According to the 2006 census, approximately four out of every ten residents of metropolitan Vancouver were born outside Canada. This is the second-highest proportion of immigrants of any metropolitan area in Canada, or in any of the OECD countries for that matter (the only higher figure is that of Toronto). In fact, the immigrant population of Vancouver is almost as large as the total population of Calgary or Edmonton, and is much larger than that of Québec City (715,000) or Winnipeg (695,000), Canada’s 7th and 8th largest cities in 2006. As any resident of the Vancouver area will know, the “face” of newcomers has changed a great deal over the past 40 years. At that time, most immigrants to Vancouver came from European countries, while some three-quarters arriving now are from Asia. There are also growing numbers from other parts of the world, notably the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. This atlas, like its predecessors which looked at data released after the 1996 and 2001 censuses, is intended to provide a highly accessible graphical portrait of the immigrant settlement process. It includes maps of the Vancouver population based on the languages people first learned (mother tongue), their ethno-cultural origins, and their place of birth. While most maps show the characteristics of the whole population, we have also included a set that focus on immigrants in general, and those newcomers who arrived in the period between 2001 and 2006. Similar atlases of immigration are being produced for Montréal and Toronto.
All of the information used to create this atlas has been derived from the 2006 Census of Canada, conducted by Statistics Canada, which required one out of every five households to fill in a special 'long form' providing considerable detail about the birthplace of members of the household, their ethnic origin, education levels, income, and so on. Statistics Canada organizes this information at several different geographical scales, ranging from individual blocks in cities to Canada as a whole. We have elected to use Census Tracts as our basic mapping unit, as was done in the 1996 and 2001 atlas projects. There were over 400 Census Tracts in Greater Vancouver in 2006, with an average of around 5,200 people in each. Statistics Canada tries to ensure, to the extent that it is possible, that each Census Tract is as homogeneous in terms of its socio-economic composition as possible. However, readers of this atlas should be aware that there is often a great deal of variability within census tracts, and that maps made at finer scales would reveal much more complex patterns than those we have been able to show here.