While Canadian first, most new citizens of the country do not forget their roots. This is the case of Asians, for example. The first Chinese, who came in large numbers in the late 1800s, built the Trans-Canada Railway and settled mainly in Vancouver. Today, Canadians of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, Pakistani, Filipino origin… form, throughout the territory, a large community of more than 6 million people, or more than 17% of the population. Canadian, according to the last census used, dating back to 2016. And if that year, according to Statistics Canada, almost half of the total newcomers were born in Asia (including the Middle East), between 2017 and 2019, 63 5% of immigrants came from these different countries (China, South Korea, India, Iran, Pakistan, Philippines, Syria, etc.).
new paradigms
“Until the late 1960s, Canada received mainly immigrants of European origin. But, in the early 1970s, immigration policies changed to adopt a points system, aimed at economic immigration. Nature Even immigration then changed. The percentage of Europeans dropped and the number of immigrants from Asia and other regions of the world, including Latin America and Africa, increased,” explains Daniel Béland. , director of the Institute of Canadian Studies at McGill University.
According to Statistics Canada projections, by 2036, immigrants born in Asia could represent more than 55% of new arrivals. Generally speaking, immigrants as a whole would form, on the same date, between 24.5% and 30% of the population of Canada, compared to 20.7% in 2011. The highest proportions since 1871 …
In the Canadian mosaic, beyond the Asians, there are long-established populations: Germans and other German speakers (arrived from Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Switzerland before and after the Second World War) , from whom more than 3 million Canadians are descended; but also Italians, with more than 1.5 million Italian-Canadians today.
And if Africa, particularly in the North and West, and Latin America have been providing contingents for several years, this is also true of the Caribbean and in particular of Haiti. Mainly settled in Quebec because of linguistic proximity – like the Irish before them, but also because of the same Catholic religion – Haitians have, like many other immigrants, arrived in waves since the 1930s, depending on the upheavals policies in their country of origin. Waves that greatly intensified in the 1960s, with the Duvalier dictatorship, and more recently, in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake. According to the 2016 census, the Haitian community numbers 165,000 people.
A large Ukrainian community
Finally, among the Europeans, there are Ukrainians. In total, more than 1.4 million Canadians claim origins from this country. Their presence, particularly in the Canadian Prairies, where approximately 700,000 members of the community live (11% of the population in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba), is ancient: according to official sources, the first arrivals date from 1891. As the authorities of the day sought to populate the great plains in the center of the country, the Ukrainians were lured by the promise of land to exploit (even if some had been taken from the Aboriginals).
Then the flows followed one another at the end of the First World War, then after the Second. Between 1947 and 1954, 34,000 Ukrainians were received in Canada in this way. Between 2001 and 2016, some ten years after Ukraine’s independence (1991), more than 40,000 also chose to immigrate. From now on, it is a new wave – of refugees, for the moment – which arrives.