakers in the country. Toronto's 237,000 italophones make up its biggest non-official language group. Vancouver's 165,000 Panjabi speakers are its biggest group.
(Cantonese and Mandarin are counted as distinct languages in the survey.)
TD estimates that more than 20 per cent of Montreal's population is trilingual – or able to converse in English, French and third language, usually their mother tongue – one of the highest proportions anywhere. After Spanish, the top non-official languages in Montreal are Arabic and Italian.
While 60 per cent of newcomers still settle in Canada's three biggest cities – 31 per cent in Toronto alone – Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Calgary all saw big jumps in immigration between 2006 and 2011. Indeed, fully 42 per cent of Saskatoon's foreign-born population arrived during that five-year period.
The Philippines was the top source of immigrants in every Western Canadian city except Vancouver, where it was the second-biggest source of immigration.
Konrad Yakabuski