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South Asians push Chinese aside as Canada's main ethnic minority

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South Asians have overtaken Chinese as the largest minority group in Canada, which now has well over a million members of each ethnic group.

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And, for the first time, minorities - people who are neither white nor aborigines - now make up a majority of the population in the City of Vancouver.

While Chinese remain the largest minority group in Greater Vancouver, making up about 18 per cent of residents, the broader picture showed that South Asians have become the dominant minority group across Canada. There are 1.26 million South Asians in Canada, compared with 1.22 million ethnic Chinese. The data from the 2006 census was released by Statistics Canada.

'The [South Asian] population is growing and there are families being reunited and even more applications waiting to come through,' said Balwant Singh Gill, president of the Guru Nanak Temple in Surrey, outside Vancouver. 'This is a good thing. It's a 100-year history and took a long time to get to this level.'

Of the country's 31 million residents in 2006, more than 5 million defined themselves as part of a minority. The latest figures show that the number of South Asians has increased by more than 37 per cent, from 917,100 in 2001. South Asians and Chinese each make up about 4 per cent of the national population.

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The Fraser Valley community of Abbotsford, about an hour east of Vancouver, has one of the country's most diverse populations. The census showed that after Toronto and Vancouver, Abbotsford has the third highest proportion of minorities and the municipality with the highest proportion of South Asians.

The number of residents who identified themselves as Chinese increased 18 per cent between 2001 and 2006.

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