By Gerald V. Paul

With a StatsCan study released on Tuesday showing that visible minorities in the GTA could double by 2031, the Caribbean/Black community was urged to become fully involved in the economic and political life, since they are here to stay.

And for the first time the “Toronto will have 43 per cent of the diversity of the GTA, of all the diversity of the country,” Laurent Martel, one of the authors of Projections of the Diversity of the Canadian Population, told The Caribbean Camera.

Canada’s Black and Filipino populations, which were the third and fourth largest visible minority groups in 2006, could also double in size.

“Soon a larger share of this visible minority population will be people actually born in Canada. They are children of immigrants or grandchildren of immigrants. So the face of Canadians is changing.”

According to Martel, by 2031, between 25% and 28% of the population could be foreign-born. This would surpass the proportion of 22% observed between 1911 and 1931, the highest during the 20^th century. About 55% of this population would be born in Asia.

To look at it in another light, Whites will become the visible minority population in Toronto within 30 years, the study showed.

While Martel revealed that three federal agencies asked for the numbers to help in their police planning, he also disclosed that the information may be used for other purposes, be it in the educational or political sphere.

“It is interesting to watch the political and economic implications. The question is, are we fully involved? We as a community need to pay attention and become involved,” Professor Carl James, Director, Centre for Education and Community in the Faculty of Education at York University, said in response to the study.

Professor James noted that the Caribbean/Black community is not going anywhere – forget thoughts of the old country – “they are here to stay as such must be part of the power structure.”

Our readers should note that results of the study focus on foreign-born population are based on visible minority groups, generation status, religious denomination and mother tongue, all key indicators of the diversity of the population.

The Employment Equity Act defines minorities as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race and non-white in colour.”

The study contains five population growth scenarios.

And the projections contained in the study were produced with a microsimulation model developed at Statistics Canada called Demosim. This model not only allows projections of a large number of characteristics of the population, but it also takes into account differentials in demographic behaviours between sub-groups of the population.