Post-Multicultural Canada: The 2011 Census

There are two things I firmly believe are more important to make political/social change than voting in this country.  One is not paying taxes and the other is (filling out) the Census.

A few key points that have just come out of the 2011 Census:
 

• Between 2006 and 2011, Canada had the fastest population growth of any other G8 country.  That's a rate of 5.9%
• The Canadian birthrate is only 1.6 children per couple.  So it doesn't take a PhD to explain that immigration is what's keeping this country afloat.
• 7 out of 10 Canadians live in CMAs (Census Metropolitan Areas).  I just like to call them cities.
• That's a total of 23 million plus people out of the 33,476,688 total population that can call themselves urban dwellers
• Oh, and we now live in a post-Multicultural society.  Why? Because outside of language spoken at home, with this short-form Census, we no longer keep tabs on Canada's racial/multicultural makeup.
 

As a Cowardly Historian, better known as a CH, I argue switching to the short-form version is the end of Canadian multiculturalism.  The Census is how governments, researchers, community and social programmes, know who exactly lives in this country and how we can - and should - manage our multicultural state (and spend what's left of tax payer dollars after fighter jets and ORNGE salaries).  How can you argue a country is multicultural if you don't even know who and how many different cultures/races/colours/hyphenated nationalities live in Canada?

So can you really argue you are a part of a marginalized and Visible Minority group, worthy of equitable and favourable "affirmative action", if you have to go back to 2006 for any concrete evidence?  I mean, I didn't personally know the 783,795 Black people that lived in Canada in 2006 who made up about 2.5% of the population, or the 30,435 Barbadians, so who am I to know if they all got on a boat last year and went back-to-Africa?  Or better yet, what if in 2009 about 5 million Nigerians sneaked through the unprotected Arctic and decided to settle in Nunavut?  Or the 10,066,290 Canadian-Canadians (I reckon they must be White folks), decided to say to hell with all these coloured folks, we're going to go colonize Antarctica or Pluto?

We will never know.