With all the talks of refugees coming to Canada in the next few months, I figured it was time to understand the lives of the newcomers in our capital. Using Statistics Canada, I was able to find the National Household Survey of Canada for our two closest statistical years: 2006 and 2011.
After a preliminary look at the data, I narrowed the information to concentrate on the percentage change of immigrants in Ottawa. I gathered the data sheets on excel and created a table that reflected the total population in private households in Ottawa to the number of immigrants, then filtered to create a percentage.
What I learned here is that Ottawa is on an upward trend with immigrants, considering that it has risen from 22.3 per cent of the total population to 23.4 per cent.
This led me to a new question: Do the newcomers tend to choose a specific area in the city or do they just go anywhere?
From there I created a bar graph that calculated the most recent data from the National Household Survey of Canada (2011) that measured the concentrations of immigrants within each ward.
I did this by separating the number of private households by citizens to the immigrants within the ward to see how many immigrants make up each ward.
Here is what I discovered:
As the graph sho
ws, Gloucester-Southgate holds the highest immigrants per-capita in Ottawa. These numbers equate to 16,000 immigrants out of 47,910 private home dwellers in Gloucester-Southgate, or ward 10.
On the bottom-left, you will find a map of Gloucester-Southgate inside the city of Ottawa, which is broken down into 23 wards.
What makes these pi
ctures significant is that Gloucester-Southgate does not make up a large part of the Ottawa city map.
So why do immigrants tend to go there?
“Southgate is near the airport so the cost of living goes down considering the noise pollution,” said Samir Kadou, a community leader in the ward. “It doesn’t matter where you’re from, the newcomers get our city appeal right when they land in the country.”
Was he saying that there was no specific nationality that made up their majority? I had to look deeper to understand.
So I created two tables that counted the majority continents of origin that new immigrants were coming from: America, Europe, Africa and Asia. I made one with the 2006 data and 
one with the 2011 data.
Next, I measured the top-3 concentrations of ethnicities within each ward by sorting each column from largest to smallest to see if I could find any patterns between the two surveys. What I found was that immigrants have always stuck to Glo
ucester-Southgate, although it ranked second in overall immigration numbers in 2006, behind River ward.
But in 2011, it topped the list. Although several continents contributed to the ascension, a big reason it rose was from continued immigration of Asians & Middle Easterner’s, who seem to hold a strong community in the ward. Asians and Middle Eastern’s reached the top spot in Gloucester-Southgate in 2006 as well, suggesting that they may be developing roots in the area.
But as the pie chart below shows, although Gloucester-Southgate may be saturated with the most immigrants in the Ottawa region by-far, nearly two thirds of the population of that community come from Canadian heritage or from generational living. This should help ease some feelings of discomfort for those who worry about immigration policies.
Sources and data: