The word Canadian once meant only French colonists along the St Lawrence
In the 16th to 18th centuries, Canadien referred to French settlers in what are now Quebec and Ontario. The first known use covering English settlers too came in June 1792, when Prince Edward told rioters at a Charlesbourg poll to forget the distinction. Today about 41% of Canadians are first- or second-generation immigrants.
People lived in the land long before either group arrived; Old Crow Flats and Bluefish Caves are among the oldest known human sites in the country. Indigenous societies built permanent settlements, farms, hierarchies and trade networks, and some had already collapsed by the time Europeans came. The Métis emerged in the mid-17th century from marriages between First Nations people and European settlers. In the 2016 census, Indigenous peoples numbered 1,673,780, or 4.9% of the population.
The French founded New France and Acadia in the early 17th century; French colonists in the Maritimes were called Acadians rather than Canadiens. After the British conquest in 1760, New Englanders moved north, and roughly 60,000 United Empire Loyalists fled the American Revolution, many to New Brunswick. Between 1815 and 1850 some 800,000 people arrived, largely from the British Isles, including Highland Scots displaced by the Clearances. Irish famine refugees poured in, with more than 35,000 landing in Toronto in 1847 and 1848.
Openness had limits. The Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 imposed a head tax meant to discourage Chinese arrivals once the Canadian Pacific Railway was finished, and a 1908 continuous journey rule quietly shut out migrants from India. Those preferences for European settlers were loosened in the 1960s, and by the 1970s newcomers were increasingly from China, India, Vietnam, Jamaica and Haiti. Canada now takes in more than one in ten refugees resettled worldwide, and few countries admit more immigrants per head.
Independence came gradually after Confederation in 1867. The Statute of Westminster in 1931 brought legislative independence, the Citizenship Act created a distinct Canadian citizenship from January 1, 1947, and patriation of the constitution in 1982 completed full sovereignty. In the 2021 census people reported more than 450 ethnic or cultural origins, and the single most common answer was simply Canadian. About 2.8 million citizens lived abroad in 2010, the largest group in the United States.
Source: Canadians
