When Kedan Reval moved to Moncton, N.B., just three years ago there was only one Indian food restaurant in town, and few places to find supplies to make the meals he loved from his home country.
Now, only a few years later, Reval said there is a thriving Indo-Canadian community in the city, and all the amenities to boot.
“When I personally saw that Walmart had an Indian section, a South Asian section, it was like tears of joy here,” joked Reval, the vice-president of the Indo-Canada Association for the Greater Moncton Area.
The booming number of newcomers means immigrants make up nearly a quarter all people in Canada, and the majority are coming from India, the latest release of 2021 census data shows.
The proportion of immigrants is the largest it’s been since Confederation with 23 per cent of the country _ or more than 8.3 million people _ who were, or had ever been, a landed immigrant or permanent resident.
That’s also the highest proportion among G7 countries.
By 2041, Statistics Canada projects as many as 34 per cent of people in Canada will be immigrants.
Statistics Canada says immigration is the main driver of population growth, in part because of the aging population and low fertility rates in the country.
The federal government has committed to bringing in record numbers of people to fill labour shortages, with plans to welcome 431,645 newcomers to Canada this year.
“I think it should come as no surprise that we’ve embraced immigration as a growth strategy in Canada,” Immigration Minister Sean Fraser told reporters Wednesday in Ottawa.
Immigrants accounted for four out of five new workers in the labour force between 2016 and 2021.
Not only that, Fraser said, but immigrants will help pay for schools, hospitals and sustaining basic social services as the Canadian population ages.
Previously, the majority of immigrants to Canada came from Europe, but now most immigrants come from Asia, including the Middle East.
One in five people coming to Canada were born in India, the data shows, making it the top country of birth for recent arrivals.
“The last three years there is tremendous population growth of Indian guys over here and not in only permanent residents, but temporary workers and international students,” Reval said of his community.
The last time such a huge proportion of people came from the same place was in the 1971 census, when more than 20 per cent of immigrants came from the United Kingdom.
The overall share of immigrants from Europe has dwindled since then, down to just 10.1 per cent in 2021 from 61.6 per cent in 1971.
The census didn’t ask questions about why people from certain regions have chosen to come to Canada, said Tina Chui, director of diversity and socio-cultural statics for Statistics Canada, but other studies do give some clues.
“Joining family, economic opportunities, all those are kind of the reasons why people chose to come to Canada,” she said at a press conference Wednesday. The large number of international students from India could also be a factor, she said.
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Toronto-based immigration lawyer Peter Rekai said well-educated Indian applicants typically do very well in the express entry system, Canada’s main economic immigration program.
The system favours people with a good education, excellent official language proficiency, and work experience in Canada.
“Put it all together and they get enough points to be eligible for this program and also to be competitive,” Rekai said in an interview Wednesday.
Many Indian applicants come to Canada under a work or study visa, which gives them a leg up when it comes to their permanent residence application, he said.
The census shows that two-step immigration process is becoming far more common in Canada. More than one-third of immigrants who arrived in the last five years have gone through the two-step process, compared with just 18 per cent of those who were admitted between 2001 and 2005.
Canada offers a level of stability and a relatively short path to permanent residency and citizenship compared to many other countries, making it an attractive destination for newcomers, Rekai said.
“Canada offers a better path and a quicker path ? than just about any other country,” he said.
All that immigration over recent years means almost one-third of children in Canada have at least one parents who was born abroad, which is up from 26.7 per cent in 2011 and 29.2 per cent in 2016.
The face of Canada is changing, and Reval said multiculturalism is going to play a huge role in Canada’s future.
A few years ago he celebrated Diwali in Moncton, one of the most important festivals in the Hinduism, with less than 200 people _ most of whom he already knew.
This year, his association plans to throw a sold-out event with more than 600 people in attendance.
“The community is thriving,” he said.
'No religious affiliation'
Canadians are losing their religion at an unprecedented rate, with more than a third of the country reporting no religious affiliation in the latest census, Statistics Canada revealed Wednesday.
And while the latest tranche of data from the 2021 census shows the proportion of non-religious Canadians has more than doubled in the past 20 years _ to 34.6 per cent, up from 16.5 per cent in 2001 _ the share of the country who identify as Christian has shrunk.
They made up 53.3 per cent of the population in 2021, down from 67.3 per cent in 2011 and 77.1 per cent in 2001.
“It is fair to say that the two things that we are seeing _ the growth in the non-religious population, along with the decline in people reporting Christian denominations _ they’re linked,” said with Jarod Dobson, a senior analyst with StatCan’s diversity and socio-cultural statistics division.
The trend in Canada is in line with the United States, the agency noted.
“There are studies that have been done that show that over time, the importance of religion in people’s lives has decreased,” Dobson said.
For Tania Akon of Toronto, leaving behind her Muslim faith meant losing not only her guiding philosophy, but also her community.
“If you leave your community in a place like Toronto, you’re just a worker,” she said. “You try to find that meaning and connection and humanity (at work) but that’s not a guarantee.”
In search of that connection, Akon turned to secular humanism, a philosophy-cum-community centred around human dignity. Some 11,390 people described themselves as humanists in the latest census.
The non-religious category includes people who identify as atheist and agnostic, as well as humanists and those with other secular perspectives.
Akon attended her first meeting of the secular community Toronto Oasis in 2017 and has since become one of its volunteer organizers.
Until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, they met weekly at an interfaith centre, hosting speakers and musicians.
“Every Sunday morning, so it’s like a church except there’s no dogma, no doctrine,” Akon said.
They migrated to virtual meetings when the pandemic began, and haven’t switched back since.
Even so, she said, the sense of community persists.
“We’re meeting a need,” she said. “It’s being organized by people like me who have the need themselves and have tried to create something to meet a need we have.”
But not every non-religious person seeks community based on their philosophy, said Lori Beaman, a professor at the University of Ottawa and the Canada Research Chair in religious diversity and social change.
“We see a kind of openness to come together around things that matter to people, like homelessness, like food banks, like conservation, and so on,” she said. “So I think that those are the ways that people are finding community in new ways.”
While in some cases those communities are online, Beaman noted that people also form community around in-person activities. Book clubs, knitting groups and sports teams are all secular communities.
“Very often, what tends to happen is there’s a characterization of non-religious people as somehow having a gap or a yearning. And I think that we perhaps want to bracket that and instead ask, simply, what are the things that people care about?” Beaman said.
Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, said the shift away from religion is largely a generational one.
Only 19 per cent of Canadians 65 and older said they had no religion, the census data shows, compared to 36.5 per cent of those between the ages of 15 and 64, and 42.5 per cent of those 14 and younger.
Wilkins-Laflamme said many baby boomers stopped attending religious services on a regular basis but still identify with a religious tradition.
“And then as they had kids of their own and raised them, those kids didn’t necessarily attend any kind of activities with religious groups with their parents,” she said.
“And so when it was their turn to become adults, they didn’t really see the need or the point of even keeping their religious identity or affiliation if they have no practice tied to it.”
Even as the share of non-religious people is increasing, some non-Christian religions are growing, driven largely by immigration.
Islam is the second most commonly reported religion in Canada in 2021, with nearly five per cent of the population identifying as Muslim. That’s more than doubled since 2001, when the share was only two per cent.
Meanwhile, 2.3 per cent of the population now identifies as Hindu, compared to one per cent in 2001.
Those who are affiliated with a given religion aren’t necessarily practising members of that faith, Statistics Canada noted.
The agency said this year’s release presents the most comprehensive portrait of Canadians’ religious affiliations to date, as the census linked to a list of 200 example denominations for people to look at before writing in their religion, which encouraged people to be more specific.
For example, 1,645 people reported being Druidic on the 2021 census, while 4,475 said they were Neopagan. In surveys past, they would only have been identified as Pagan.
The Pagan umbrella, which also includes 12,625 Wiccans, now encompasses 45,325 people.
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