The colourful town square just got livelier. Toronto is a minority majority city at last, fully 51.5 per cent of us identify as visible minorities and almost half, or 48.8 per cent, do so in the GTA. “At last,” not because this fulfils a dire take-over-the-country prophecy by “foreigners,” but because in a capitalist society, this was inevitable. A census, like this latest 2016 data from Statistics Canada, is rarely just about numbers or about sorting and counting the people in statistically correct ways. The data shows us who we are — not just what the colour of our skin is, or the faiths that we follow, but what values we truly cherish.The data tells us stories.It also casts light on how we understand race. In Toronto, for instance, should people of colour still be called visible minorities if they’re not a minority any more? This is a messy question with no easy answers. The largest minority group in the city, now, consists of people who identify as whites. The heterogenous rest are still a coalition of minority groups, a unifying factor being that they’re not white. (This group of minorities does not include Indigenous peoples.) Ideally, humans would have no labels, but discrimination based on these identities exists; not acknowledging that would erase those discriminatory experiences. Read more:A majority of Torontonians now identify themselves as visible minorities, census showsOntario now home to Canada’s largest Métis population, census showsCanada has more same-sex couples, one-person households, census showsHighlights from the 2016 censusOn the Indigenous front, the data offered heartening evidence of resilience; the news that Indigenous populations are seeing an unprecedented boom in the modern history of this land. This is due to higher fertility rates, but also the willingness of more people to identify as one of the diverse Indigenous groups; either First Nation, Métis or Inuit.The data also ...
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