Image: Chinese Canadians joyfully celebrating the Spring Festival
In December 2007, a report released by Statistics Canada showed that the number of people in Canada with Chinese as their mother tongue exceeded 1 million for the first time in 2006, consolidating Chinese's status as the third-largest language in Canada.
The report stated that the populations with English and French as their mother tongues remain the two major groups in Canada, with native English speakers accounting for 57.8% of the total population and native French speakers accounting for 22.1%.
From 2001 to 2006, the number of people in Canada with Chinese as their mother tongue increased by 162,000, reaching 1.034 million, with its proportion of the total Canadian population rising from 2.9% to 3.3%. Populations with Italian and German as their mother tongues are the fourth and fifth largest groups, respectively, while the population with Punjabi as their mother tongue remains in sixth place.
The number of Chinese immigrants in Canada has grown rapidly since the 1980s. The results of the 1996 census by Statistics Canada showed that the number of people with Chinese as their mother tongue that year was 736,000, accounting for 2.6% of Canada's total population, which allowed Chinese to replace Italian for the first time as Canada's third-largest language after English and French.
The report stated that in 2006, the proportion of the foreign-born population in Canada reached 19.8% of the total population, meaning that on average, approximately one in every five Canadians was born abroad. This proportion is second only to Australia's 22%, making Canada the country with the second-highest proportion of foreign-born residents after Australia.
The report shows that from 2001 to 2006, Canada's population grew from 30 million to 31.61 million, with foreign-born individuals accounting for 1.1 million of the new population, representing a 13.6% growth in the total foreign-born population over these five years; meanwhile, the native-born population grew by only 3.3% during the same period.
In addition, among the immigrants who arrived and settled in Canada between 2001 and 2006, the largest number came from countries in Asia and the Middle East, accounting for 58%; those from Europe ranked second, accounting for 16%. Among them, China is the largest source country for Canada's foreign-born population, with Chinese immigrants accounting for 14% of the total number of immigrants, followed by India (11.6%), the Philippines (7%), and Pakistan (5.2%).