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Citizenship

Canadian-born, naturalized citizens, and non-citizens, mapped by census tract (2021 Census)

Citizenship & nativity, by neighbourhood

Where the Canadian-born, naturalized citizens (immigrants who have become citizens), and non-citizens live, by census tract (2021). Use the dropdown to switch group, and zoom and pan to your area.

How the groups are assembled. The census reports citizenship (citizen or not) and immigrant status (non-immigrant / immigrant / non-permanent resident) on the same population base. We combine them as:

  • Canadian-born: StatCan’s “non-immigrants” (Canadian citizens by birth).
  • Naturalized citizens: Canadian citizens minus the Canadian-born.
  • Non-citizens: direct from the census (permanent residents on track to citizenship, temporary residents, and others).

The three groups sum to 100%.

Non-permanent residents: people on work or study permits or claiming asylum are a subset of non-citizens, shown as a fourth map option. Census citizenship questions are asked of a 25% sample, so small tracts carry more noise than the diversity and language layers.

Becoming a citizen: how Canada compares

This chart shows how many people become citizens each year. Counting acquisitions of citizenship per 100,000 residents enables comparison between countries of different total populations. Canada naturalizes new citizens at one of the highest rates in the peer group, and far above the United States, France, and Japan. The Canadian line is volatile because it tracks processing throughput as much as demand. Grants fell sharply in 2020 when offices closed, then surged in 2022–23 as the pandemic backlog was cleared. Countries also count acquisitions differently. Some include registration and declaration routes that others exclude. This is best read as broad scales, not an exact ranking.

In the most recent year, ranked:

Voting

Citizenship confers the right to vote. Canadians’ turnout at the polls has varied over our 150+ year history of federal elections, ranging from roughly 60% to 80% of registered electors.

Turnout differs sharply by age: Canadians aged 18 to 24 vote at the lowest rates and those aged 65 to 74 at the highest.

Toronto’s municipal elections

Turnout at municipal elections runs well below the federal figures above. In Toronto’s general municipal elections since 2003, the first for which the City Clerk publishes voter statistics on Toronto Open Data, the share of eligible electors who voted has ranged from 54.7% in 2014 to 29.7% in 2022.{python} tt_last_sentence The grey bar is the 2023 mayoral by-election. Eligible electors are those on the voters’ list plus election-day additions, so the denominator is the Clerk’s, not an estimate of the voting-age population.

Across Ontario’s largest cities

Every Ontario municipality votes on the same day under the same Act, so the province’s post-election returns allow a like-for-like comparison. Among the 20 municipalities with the most electors in 2022, turnout ranged from 43.8% in Ottawa to 18.4% in Oshawa, with a median of 28.1%. These are the figures each municipality reported to the province, which for Toronto match the City Clerk’s final count in 2022.

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