Those alarmed by the growing ethnic enclaves in Canada’s big cities should take comfort in a new study by a national think tank.

The report by the Institute for Research on Public Policy found neighbourhoods with a dominant ethnic population are actually places of cultural diversity rather than cultural isolation. In fact, the average number of cultural backgrounds represented, even in enclaves, is close to 15, the study found.

And surprisingly, it also found that members of visible minorities who live in modern-day enclaves in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal are less likely to experience poverty than their counterparts who live outside them.

“The accelerated development of enclaves in Canadian metropolitan areas does not pose a threat but should instead be seen as an opportunity and a challenge,” said the study to be released by the Montreal-based think tank on Wednesday.

“Any assumption that enclaves are monocultural is decidedly incorrect. We see that in Montreal, enclaves are more diverse than other parts of the city, and in Toronto they are just as diverse as other parts of that city. Even in Vancouver, enclaves tend to be highly diverse social settings.”

Based on census data for 1996 to 2006 and the 2011 National Household Survey, University of British Columbia professor Daniel Hiebert examined whether enclaves are becoming more prominent in Canada’s urban landscape, the demographics of residents of these enclaves, and their relationship with poverty.

The study found Greater Toronto’s social landscape changed rapidly in the decade ending in 2006, by which time nearly two-thirds of the visible minority populations were living in areas where more than half of the population identified with a visible-minority background.

In all, three million people in the GTA live in white-dominant areas, one million in mixed and visible-minority-dominant areas and 1.4 million in enclaves. The enclaves identified in the study are mostly located in Scarborough, Mississauga, Markham and Brampton, most of them not dominated by any one ethnic community.

While Toronto’s ratio of whites to visible minorities in 2011 was about 55 to 45, 76 per cent of the white population lived in white-dominant areas, whereas nearly 70 per cent of visible minorities lived in neighbourhoods where they were in the majority.

Annie Tsu has noticed how ethnic enclaves have become more diverse from the clients who walk into her travel agency, which first opened its doors in 1976 in the old Chinatown — near University Ave. and Dundas St. — to cater to a predominantly Chinese clientele.

Forty years later, the travel agency has seven branches in Greater Toronto, as well as offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Beijing, Shanghai and New York. Although its GTA offices are located mostly in areas with a high Chinese population, customers now come from all ethnic backgrounds.

“We cover pockets of Chinese community areas in Markham, Richmond Hill, Mississauga and Scarborough. But the landscape has become more diverse in the last 10, 15 years,” Tsu said.

“We live in a great country. I’m so proud to see how the country has grown, how the community has grown. It’s great for travel. It’s great for the community.”

As the white population has shifted to more ethnically mixed areas through the years, the report said, more visible minorities now live in ethnic enclaves, where residents are more likely to be recent immigrants and use their mother tongue at home.

Among different ethnic groups, black and Arab people are generally the most likely to be found in mixed visible-minority-dominated spaces, while South Asians and Chinese have the greatest propensity to reside in enclaves.

“The good news is the overlap of enclaves and poverty in Toronto is actually small,” said Hiebert.

While median household income is lowest in mixed visible-minority neighbourhoods, at about $63,000, those in single-group-dominated enclaves earn $72,600, just 6 per cent short of the metropolitan average of $77,000.

In Europe, enclaves are often seen as “deeply problematic” places set apart from mainstream society, where minority groups are often economically deprived, but that’s not the case in Canada, the study notes.

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“For the most part, enclaves in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal would hardly be recognizable to a European — particularly the extent of home ownership,” the study says. “To put it another way, ‘Canadian exceptionalism’ in the resilience of multiculturalism might be facilitated by ‘Canadian exceptionalism’ in the socio-economic fabric of Canadian cities.”

The study urged Canadians to stop viewing enclaves as “antithetical” to economic and cultural integration.

“There are significant numbers of co-ethnics as well as a diverse array of other groups in the relatively small scale of these neighbourhoods,” it said. “The challenge is that we must re-imagine our understanding of integration in Canada.”

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