| Welcome to Canada! |
| If you are a newcomer to Canada, you must adapt to a new culture, language and climate. Tamil Cultural Association of Waterloo Region wants to help you become familiar with your new surroundings and find a job. Come and join us at one of our many events to find out more. Find out about our upcoming events. We also provide some useful sites to ease your transition into Canadian society. |
| Immigrating to Canada |
| Every year, Canada plans to accept a couple of hundred thousand immigrants, to meet goals of economic benefit to Canada, family reunification, and humanitarian commitment. At Citizenship and Immigration Canada, you can find out how immigrants are selected, where to go and how to apply. |
| Province of Ontario - Capital: Toronto |
| Province of Ontario is one of the 10 Provinces of Canada. The Capital City of Ontario is Toronto. Multiculturalism is what sets Toronto apart from other big North American cities. Toronto is home to virtually all of the world's culture groups and is the city where more than 100 languages are spoken. |
| There are more than 90 different ethnic groups in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) and over one million non-English or French speaking people. The top six are European (997,180), East and Southeast Asian (488,350), British (457,990), Canadian (311,965), South Asian (291,520) and Caribbean (167,295). The top ten source countries for immigration to Canada were China, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Iran, Sri Lanka, The Philippines, Taiwan, Russia and Jamaica in 1996. |
| Italian is the most widely known non-official language with some 277,500 Torontonians able to speak it. Cantonese is the second most widely known non-official language with 178,680 persons able to speak it and Spanish is third with 142,635. Cantonese is the non-official language most widely spoken at home in Toronto (139,670 persons or 10.8% of all persons who speak a non-official language at home) and for those residents under the age of 25 (38,265 persons or 10.9%). |
| Italian (95,655 persons), followed by Punjabi (84,635), Portuguese (68,965) and Tamil (68,050) are the next most widely spoken non-official languages at home in Toronto. |