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Canada’s Veterans Affairs Minister found himself in a Twitter imbroglio on the weekend after tweeting that “Immigrants are better at creating new businesses and new jobs than Canadian-born people. Simple.”

The comment, based in part on a 2016 Statistics Canada study and intended to defend programs in Seamus O’Regan’s province of Newfoundland and Labrador designed to retain immigrant entrepreneurs, created a Twitter backlash that forced O’Regan to retract his statement.

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“Poor choice of words on my part,” he tweeted on Sunday. “Far better if I’d said that immigrant entrepreneurs ‘hold their own.’ ”

A new analysis of employment statistics from the 2016 Canadian census, however, supports the premise that it is members of ethnic populations, either recently arrived or long-standing residents, who are more likely to start their own businesses.

Respondents to the census who classified their ethnic origins as something other than “Canadian” were far more likely to also register themselves as “self-employed,” considered a leading gauge of entrepreneurism.