Who We Are

Canadians are a people drawn from three founding sources: Aboriginal, French, and British. Today more than 38 million people call Canada home, and roughly one in five was born outside the country. The 2021 census shows visible-minority groups making up about 27% of the population, the highest share ever recorded.

Aboriginal Peoples

The First Nations, Inuit, and Métis are the Indigenous peoples of Canada. The territory was inhabited for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Today about 5% of Canadians identify as Aboriginal.

• First Nations — about 65% of Aboriginal people; live in every region.
• Métis — distinct people of mixed European and Aboriginal ancestry, with roots in the Prairies and along the fur-trade routes.
• Inuit — "the people" in the Inuktitut language; live mainly in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, northern Quebec, and Labrador.

From the 1800s until the 1980s the federal government placed many Aboriginal children in residential schools, separating them from their families and forbidding their languages. In 2008 the Government of Canada formally apologized; a Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented the harm and the path forward.

The English and the French

The two official languages are central to Canadian identity: - About 18 million Canadians speak English as a first language. - About 7 million speak French as a first language. - Quebec is the only majority French-speaking province; over 75% of Quebec's population is francophone. - New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province. - One million francophones live outside Quebec — the Acadians of the Atlantic provinces, and Franco-Ontarian, Franco-Manitoban, and Fransaskois communities.

A land of diversity

Canada is the second-largest country on earth by area, after Russia, but holds only about 0.5% of the world's population. Three out of four Canadians live within 200 km of the U.S. border, leaving vast areas of forest, lake, mountain, and tundra largely uninhabited.

Canada's largest origin groups today include people of British, French, German, Italian, Chinese, South Asian, Indigenous, Ukrainian, Dutch, Polish, and Caribbean heritage, alongside more recent arrivals from across the Middle East, the Philippines, and Africa. Religious diversity is similarly broad: Christianity remains the largest tradition, followed by significant Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Jewish communities.