OTTAWA—Ontario is now home to the largest population of Métis people in Canada, as the booming growth of Indigenous peoples in recent decades continues across the country.

More than 1.6 million people identified as First Nations, Métis and Inuit in the 2016 census, a jump of more than 42 per cent from a decade earlier. Indigenous peoples now represent almost 5 per cent of the Canadian population and are increasing at a rate that’s more than four times greater than non-Indigenous people, according to Statistics Canada.

The numbers represent the continuation of a trend that has been detected for more than two decades, as the high birthrate among Indigenous peoples fuels a population boom, Statistics Canada says. The agency also points to an increasing tendency among census respondents to claim their Indigenous heritage as a contributor to this growth.

“There are changes in the way people self-identify,” said Jean-Pierre Corbeil, assistant director of the social and Aboriginal statistics division at Statistics Canada.

“There are certainly people who discover that, yes, in fact, they identify themselves because of their ancestry, the community they live in, and so on,” he said. “Clearly, we see this population is increasing far more rapidly than the non-Aboriginal population.”

Métis peoples are growing the fastest. The group’s population increased 51.2 per cent to 587,545 between 2006 and 2016, the census shows. First Nations, meanwhile, increased to 977,230 people (a jump of 39.3 per cent) over that timeframe, and the Inuit population expanded by 29 per cent to 65,025.

For the first time, the largest number of Métis people live in Ontario, according to the census — an interesting development for a population that’s historically associated with Manitoba and the western provinces. The Ontario Métis population has jumped more than 64 per cent since 2006 and now accounts for 20.5 per cent of the total population, the census says.

The Indigenous population is also younger. In 2016, the average age of an Indigenous Canadian was 32.1 years, almost a decade younger than the non-Indigenous average. And while seniors outnumber children in the Canadian population overall, less than 10 per cent of Indigenous peoples are 65 or older, according to the census.

Almost one-third of First Nations people, meanwhile, were 14 or younger in 2016. That’s more than four times the proportion of First Nations people who are 65 or older.

At the same time, more than half of Indigenous peoples in Canada live in cities with at least 30,000 people, an increase of almost 60 per cent since 2006, the census says. Corbeil said this growth far outpaces the rate of on-reserve populations, which expanded by 13 per cent from 2006 and 2016.

In Toronto, the number of people who identify as Indigenous has been climbing steadily for at least a decade, though they remain less than one per cent of the overall population. In 2006, there were 13,525 people in Toronto who identified as Indigenous. By 2016, that number had almost doubled to 23,065.

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