"At least someone here is multicultural.”

That was the ironic joke the smiling Korean-Canadian customer made after his exchange with the Sri Lankan-Canadian woman behind the counter at Tim Hortons in Burnaby.

The Korean-Canadian was mock-boasting to everyone in earshot about how he and the Sri Lankan-Canadian had just been practising their mutual facility in the Japanese language.

The moment was an illustration of the kind of inter-ethnic “multicultural” interaction that happens all the time in Burnaby, including in this fast-food place on Kingsway and Arcola, near the Edmonds neighbourhood. The customers and staff look like a snapshot from a casual United Nations outing.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Korean, Sri Lankan, Chinese, white, Japanese, South Asian, Vietnamese or African, there is no place in Metro Vancouver — or arguably Canada or even the world — where you’re more likely to interact with someone of another ethnicity than in Burnaby.

In Metro Vancouver, Burnaby is the municipality that is most mixed in its ethnic diversity. Statistics compiled by The Vancouver Sun confirm it.





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One of the most authentic ways to measure the intensity of ethnic diversity is to test the chances that two people, chosen at random from a certain area, will be of a different ethnic background.

Which is exactly what Sun data journalist Chad Skelton did: He’s given each part of Metro Vancouver a “diversity index.”

Burnaby prevails. There is a 73 per cent chance two randomly chosen people from Burnaby will be of a different ethnicity.

In Richmond, the chances of two random people being of a different ethnicity goes down to 68 per cent, which is the same diversity index rate for the city of Vancouver.

Sprawling Surrey, with its strong South Asian population, comes in next on Metro Vancouver’s diversity index, at 67 per cent. Coquitlam’s rate is 64 per cent. New Westminster comes in at 55 per cent on the diversity index. North and West Vancouver, Port Moody, Delta and Port Coquitlam all settle in at about 48 per cent.

Even though some people think of Richmond as the most “diverse” city in Canada because its population is 62 per cent foreign born, its diversity index is not as intense as that of Burnaby because Richmond is dominated by two major ethnic groups, Chinese and whites.

Burnaby is different. It has a wide range of ethnic groups. And they’re spread more evenly, with none dominating.

While Burnaby has a significant number of whites and ethnic Chinese, it also contains solid portions of Filipinos, South Asians (mostly Indians and Pakistanis), South Koreans, West Asians (mostly Iranians), followed by smaller groups of Vietnamese, Malaysians, Africans, Japanese, Latin Americans and Arabs.

The Sun’s diversity index shows Burnaby has two of the five most intensely diverse neighbourhoods in Metro Vancouver.

They are Burnaby-Edmonds and Burnaby Central. In parts of these neighbourhoods, the chance two people chosen at random will be of a different ethnicity can reach an amazingly high 83 per cent.

Other neighbourhoods almost as high on the index are North Surrey, the Queensborough part of New Westminster and North Coquitlam.

While Burnaby scores at the top, the “diversity index” for all of Metro Vancouver is unusually high — far higher than the rest of British Columbia.

The Sun’s diversity index reveals B.C. is divided into two major ethno-cultural regions.

On one hand B.C. has “super-diverse” Metro Vancouver. On the other, the rest of B.C. remains predominantly white. The diversity index rankings for Metro Vancouver, and each municipality in Metro (plus Abbotsford), are significantly greater than for all the rest of B.C.

‘Growing pains’

What does this diversity trend line mean for Metro Vancouver? Is it good, bad or indifferent?

In part 2 of this series, we ask the residents of Burnaby Edmonds what it’s like to live in their extremely eclectic neighbourhood.

Curiously, as will be explained in the second part of this series, these ultra-mixed neighbourhoods tend to be middle to low income.

From a professional point of view, studies of super-ethnic diversity have come up with mixed results about the phenomenon.

Famed Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, a self-described liberal, regrets he has discovered through extensive studies mostly in the U.S. that trust tends to go down in neighbourhoods where people of different ethnicities live side by side. So does support for social welfare programs.

Putnam’s findings on trust — and related experiments that test the lower likelihood people in diverse neighbourhoods will return “lost” wallets — are being questioned.

But they have in part been confirmed by Canadian scholars such as Queen’s University’s Keith Banting, McGill’s Dietlind Stolle and UBC’s Richard Johnston.

Psychological research by Zachary Neal and Jennifer Neal, in addition, shows there is often tension between “promoting respect for diversity and a diminishing sense of community.”

High ethnic diversity often decreases feelings of mutual bonds, say the U.S. scholars.

They have found there is a natural human inclination to “homophily,” a term meaning individuals tend to associate with people who are similar to them.

Richard Carpiano, a University of B.C. sociologist, acknowledges there can be “growing pains” when a stream of newcomers seems to suddenly change the makeup of a neighbourhood.

“Canadians value diversity, but sometimes it does present challenges,” Carpiano says.

Even though such scholars generally hope Canadians, steeped in the values of multicultural tolerance, will avoid the wariness associated with super-diversity, many of them also caution that ethnic tensions can be exacerbated by the increasingly poor economic performance of both new immigrants to Canada and of members of the host population.

Since the kind of super-diversity occurring in Burnaby and other parts of Metro Vancouver is extremely rare compared to most other parts of the globe, a great deal more study is being called for to figure out its consequences.

Understanding the issues

How does Metro Vancouver compare on the diversity index to the rest of B.C.?

Metro Vancouver as a whole scores far higher on the diversity index — at 65 per cent — than any other region of B.C.





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The diversity index for Victoria, the seat of the province’s legislature, is a paltry 21 per cent. Nine out of 10 Victoria residents are white, compared to about one in two in Metro.

We can therefore wonder whether many of the province’s politicians really have a first-hand experience of the kind of super-mixed diversity occurring in Metro Vancouver, which contains more than half the province’s population.

Kelowna — which is the riding of Premier Christy Clark, although not her place of residence — has a diversity index of just 12 per cent. Compared to Metro Vancouver, it’s super-white, with 94 per cent of the population being Caucasian.

Chilliwack’s ethnic index rating is even lower, at nine per cent. Cranbrook’s is five per cent.

People might wonder whether B.C.’s non-Metro Vancouver politicians, as a result, are up-to-speed on issues relating to super-diversity, such as those involving education, cultural differences and employment opportunities.

UBC geographer Dan Hiebert believes the diversity disparity between Metro Vancouver and the rest of the province echoes a nationwide problem, especially for cities and the federal policy-makers who create immigration policy.

Unlike in the 19th century, when immigrants to Canada mostly populated rural areas, they now almost exclusively choose major cities.

“Immigrants are settling in Canada in highly uneven patterns,” said Hiebert, author of a related August paper for the Institute for Research on Public Policy.

While some small Canadian towns want more immigrants, many major cities struggle to incorporate newcomers, who need taxpayer-funded services, use transit, attend public schools and universities and raise housing costs.

Despite the ongoing disparity between Metro Vancouver and smaller centres, Hiebert said, politicians and officials from major cities are not normally asked to take part in important federal-provincial policy meetings.

“So there’s no advocate for big urban centres.”

Diversity in other cities

How does Metro compare nationally for mixed diversity?

Metro Vancouver and Metro Toronto are the super-diverse standouts in Canada, both with indexes above 65 per cent.

Greater Vancouver and Toronto are the destination cities for almost half of all immigrants to Canada, most of whom have, since the 1970s, arrived from Asia. The top ethnic groups in Metro Vancouver, in descending order, are whites, Chinese, South Asians and Filipinos. In Metro Toronto the top ethnic groups, in order, are whites, South Asians, Chinese and blacks.

Significantly behind Metro Vancouver and Toronto, Calgary ranks third highest on the diversity index, at 47. Edmonton comes in at 39 per cent, Montreal at 37 per cent, Winnipeg at 36 per cent.

Ottawa, the nation’s capital — where the federal government sets policy on immigration and related issues — has a diversity index of just 34 per cent.

What about internationally?

In the U.S., some places have become super-diverse, such as southern parts of California and Texas. That’s mostly because of increasingly larger influxes of Asians and both legal and undocumented Hispanics.

USA Today produced its own diversity index maps for the U.S., created by Phil Meyer of the University of North Carolina and Shawn McIntosh of USA Today. The Sun’s diversity maps of Metro Vancouver are based on a variation of that model.

The U.S. index measures fewer visible minority groups than does Statistics Canada. So direct numerical comparisons cannot be made.

That’s even more the case when contrasting Vancouver’s exceptional diversity rates to those outside North America.

Although Metro Vancouver has one of the highest proportions of permanent foreign-born residents of any city in the world, it’s hard to find meaningful cross-comparisons on ethnicity.

After Australia, Canada has the world’s second highest proportions of immigrants of any large country, at 21 per cent.

Many major countries have almost no immigrants — fewer than two per cent of their populations — including Japan, South Korea, China, India, Turkey, Romania, Mexico, Poland, Brazil, Indonesia, Egypt, Vietnam, the Philippines and most African nations.

Although some of these countries still contain different language, religious and cultural groups, the difference is, unlike in Canada, the ethnic groups in these low-immigrant countries all typically come from the same broader racial group (which some loosely defined as white, Asian or black).

Unknown future

All of which illustrates Metro Vancouver stands out for its mix of ethnic diversity.

In the past few decades, with the expansion of Asian immigration, it has become a kind of laboratory for a diversity experiment virtually unprecedented in world history.

How will it all work out?

“Canadians are getting the diversity they wanted,” says Carpiano. “But, with many new people arriving, it’s not to say Utopia is automatically going to emerge out of this.”

Carpiano recommends against Canadian leaders being “laissez-faire” about the future of diversity. Among other things, he recommends social agencies make sure they don’t just “compete” to serve their own interest group. They need to do more, he says, to co-operate to work for the common good, the wider community.

While Carpiano holds to some optimism, he’s also realistic enough to remind us that, with increasingly mixed diversity: “There’s still a lot of unpredictable change to come.”

dtodd@vancouversun.com

Twitter.com/@douglastodd

Part two of the diversity index series: Tales from the Edmonds area of Burnaby

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