‘Minorities’ now majority in Greater Vancouver
Burnaby’s visible ‘minorities’ are now the majority, according to latest data from Statistics Canada.
More than half of Burnaby residents - 55 per cent - belong to a visible minority group. That’s up from about 49 per cent in 2001.
In 2006, Chinese-Canadians represented about 30 per cent of Burnaby’s total population. The information was part of a Statistics Canada report titled Canada’s Ethnocultural Mosaic, based on 2006 census data. Visible minorities referred to anyone, other than aboriginal people, who is non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.
The latest numbers put Burnaby in second place, next to Richmond, for the highest proportion of visible minorities in Vancouver and surrounding municipalities and the fourth highest in Canada. The national average is 16 per cent.
Overall results for Vancouver and surrounding municipalities, including Burnaby, showed two out of every five residents are visible minorities.
That’s 41.7 per cent of the population, up 20 per cent from 725,700 in 2001. That figure is also the second highest in the country, next to Toronto, which was about one per cent higher.
Seventy per cent of visible minorities in Vancouver and surrounding areas were born outside Canada.
Chinese was the largest visible minority group, followed by South Asians and Filipinos.
But Jody Johnson, head of the Burnaby Intercultural Planning Table, posed the question: What exactly are we counting?
She worried the data leads to an unsophisticated analysis and may be misinterpreted because some people confuse visible minorities with immigrants.
“That’s why I find immigration data and the number of foreign-born (people) are more significant and interesting pieces of information,” she said.
“Why are we lumping people into this huge group? People should be recognized, but they shouldn’t all be put into ‘visible’ and white,” she said, adding the vast majority of visible minorities are Canadian citizens.
