Talk:Demographics of British Columbia

Visible minorities and aboriginal peoples

As per my edit comment, if StatsCan doesn't label aboriginal peopls as visible minorities, why should Wikipedia? Because they're not white? That's racist/racially-defined, and unpalatable. Why not a table of non-British minorities - that's already sort of there in the ethnic groups table, but the proportion of the minority/non-British population is there for the counting. Apparenetly the visible minority conceit is that they're the only minorities that matter; as a member of the other kind of minorities, I beg to differ.....Skookum1 (talk) 02:50, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

PS the visible minorities in many BC small towns, particularly up North and up the Coast, is all the non-aboriginal people....."visible minority" is a political definition, also. Since when are Argentines and Brazilians "visible minorities"? German-Italian-Welsh-mestizo doesn't quite cut it just because they speak Spanish or Portuguese. Are Spaniards also visible minorities?...Census Canada may use their definitions, and it's all too fashionable nowadays to categorize people by racial group while touting what a great thing it is that racism isn't a factor anymore; somebody should buy someone a mirror or two. My point here is that census figures are only worth the political agenda behind them....likewise the division of census areas by RDs.....Skookum1 (talk) 02:52, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Now, the pie chart for Visible minorities and Indigenous Peoples splits up as European, Visible Minority, First Nations, Metis, and Other Indigenous. I do not see why the different types of Indigenous peoples are split apart, whereas the "visible minorities" are all lumped together as one, particularly since the visible minorities are far far more numerous than the Indigenous. I will change the pie chart to be more logical. Zacharycmango (talk) 22:19, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

Early figures

Reproducing part of a table for discussion:

Year	Population	Five Year  % change	Ten Year  % change	Rank Among Provinces
1851	55,000	n/a	n/a	n/a
1861	51,524	n/a	-6.3	n/a
1871	36,247	n/a	-29.7	7
1881	49,459	n/a	36.4	8
1891	98,173	n/a	98.5	8
1901	178,657	n/a	82.0	6
1911	392,480	n/a	119.7	6

I'm a little dubious about those early figures, for one thing the 1851/1861 precision was unlikely to have taken place (i.e. of a formal census). There was an HBC "census" of sorts in colonial (VI) years but I can't remebmer in which year; and it was made up of reports from the various trading posts as to the size of their customer base. BC's early population figures are all wildly out of whack; presumably these are from StatsCan's database, but their source/estimate is itself a POV issue. Cole Harris' The Resettlement of British Columbia discusses the various modern estimates of pre-Contact populations, and also of post-Contact/post-smallpox populations; what I'm getting at is that, especially in these early years, the number of indigenous poeple should be broken out separately, or as a percentage. I'm also undecided whether 1861's 51k can be right; of the 20-30,000 who came to bC in 1858-59, many had gone home; but with the 50,000 or so native population in that year (higher actually; I usually see 60,000 as the native population on the eve of the great smallpox epidemic of 1862) there doesn't seem to be much room for hte hangers-on miner population; also any govt figures from that time will definitely exclude Americans and Chinese and possibly other non-naturalized residents (who were teh majority of non-indigenous peoples in momst communities). Anyway I don't have Harris' book and am not in the mood to revamp this table; but it needs doing, and cites for these figures should be given (plus variables). Once the Harris book is available as a resource (i.e. someone here starts using it) there's also no reason to begin only at 1851, as estimates run back at least into the 17th Century; there are also ancient population estimates. Also, from 1851-1891 BC's own census estimates/data would have included the Tlingit of much of the Alaska Panhandle, which was perceived to be part of BC as London still hadn't given BC's share of it away; certainly teh 1851 population includes them, if that's the HBc figures...but again, it seems low anyway.....Skookum1 (talk) 03:47, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Note re decrease for 1871: it's not just the smallpox epidemic in 1862....the Civil War in the US, and the associated depression in the Gold Colony, saw an out-migration of non-Britons that was not made up by new immigration fo thte Cariboo Gold Rush.and otehr 1860s goldrushes...Skookum1 (talk) 03:51, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Updated ethnic table to 2006, "but"

I noticed the link to StatsCan for the 2001 ethno-cultural profile was dead; the closest I could find for 2006, for now, was a listing that ended at Swedish and went no farther; so I commented out the subsequent groups, all 50,000 + and have to wonder why they're not important enough to StatsCan to include....must be another table out there somewhere. I haven't updated anything else, though I note that lots on this page is for 2001 and the lede data is a 2005 estimate; page needs lots of work; rates of numerical and proportionate increase on the ethnicity table could also be calculated without being "original research", I think, since they're only computations.....and I reverted "Indian" to "East Indian" as that's what StatsCan uses, and despite the p.c.ism and global usage of "Indian" in BC there's enough complications with that term, to say the least, that "East Indian" HAS to be specified.Skookum1 (talk) 16:14, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

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