Black Canadians make up 4.3% of the country’s population, 41.9% of them are under 25, and 60% were born outside Canada, according to the second annual State of Black Economics Report from the Diversity Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Ted Rogers School of Management.
The population has more than doubled since 1996 and the report projects it could exceed three million people by 2041. Those four figures together describe something that Canadian policy conversation tends to miss: a population that is young, substantially foreign-born and growing faster than the country around it.
The report does not treat the economic picture as a matter of a slow start. It states that the “enduring legacy of slavery, segregation and anti-Black racism continues to shape economic outcomes,” which is a claim about mechanism rather than about timing, and it comes from a business school research institute rather than from an advocacy organisation.
Alongside the demographics, the report covers labour market data and Black representation on corporate boards and in public-sector leadership, updated against the inaugural edition. Those figures are in the full document rather than in the summary, and the institute publishes it in English and French.
Why the demographics matter before the economics: a population where two in five people are under 25 is a population whose outcomes are mostly still being decided by schools, first employers and lending decisions rather than already set. A population where three in five were born abroad is one whose credentials, in a country with a long record of not recognising foreign qualifications, are a live economic question rather than a settled one.
What makes this kind of report necessary at all is that Canada collects race-disaggregated economic data patchily. Statistics Canada’s own category for this population, “visible minority,” bundles groups with very different labour market experiences, which is why a separate annual accounting has to exist.
Survey work has filled part of the gap. A York University survey released in 2021 found that 70% of Black respondents said they experienced racism regularly, and more than a fifth said they had been stopped by police unfairly.
The Diversity Institute has now published the report twice, which makes next year’s edition the first one that can show a trend rather than a baseline.
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