The term Black Canadian refers to black Canadian citizens whose ancestors were indigenous to Africa; for the most part they have recent origins in the Caribbean, but others trace their lineage through the United States, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. Black and other Canadians often draw a distinction between those of Caribbean ancestry and those of different descent. Some black Canadians, such as the large community in Nova Scotia, trace their ancestry to freed American slaves who fled to Canada seeking refuge.
According to the 2001 census, 593,335 Canadians[1] identified themselves as black (in addition to 70,000 who claimed to be both black with European ancestry), approximately two per cent of the entire Canadian population (Statistics Canada). The majority of black Canadians live in five major Canadian cities. As of 2001, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver and Halifax were home to approximately 78.4 percent of all black Canadians.
Many black Canadians still face challenges. According to the Ethnic Diversity Survey released in September 2003, nearly one-third (32%) of blacks said that they had experienced some form of racial discrimination or unfair treatment sometimes or often in the five years prior to 2003.
Terminology
One of the ongoing controversies in the black Canadian community revolves around appropriate terminologies. Some may refer to black Canadians as Afro-Canadian or African-Canadian, although this term is not as prevalent as African American in the United States. Caribbean-Canadian is often used to refer to black Canadians of Caribbean birth, although this usage can also be controversial as the Caribbean is not only populated with people of African origin. (It includes large groups of Indo-Caribbeans, Chinese Caribbeans and small groups of European-Caribbeans, Syrian or Lebanese-Caribbeans and Amerindians.) The term Afro-Caribbean-Canadian is occasionally used in response to this controversy, although as of 2006 this term is still fairly rare.
Blacks of Caribbean origin form a much larger proportion of the black community in Canada than in the United States — in fact, over a third of Canada's black population is of Jamaican origin alone. Many Canadians of Afro-Caribbean origin strongly object to "African-Canadian" as obscuring their own culture and history, which partially accounts for the term's less prevalent use in Canada.
More specific national terms such as Jamaican-Canadian, Haitian-Canadian or Nigerian-Canadian may also be used.
To date, however, there is no widely-used alternative to "black Canadian" which is accepted by both the African-Canadian and Afro-Caribbean-Canadian communities as an umbrella term for the group as a whole. A black Canadian, however, should never be referred to as "African-American".
Black immigration
Black people arrived in Canada in several waves of immigration. The first of these came alongside French colonists as slaves. Others arrived in Nova Scotia through the Underground Railroad and Alberta through Native and Quakers communities.
Canada was not suited to the large-scale agricultural slavery practiced in the United States, and slavery became increasingly rare. In 1793, in one of the first acts of the new Upper Canada colonial parliament, slavery was abolished. It was all but abolished throughout the other British North American colonies by 1800, and was illegal throughout the British Empire after 1834. This made Canada an attractive destination for those fleeing slavery in the United States. From the 1830s until the American Civil War began in 1861, the Underground Railroad brought tens of thousands of fleeing slaves to Canada. While many of these returned to the United States after emancipation, a significant population remained, largely in Southern Ontario.
In the late nineteenth century there was an unofficial policy of restricting blacks from immigration, and in the 1920s formal racially-based immigration standards, which excluded blacks, were developed. Thus the huge influx of immigrants from Europe and the United States in the period before World War I included only very small numbers of black arrivals. These restrictions on immigration remained until 1962 when racial rules were eliminated from the immigration laws. This coincided with the dissolution of the British Empire in the Caribbean, and over the next decades several hundred thousand blacks came from that region to Canada.
In the last couple of decades an increasing number of immigrants from Africa have been coming to Canada, as is the case with the U.S. and Europe. This includes large numbers of refugees, but also many skilled workers pursuing better economic conditions. Today's black Canadians are largely of Caribbean origin, some of African origin (especially, but not exclusively, from Somalia) and smaller numbers from Latin American countries, but a sizable number of black Canadians descended from freed American slaves can still be found in the province of Nova Scotia and parts of Southwestern Ontario. However, some descendants of the freed American black slaves have mixed into the white Canadian community and have mostly lost their ethnic identity.