Statistics

By Volodymyr Kish

There are a lot of Ukrainians in Canada, some 1.2 million who identify themselves as wholly or partly Ukrainian according to census data. That makes Ukrainians the 9^th largest ethnic group in Canada at just under 4% of the total Canadian population. Not surprisingly, over half of them are concentrated in the three Prairie Provinces, the original destination of the first Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, and where most of their descendants remain still.

Ontario also has a large number of Ukrainians with some 336,000, fueled by the second, third and fourth waves of Ukrainians who came to Canada between the First World War and today. Surprisingly, there are also close to two hundred thousand Ukrainians in British Columbia. I say surprisingly, because compared to the Ukrainians on the Prairies and in Ontario, the Ukrainians in BC have been a quiet lot, with little of the organizational activity and activism of their brothers and sisters to their east. Meanwhile, east of Ontario, Ukrainians become quite scarce - there are some thirty two thousand in Quebec, and handfuls scattered throughout the Maritime Provinces.

I have garnered all these numbers from official Canadian census statistics, the last one being in 2011, and the one before that in 2006. I like statistics. Maybe it’s because I have a degree in mathematics, but more likely, it’s because I have an inherent desire to quantify things. It helps me put things in context, from which I hope I can draw more valid conclusions and opinions.

Unfortunately, statistics, and particularly statistical trends often lead me to ask more questions, many of which do not have easily quantifiable answers, and have a tendency to leave one somewhat disturbed. I will give you one example.

In the 2006 Census, some 134,500 Canadians claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue. Five years later, only 111,540 people claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue. This is a decrease of 22,960 or 17%. What would cause such a dramatic drop in just five years? I know too, that Ukrainian immigrants continued to come to Canada during that time period, between two to three thousand per year, so there should have been a net addition of at least ten thousand or more Ukrainian speakers during that time. By contrast, the number of people claiming Russian as their mother tongue rose during that same period from 133,580 to 164,330. According to the 2006 Census, there were 59,460 Canadians whose country of birth was Ukraine, and 64,130 whose country of birth was Russia. In 2011, there were 2,455 immigrants to Canada from Ukraine and only 1,887 from Russia.

So what does all this mean? What conclusions can we draw from it? Why would there be such a dramatic drop in Ukrainian speakers and a correspondingly sharp increase in Russian speakers at a time when Ukrainian and Russian immigrants to Canada were comparable and there were no corresponding population flows to support either the decrease in the one case, and the increase in the other?

The answers to these questions are not simple and I can only speculate on some of the causes. No doubt, many of those who had claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue in earlier censuses were predominantly of the older immigrant generation and many of them have reached the age where many are passing away in significant numbers. Regrettably, the maintenance of Ukrainian as a mother or first tongue falls away rapidly in each succeeding generation of their Canadian-born descendants, so there is no natural demographic replacement mechanism.

I suppose too that we should not assume that the ten thousand or so immigrants who came to Canada from Ukraine in those five years between the censuses were Ukrainian speakers. With the Russification of Eastern Ukraine, and the fact that Russians are generally better placed both economically and politically to be able to take advantage of the immigration process, it would be reasonable to assume that a significant number of those “Ukrainian” immigrants were in fact Russian speakers. Further, the same can be said of immigrants from most of the other countries that were once part of the USSR – Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, the Baltic countries, etc., thereby, also inflating the number of Russian speakers.

There are many stories behind the numbers. I wish I had the time to explore them more.