OTTAWA—Most people in Canada’s biggest city now identify as visible minorities, as new census data shows increasing diversity in Toronto and many of its neighbouring suburban areas.

More than half of respondents to the 2016 census in the City of Toronto — 51.5 per cent — said they’re from visible minority communities, a milestone that was narrowly missed when 49 per cent identified that way in 2011.

The news comes as part of a tranche of census data, released Wednesday, that paints a multifaceted portrait of a country where more than one in five people was born outside its borders. Canada is now home to millions of people who claim more than 250 distinct “ethnic origins,” with historical lineages through Indigenous groups and countries all over the world.

Article Continued Below

Click to expand

“We’ve been seeing this for 20 years now, that Canada is becoming more and more diverse,” said Jean-Pierre Corbeil, Statistics Canada’s assistant director of social and Aboriginal statistics.

“It’s not surprising that we see the share of people identified as visible minorities… increasing for sure,” he said.

In Toronto, 51.5 per cent of respondents to the 2016 census said they are from visible minority communities. Five years earlier in 2011, the number was 49 per cent. (Rene Johnston / Toronto Star)

Across the GTA, almost half (48.8) per cent of census respondents identified as visible minorities.

Almost 22 per cent of the Canadian population is foreign-born, while 1.2 million people immigrated here between 2011 and 2016, the census data shows. Forty-one per cent of Canadians, meanwhile, lay claim to more than a single ancestral group, the most frequent being English, Scottish, French or Irish.

Article Continued Below

In Canada overall, more than 22 per cent of people reported in 2016 being from visible minority communities, up from 16.3 per cent in 2006 and 4.7 per cent when the government started gathering this information in 1981. Statistics Canada attributes the increase in part to an increasing proportion of immigrants from non-European countries. For example, Africa surpassed Europe as the continent-of-origin for the second-highest number of immigrants between 2011 and 2016, the data shows.

Click to expand

Read more:

The census makes for a colourful portrait, now how do we get along?: Paradkar

Housing repairs are most badly needed in these two GTA communities

Growth in Indigenous population is a profound challenge for Canada: Editorial

The release showed a similar trend for two groups: the largest overall increase in the Indigenous population was in western Canada over the last decade, while the share of recent immigrants to the Prairies more than doubled over the last 15 years.

“Immigrants are diffusing across the country,” said Michael Haan, a sociology professor at Western University in London, Ont.

Article Continued Below

“What it’s forcing us to do, collectively, is think about our entire nation as being composed of immigrants, rather than just major cities.”

Nearly half of major metropolitan areas are comprised of visible minorities, noticeably Toronto and Vancouver, said Doug Norris, chief demographer at Environics Analytics. But the figures are also on the rise in places such as Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg and Calgary, he added.

“Places that people didn’t think were culturally diverse are becoming now culturally diverse.”

Click to expand

The release is just the latest — and second-to-last — in a year-long series of statistical snapshots of Canada. It also marks the return of the long-form census for the first time in a decade.

The data also shows a marked difference in diversity between the multicultural heartland of the Greater Toronto Area and the rest of the country. Twenty-nine per cent of Ontarians and 22 per cent of Canadians overall reported being visible minorities, versus a thin majority in the Big Smoke.

Five of the suburban cities around Toronto — Ajax, Mississauga, Richmond Hill, Brampton and Markham — had majorities of people who identify as visible minorities. Markham posted the highest proportion (77.9 per cent), followed by Brampton (73.3 per cent) and Richmond Hill (60 per cent).

Read more:

Toronto still top-choice for recent immigrants, as more people flock to the Prairies

Home ownership rates drop as more young Canadians opt to rent: census

Ontario now home to Canada’s largest Métis population, census shows

But while diversity — in terms of visible minority populations — increased in every census division in the GTA from 2011 to 2016, the numbers vary widely. Burlington and Oshawa had the lowest proportion of visible minorities for cities with more than 100,000 people, at 16 per cent each in 2016, followed by Whitby at 25 per cent and Oakville at 31.

The numbers also varied in the City of Toronto. The higher proportions of diversity — more than 50 per cent — were clumped in the inner suburbs of Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke.

Several areas showed proportions of visible minority communities as high as 90 per cent, with concentrations of people who identified as Chinese, for example, in places such as Scarborough’s Agincourt neighbourhood and the city of Markham. Two neighbouring Toronto census tracts with almost 4,000 residents off Steeles Ave. E. even showed a combined 99 per cent Chinese population, one of the highest proportions of a single visible minority in the GTA.

Minorities in the GTA:

More than half of 2016 census respondents in Toronto — 51.5 per cent — said they’re from visible minority communities: Here’s how the numbers break down:

South Asian: 12.59 per cent

Chinese: 11.13 per cent

Black: 8.91 per cent

Filipino: 5.67 per cent

Latin American: 2.87 per cent

Arab: 1.34 per cent

Southeast Asian: 1.55 per cent

West Asian: 2.24 per cent

Korean: 1.55 per cent

Japanese: 0.5 per cent

Visible minorities not included elsewhere: 1.37 per cent

Multiple visible minorities (people who belong to more than one group): 1.77 per cent

In Canada overall, the largest visible minority communities were South Asian (1.9 million people), Chinese (1.6 million) and Black (1.2 million).

With files from The Canadian Press

* This story has been corrected from an earlier version. The figure of people in the GTA who identify as visible minorities does not include those who identify as Aboriginal.*

Matthew Cole, Data Analysis Cameron Tulk, Data Visualization

Click to expand