Black Canadians () are citizens of Canada who have ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa. The Canadian-born (41.0%) were the largest Black population group in Canada in 2021, followed by the African-born (32.6%) and the Caribbean-born (21.0%). Text was copied from this source, which is available under the Statistics Canada Open Licence A large share of Black Caribbean immigrants (42.5%) migrated to Canada from 1960 to 1990, while over half (54.8%) of Black immigrants from Africa came to Canada from 2011 to 2021.
A historically significant population includes the descendants of African Americans, including fugitive slaves, Black Loyalists and refugees from the War of 1812. Their descendants primarily settled in Nova Scotia and Southern Ontario, where they formed distinctive identities such as Black Ontarians and Black Nova Scotians.
Black Canadians have contributed to many areas of Canadian culture. Many of the first visible minorities to hold high public offices have been black, including Michaëlle Jean, Donald Oliver, Stanley G. Grizzle, Rosemary Brown, and Lincoln Alexander. Black Canadians form the third-largest visible minority group in Canada, after South Asian and Chinese Canadians.
Population According to the 2021 census by Statistics Canada, 1,547,870 Canadians identified as black, constituting 4.3% of the entire Canadian population. Of the black population, 10 per cent identified as mixed-race of "white and black". The five most Black-populated provinces in 2021 were Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba. The 10 most black-populated census metropolitan areas were Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Hamilton, Oshawa, and Québec City. Preston, in the Halifax area, is the community with the highest percentage of black people, with 69.4%; it was a settlement where the Crown provided land to black Loyalists after the American Revolution.Community Counts Home Page Brooks, a town in southeastern Alberta, is the census subdivision with the highest percentage of black people, with 22.3%. The community there is mainly composed of East African immigrants.
In the 2011 census, 945,665 black Canadians were counted, making up 2.9% of Canada's population. In the 2016 census, the black population totalled 1,198,540, encompassing 3.5% of the country's population.Census Profile, 2016 Census Statistics Canada. Accessed on 6 November 2017.
The 10 largest sources of migration for black Canadians are Jamaica (136,505), Haiti (110,920), Nigeria (109,240), Ethiopia (43,205), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (37,875), Cameroon (33,200), Somalia (32,285), Eritrea (31,500), Ghana (28,420), and the United States (27,055).
68.8% of black Canadians are Christian, while 11.9% are Muslim and 18.0% are irreligious. This is compared to 53.3%, 4.9%, and 34.6%, respectively, of Canadians as a whole. Among first-generation black Canadian immigrants, 74.2% are Christian, 13.2% are Muslim, and 11.5% are irreligious.
A small amount of black Canadians (0.6%) also have some Indigenous heritage, due to historical intermarriage between black and First Nations or Métis communities.Sheri Borden Colley, "Black artists with N.S. roots want their Métis ancestry recognized". CBC News Nova Scotia, 16 February 2018. Historically little known, this aspect of black Canadian cultural history began to emerge in the 2010s, most notably through the musical and documentary film project The Afro-Métis Nation.
Demographics and census issues
At times, black Canadians are claimed to have been significantly undercounted in census data. Writer George Elliott Clarke has cited a McGill University study which found that fully 43% of all black Canadians were not counted as black in the 1991 Canadian census, because they had identified on census forms as British, French, or other cultural identities, which were not included in the census group of black cultures."The Complex Face of Black Canada" , George Elliott Clarke, McGill News, Winter 1997.
Although subsequent censuses have reported the population of black Canadians to be much more consistent with the McGill study's revised 1991 estimate than with the official 1991 census data, no study has been conducted to determine whether some black Canadians are still substantially missed by the self-identification method.
Mixed unions In the 2006 census, 25.5% of black Canadians were in a mixed union with a non-black person. black and non-black couples represented 40.6% of pairings involving a black person. Among native-born black Canadians in couples, 63% of them were in a mixed union. About 17% of black Canadians born in the Caribbean and in Bermuda were in a mixed relationship, compared to 13% of African-born black Canadians. Furthermore, 30% of black men in unions were in mixed unions, compared to 20% of black women.
Terminology
There is no single generally-accepted name for Canadians of black African descent.
African identity
The term "African Canadian" is used by some black Canadians who trace their heritage to enslaved peoples brought by British and French colonists to the North American mainland and to Black Loyalists. This group includes those who were promised freedom by the British during the American Revolutionary War; thousands of Black Loyalists, including Thomas Peters, were resettled by the Crown in Canada after the war. In addition, an estimated 10,000–30,000 fugitive slaves reached freedom in Canada from the Southern United States during the years before the American Civil War, aided by people along the Underground Railroad. Starting in the 1970s, some persons with multi-generational Canadian ancestry began distinguishing themselves by identifying as Indigenous black Canadians.
Black Nova Scotians, a distinct cultural group, some of whom can trace their Canadian ancestry back to the 1700s, use both "African Canadian" and "black Canadian" to describe themselves. For example, there is an Office of African Nova Scotian Affairs and a Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia.
In French, the terms Noirs canadiens or Afro-Canadiens are used. Nègre ("Negro") is considered derogatory. Quebec film director Robert Morin faced controversy in 2002 when he chose the title Le Nèg' for a film about anti-black racism,"Montreal film, Le Neg, stirs up controversy about racism, bigots". Canadian Press, 21 October 2002. and in 2015 five placenames containing Nègre (as well as six that contained the English term nigger) were changed after the Commission de toponymie du Québec ruled the terms no longer acceptable for use in geographic names."11 Quebec sites that contain the N-word to be renamed". CBC News Montreal, 25 September 2015.
Caribbean identity Black Canadians often draw a distinction between those of Afro-Caribbean ancestry and those of other African roots. Many black people of Caribbean origin in Canada reject the term "African Canadian" as an elision of the uniquely Caribbean aspects of their heritage, instead identifying as "Caribbean Canadian".Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada. 2003, Insomniac Press. . However, this usage can be problematic because the Caribbean is not populated only by people of African origin, but also by large groups of Indo-Caribbean people, Chinese Caribbean people, European Caribbean people, Syrian or Lebanese Caribbean people, Latinos, and Amerindians. The term West Indian is often used by those of Caribbean ancestry, although the term is more of a cultural description than a racial one, and can equally be applied to groups of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
More specific national terms such as Jamaican Canadian, Haitian Canadian, or Ghanaian Canadian are also used. No widely used alternative to "black Canadian" is accepted by the Afro-Caribbean population, those of more recent African extraction, descendants of immigrants from the United States, and other Canadians of Black African descent as an umbrella term for the whole group."As for terminology, in Canada, it is still appropriate to say Black Canadians." Valerie Pruegger, "Black History Month". Culture and Community Spirit, Government of Alberta.
One increasingly common practice, seen in academic usage and in the names and mission statements of some black Canadian cultural and social organizations, is to always make reference to both the African and Caribbean communities."Black History Month Celebrations in Markham". Markham Guiding Star, 12 February 2008. For example, one key health organization dedicated to HIV/AIDS education and prevention in the black Canadian community is now named the African and Caribbean Council on HIV/AIDS in Ontario, the Toronto publication Pride bills itself as an "African-Canadian and Caribbean-Canadian news magazine", and G98.7, a black-oriented community radio station in Toronto, was initially branded as the Caribbean African Radio Network."Caribbean radio station set for Toronto at 98.7 FM". Toronto Star, 2 February 2011.
History The black presence in Canada is rooted mostly in voluntary immigration. Despite the various dynamics that may complicate the personal and cultural interrelationships between descendants of the black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, descendants of former American slaves who viewed Canada as the promise of freedom at the end of the Underground Railroad, and more recent immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa, one common element that unites all of these groups is that they are in Canada because they or their ancestors actively chose of their own free will to settle there.
First black people in Canada
The first recorded black person to have potentially entered Canadian waters was an unnamed black man on board the Jonas, which was bound for Port-Royal (Acadia). He died of scurvy either at Port Royal, or along the journey, in 1606. The first recorded black person to set foot on land now known as Canada was a free man named Mathieu da Costa. Travelling with navigator Samuel de Champlain, da Costa arrived in Nova Scotia some time between 1603 and 1608 as a translator for the French explorer Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Monts. The first known black person to live in what would become Canada was an enslaved child, aged around 7 at the time of his arrival, from Madagascar named Olivier Le Jeune, who may have been of partial Malay ancestry. He was first given to one of the Kirke brothers, likely David Kirke, before being sold as a young child to a French clerk and then later given to Guillaume Couillard, a friend of Champlain's. Le Jeune apparently was set free before his death in 1654, because his death certificate lists him as a domestique rather than a slave.
As a group, black people arrived in Canada in several waves. The first of these came as free persons serving in the French Army and Navy, though some were enslaved or indentured servants. About 1,000 slaves were brought to New France in the 17th and 18th centuries. By the time of the British conquest of New France in 1759–1760, about 3,604 enslaved people were in New France, of whom 1,132 were black and the rest First Nations people. The majority of the slaves lived in Montreal, the largest city in New France and the centre of the lucrative fur trade.