Ahmadiyya Times | News Staff | Canada News
Source & Credit: Times Colonist
By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service
There is a "new Canada" just over the horizon — home to a diversity of skin tones, birth countries, languages and religious faiths unprecedented in the nation's history.
By 2031, at least one in four people in this country will have been born elsewhere, new population projections from Statistics Canada suggest, and just half the working-age population will belong to families that have lived in Canada for at least three generations.
"You look at the statistics and you can see it: who's the bulk of the new population, who's going to be our future," says Henry Yu, an associate history professor at the University of British Columbia. "This is the strongest indication yet — obviously, it's been developing for decades — that there is a new Canada."
The federal agency says the foreign-born population in that new Canada is expected to grow four times faster than those who are Canadian-born over the next 20 years, which is projected to create the most diverse population since Confederation.
With the vast majority of newcomers settling in large cities, the country's future and prosperity lie in its urban areas, says Yu.
And the "new Canada" is a Pacific Canada, he says, with its strongest ties and biggest portion of newcomers not coming from the European countries of old, but from our Asian, Latin American and Caribbean neighbours with whom we share a Pacific coast.
It's expected that almost one in three newcomers will follow a non-Christian religion two decades from now, Statistics Canada says, and more than three-quarters will have a mother tongue that's neither French nor English. But rather than embracing this linguistic diversity and the edge it offers in a competitive global economy, Canada has been "very pointedly obliterating the language skills of the children of immigrants," Yu says.
They learn one of the country's two official languages relatively easily as children, he says, but then they're effectively rendered monolingual by years of English- or French-only schooling and the encouragement to leave their mother tongue behind.
"We have an incredible global human capital from this new Canada," Yu says. "We need to think of ways to build upon it rather than being scared and saying, 'Oh my God, we need to make them all into carbon copies of English migrants who came 200 years ago."
Richard Day, a professor of sociology and global development studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., objects to using the "basically racist" term "visible minorities" to label a diverse group of people who are on the verge of becoming the majority in Toronto and Vancouver. It's as though there's a white, Christian "unmentioned normal person" that such diversity is being compared to, he says, but one that simply no longer reflects the face of Canada.
"If it were to go beyond the restaurant, to go beyond 'Oh, nice spices you put on your food!' — if it were to go to the level of values and how we treat each other and take on some of the really pro-community aspects of other cultures — that would be cool and I think it's going to happen," Day says.
Islam will be the fastest-growing religion in the next two decades, Statistics Canada says, with its numbers expected to triple and encompass about seven per cent of the Canadian population by 2031.
Other non-Christian religions such as Judaism, Buddhism and Sikhism will double their numbers, while the proportion following Christian religions is expected to slip from about 75 per cent of Canada's population to 65 per cent, with the proportion reporting no religion will rise to 21 per cent from 17 per cent.
There's still too much that goes unsaid when it comes to racial and cultural tensions in Canada, says Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress.
Reports tiptoe around the large and growing Muslim population, accompanied by a misinformed anxiety rather than a push to ensure Muslims are successfully integrated into Canadian society, he says.
And, Tarek adds, there's no acknowledgment of the prejudice that exists between different visible minority populations.
"People want honesty, they are thirsting for frank language," he says. "We need to abandon the notion of political correctness and abandon the fear of speaking."
The Baitunnur Mosque in Calgary — one of the largest in North America — will be on the forefront of Canada's growing Muslim population in the years to come.
Sultan Mahmood, an executive member of the mosque, says it's a central tenet of his Ahmadiyya denomination of Islam that Muslims connect with and serve their community — meaning their doors are always open to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Mahmood points to the example of an artists' group that has been using the brand-new mosque's facilities while waiting for their own to be built, adding that other community groups drop in to use the gym and they regularly host inter-faith conferences throughout Alberta.
At the end of the day, Mahmood returns home to engage in a time-honoured ritual that knows no national boundaries: gossiping with the neighbours and sharing food in the yard.
"This is enriching our society," says Mahmood, who moved to Calgary from Pakistan in 1992. "We're getting good people and all the good things from all over the world, and I think this diversity has made Canada one of the best countries in the world, and I think Canada will remain one of the best countries in the world because of this diversity."
-- (c) Canwest News Service
Read more: Growing foreign-born population to forge 'new Canada'
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