Moving into new classrooms

The population in Canada’s elementary and secondary schools—which about one in five Canadians attends—mirrors our society at large. For example, the impact of immigration is very obvious in classrooms.

For the first 60 years of the past century, European nations such as the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands were the primary sources of immigrants to Canada, as was the United States. Today, immigrants are most likely to be from Asian countries.

Since 1990, an average of 225,000 immigrants of all ages has landed in Canada every year. The vast majority have come from non-western countries: 60% arrived from Asia, while 20% came from the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. Since Canada’s birth rate has declined in recent years, more than half our demographic growth is currently attributable to immigration.

Nearly three out of four immigrants (73%) who came here in the 1990s settled in just three census metropolitan areas (CMAs): Toronto, Vancouver, and Montréal. This has resulted in a rapidly growing and increasingly diverse population in those CMAs but a slow-growing (or even declining) and relatively homogeneous population elsewhere.

Toronto and Vancouver are the two CMAs that especially stand out. In both, over 25% of the school-age population in 2001 were immigrants, over 40% were visible minorities, and close to 20% had a home language other than English or French. Toronto and Vancouver are now among the world’s most multi-ethnic urban centres.

Internal migration has also changed the face of Canada’s classrooms. From 1996 to 2001, 10.7 million Canadians aged five and older moved, either within their own province/territory or to another. Of those moving between provinces and territories, about 4 of every 10 migrants were between the ages of 5 and 29.