Most people in the world tend to lump the United States and Canada together, much in the way they would Austria and Germany, or Australia and New Zealand. Of course, this seriously annoys the citizens of these countries, who know better. Often, it is the citizen of the smaller country who feels most annoyed. Tell a Canadian that they are basically the same as Americans and you will get a heartfelt tirade of vague (and often untrue) differences that ends up defining Canadians as “not American”.
Tell an American that you are from Canada, and they will ask you if you know Fred Bloggs from Calgary. Truth be told, Canadians know a lot more about the United States than Americans do about Canada. Much of that American ‘knowledge’ comes from Saturday Night Live skits, Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties, and some strange notion that everybody from Canada speaks French.
Having lived about half my life in each country, my own take is that the differences are relatively minor. Emphasis more than substance. But is that really true?
Over the coming weeks, we will be embarking on a series of explorations into the demographic differences between Canada and the United States – both real and imagined. We think that the results may be surprising to many – some were even to us!
Our focus will be on two distinct areas and arise from our ongoing project to create a truly binational segmentation system –
- What are the demographic differences between the United States and Canada, and how do they affect businesses looking to expand across the border in either direction?
- What are the differences in terms of demographic data collection and reporting that we need to understand?
By necessity, some of our discussions will be technical as we explore some of the differences in geographic area definition, variable definition, and data distribution policies.
Language is seen as the primary distinction, but in reality, the linguistic map is much more complicated. As an overview, we classified counties (census divisions in Canada) to show areas where each of the three major languages spoken (English, French, and Spanish) dominate. Not surprisingly, French language speakers are primarily in Quebec and neighboring provinces, with most of western Canada overwhelmingly English speaking. The language patterns in the United States are equally complex – with Spanish speakers along the entire southern border with Mexico.
Outside of a few pockets of French speakers in Manitoba, the vast majority are located in Quebec, northeastern Ontario, portions of Nova Scotia, and northern New Brunswick. Even at more detailed geographic scales, the divide between English and French is apparent. The map below is at the FSA (“forward sortation area”) level, which is similar in size to a ZIP code in the United States:
Over the last few decades, immigration has been a major component of population growth in Canada, with much of that coming from south and east Asian countries. Most French speakers outside of rural Quebec are bilingual, so the economic impact of language is increasingly apparent with immigrants who are linguistically isolated.
In the United States, the concept of a linguistically isolated household is one in which none of its members speak English fluently. In Canada, language is tallied at the individual level. In our view, the household concept of linguistic isolation is preferred, since the economic impact to the household when grandma doesn’t speak English is far less important than if the entire household doesn’t speak English.
In order to compare Canada and the United States, some adjustments must be made. For the United States, we use the % of households which are linguistically isolated – that is, no member of the household is fluent in English. For Canada, we use the % of the population which speaks neither English nor French fluently, then divide by the average household size. The results are somewhat squishy, but illustrate the general patterns quite well –
The main areas where a significant proportion of the households are linguistically isolated are the largely Spanish speaking areas of the American southwest and south Florida, Native American and First Nations areas of northern Canada, Alaska, and the four corners region of the southwest, and heavily immigrant areas of major metropolitan areas including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Vancouver.
The surprise, at least to us, is the significant area of isolation in the rural areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, where massive immigration in recent years from non-English speaking countries is having a significant impact.
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