I was curious about where minorities live in Canada and looking around for data on the web over the holiday. (No, I’m not interested in moving to Canada! 😉) And I ran into this website called ‘Statistics Canada’. It is provided by Canadian government where you can find census data like population, age group, religion, immigration, etc. By the way, unlike other countries’ government websites like US, UK, Japan, it is a super user friendly web site for finding and downloading both demographics and geospatial (administrative boundaries) information.

Anyway, I have downloaded some of the data and wrangled with it in Exploratory to answer my original question, “Where minorities live in Canada?”.

Let’s take a look step by step towards to the answers.

Download and import NHS Profile data to Exploratory.

I have downloaded this data set called ‘NHS Profile, 2011’, which includes the data about the minorities for both Province and Census division levels, from this page at Statistics Canada.

Here’s the description about the data at the web site.

This profile presents information from the 2011 National Household Survey (NHS) for various levels of geography, including provinces and territories, census metropolitan areas/census agglomerations, census divisions, census subdivisions, census tracts, federal electoral districts and health regions.

Where do minorities live at province level?

I have started with the data at Province level.

Here’s how the raw data looks like in Table view after importing to Exploratory.

Select a Topic about Minorities

In Pivot Table view, I can find about 30 topics in these data sets.

Since I was interested in where the minorities live in Canada, I picked up this topic called ‘Visible Minority’ by using ‘filter’ command.

Remove ‘aggregated rows’

As you can see above, there are some ‘aggregated’ rows. This happens often with this type of data that is provided for Excel users in mind. For example, rows with ‘Total population in private households by visible minority’ under ‘Characteristics’ column or ‘Canada’ under ‘Prov_Name’ are for the total numbers of all the Provinces combined.

Since I wanted to compare among the minority groups and among provinces, I removed those ‘aggregated rows’ from the data with ‘filter’ command.

Remove ‘unnecessary’ white spaces

As you might have noticed above, there were unnecessary spaces like ‘indent spaces’ in ‘Characteristics’ column values because, again, the original data was designed to be viewed in Excel or similar tools. The good news is, we can remove them with ‘str_clean’ function quickly.

Visualize

Now that the data is cleaned up, we can visualize the population of the minority groups to compare them. We can see that South Asian, Chinese, and Black are the top 3 minority groups in Canda.

We can also find out where these minority groups are by provinces, by assigning the province name column to X-axis and the minority group name (characteristics) column to Color.

Note that this chart includes ‘Non Minority’ group (Green), which helps us understand the scale of the minorities population in a relative sense.

We can quickly see that the majority of the people live in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta. If you are Canadians, this is hardly a news to you. We can also observe that Chinese (Dark Brown), South Asian (Light Orange), Black (Light Brown), Filipino (Light Purple) are the top groups in those Provinces.

In order to see the proportion of each group within each Province, we can use ‘% of Total’ window calculation.

The above charts include ‘Non Minority’ group. If we want to see just the minority groups, we can remove ‘Not a visible minority’ from the data with ‘filter’ command.

Here is the chart without ‘Non Minority’ group and without applying the ‘% of total’.

Now, we can start seeing other minority groups like Latin American (Light Green), Arab (Light Brown), etc. Another thing I noticed here was that there are many Black folks (Dark Brown) in Quebec and Ontario, but not many in other provinces like British Columnbia and Alberta.

Visualize Geographically

Now, I have also downloaded the boundary data about Canada Provinces and Census divisions in Shapefile format from this page at Statistics Canada, and converted them to GeoJSON file so that I could visualize the data geographically in Exploratory. If you are interested in how to convert the files and set them up in Exploratory, take a look at this post.

To visualize it better, I have used ‘top_n’ command to keep only one minority group with the highest number of the population for each Province.

This would characterize each Province with a minority group with highest population like below.

Interactive map

Static map image

We can see that Chinese (Orange) is the top minority in British Columbia and that Black (Blue) is the top minority in eastern states like Quebec, New Brunswick.

However, there are a few problems with this map.

First, it gives us an impression that there are a lot of Filipino folks (Green) live in many provinces, but some of those provinces with green color don’t have many minorities (and don’t have much population) in general.

Another problem is that I am visualizing only one minority group for one entire province, which means I’m ignoring the other minority groups completely. As we saw with one of the bar chart above, Ontario has many minority groups, for example. And making Ontario a state of just South Asian gives a wrong impression about the state. This is a tradeoff I have made to make it easier to visualize, but making this tradeoff at Province level ended up simplifying it too much to the point it’s almost meaningless.

Where do minorities live at Census Division level?

Luckily, the same information is available for Census Division level at the same page at Statistics Canada. It is more granular than the province level. For example, Ontario province has 51 divisions. This should be able to give us a better view in terms of where the minorities live compared to the one at Province level.

After I imported the data, I have simply copied the data wrangling steps I did for the Province level data above and applied it to this new data set.

Let’s start analyzing this Division level data.

Highest minority populated division

I have calculated a ratio of each minority group within each Census division, and sorted the data by the ratio. Here is the top 12 divisions with highest minority ratio.

We can see that almost 30% of the population in Peel division in Ontario is South Asian. And almost 20% of Greater Vancouver in British Columbia and York in Ontario are Chinese.

Visualize geographically at Census division level

As I did for the Province level above, I have also made GeoJSON for Census division level boundary. Here’s how the division level minority data looks like on Map.

Each division is showing one minority group with the highest population like before.

The color assignment rule is slightly different from the one for Province above, so I will need to fix it for later. But we can still easily find something that was not obvious at the Province level.

For example, we can see Chinese divisions even outside of British Columbia and Arab divisions in the eastern part of Canada. Oh, and there is one division with Japanese! (Can you spot?)

Divisions in South Western Canada

Here’s how southern part of British Columbia looks like. There are Chinese (Green), Filipino (Red), South Asian (Gray), and South East Asian (Yellow Green) divisions. These areas seem to be popular among Asian immigrants, probably because of its proximity to Asia.

Divisions in South Eastern Canada

We can zoom in to the South Eastern part of Canada where we can find cities like Ontario, Toronto, Quebec city, etc.

We can see that there are many divisions with Black (Orange), Chinese (Green), South Asian (Gray), and Arab (Blue) as the highest population in this region.

Where Minorities Live in Canada?

So, to answer the original question, we can observe the following trends overall.