Metro Vancouver has highest ratio of mixed couples in Canada

Good summary report from the recent Statistics Canada study by Douglas Todd:

Faizal Sahukhan, a Fijian therapist who specializes in counselling “inter-cultural” couples, says he’s found far more people in Metro Vancouver engage in inter-ethnic dating than actually “make the leap into marriage.”

Despite the high proportion of visible minority immigrants and their offspring in Metro Vancouver, Sahukhan said the “biggest barrier to mixed unions is parental influence.”

Asked why the proportion of visible minorities entering mixed unions tends to go down when the size of their ethno-cultural group goes up in a city, Sahukhan said, “Many people who are immigrants to Canada want to preserve homogeneity when their children begin to marry.”

North Shore-raised Kate Worthy, who is married to Paul Chu, was a bit taken aback that multicultural Metro Vancouver doesn’t have a larger proportion of people in mixed unions. She knows quite a few such couples….

Despite high immigration rates to Canada, marriage habits are changing slowly. The Statistics Canada report said “couples in mixed unions in Canada accounted for 2.6 per cent of all couples in 1991, 3.1 per cent of couples in 2001 and 3.9 per cent in 2006.”

The visible minority group members most likely to be in mixed unions in Canada are those of Japanese descent (79 per cent), followed by Latin Americans (48 per cent), blacks (40 per cent) and Filipinos (30 per cent).

The two visible minority groups least likely to enter into mixed unions are the largest ones in Canada and Metro Vancouver.

Of the 352,000 couples involving Chinese people in Canada, 19 per cent were in mixed unions, and of the 407,000 involving South Asians, 13 per cent were in mixed unions.

The Statistics Canada study does not directly report on how many whites are in mixed unions, but it says 85 per cent of mixed couples in Canada include a white person.

Metro Vancouver has highest ratio of mixed couples in Canada.

Link to full study:

Mixed Unions in Canada