By Gurmukh Singh, IANS
Toronto : Every fifth Canadian today was born abroad. The Toronto region scores even higher as every second person here is foreign-born and the highest percentage of these are Indians, followed by Chinese and Italians.
According to the latest census (2001-2006) figures released Tuesday, foreign born people constitute about 19.8 percent of the Canadian population of 31,241,030. Only Australia has more foreign-born residents (22.2 percent) than Canada today.
Of the about 1.1 million who moved to Canada during this five-year period, Indians constituted 11.6 percent, Chinese 14 percent, Filipinos seven percent and Pakistanis 5.2 per cent. And they came from 224 countries.
Statistically speaking, 129,100 Indian immigrants made Canada their new home between 2001 and 2006.
The language census also shows some interesting figures, with Punjabi scoring over other South Asian languages. Among the so-called “non-official” languages, Chinese was the first language of 8.1 percent, followed by Italian that is spoken by 3.7 percent and Punjabi which 2.6 percent of the population uses.
In all, 278,500 quoted Punjabi as their mother tongue, 102,805 Urdu, 92,680 Tamil, 52,715 Gujarati, and 42,870 Hindi.
Not surprisingly, there are about 50-odd weeklies in Punjabi, Hindi, Gujarati and Urdu in the Toronto region alone, where South Asians are set to become the dominant group.
This country is fast changing its colours as for the first time in its history it has more foreign-born immigrants from Asian and Middle Eastern countries (41 percent) than Europe (37 percent).
Canada’s three major cities are choking with new immigrants as 69 percent of them opted to live in these so-called “magnet” or “gateway” cities of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver – dubbed MTV – in 2006.
Figures show that 97 percent of new immigrants ended up in urban areas.
The census is conducted every five years by Statistics Canada and is based on information filled out by Canadians on May 16, 2006.