Patterns of Politics in Canada’s Immigrant-Receiving Cities and Suburbs: How Immigrant Settlement Patterns Shape the Municipal Role in Multiculturalism Policy

In Canada, through its multiculturalism policies, the federal government established

a normative framework to guide the immigrant integration process that prescribes a

public role in facilitating inter-ethnic equality and access to government institutions.1

Nevertheless, since immigrants tend to gravitate overwhelmingly to Canada’s largest city-

regions, questions surrounding fair and effective immigrant settlement arise most

immediately in cities and suburbs in these regions. To illustrate, Canada’s 2001 census

data indicate that while immigrants constitute about 18 per cent of the Canadian

population as whole, they account for 49.4 per cent of Toronto’s population and 44.9 per

cent of Vancouver’s population, respectively. In addition, because the source countries of