Immigration is a large part of the Canadian story – a part of the story that isn’t over yet.
Just look at the latest census figures that focus on language.
For Tisdale, the second-largest mother tongue, after English, is Ukrainian. Yet when you compare the 2016 number with 2011 numbers, the number of people that list Ukrainian as their mother tongue is down. The same is true across the Northeast, where Ukrainian is the fourth-largest mother tongue.
To a degree, that’s because the wave of immigration that saw Ukrainians come to this country en masse was a century ago, a wave of immigration promoted by the Canadian government to attract people with agricultural knowledge. Those immigrants’ children – or even grandchildren – having lived in this country their entire lives, would list their mother tongue as English. Yet the Ukrainians’ culture hasn’t disappeared – Ukrainian food and dancing are popular today, and the Saskatchewan government even marks the Holodomor famine in the 1930s.
The language that’s expanding in this area now is Tagalog – one of many spoken in the Philippines. Since 2011, 35 speakers of the language have settled in Tisdale, more than doubling the population to 55. Other places, like Melfort and Porcupine Plain, are seeing even more Tagalog speakers become part of their communities.
And that’s not counting the Filipinos that speak one of the other 18 languages that are also immigrating to Canada.
Somewhat like the Ukrainians, the Filipinos coming here have a skill that’s desirable: coming from a former American colony, they were taught English back home.
A century from now, who knows what the makeup of Tisdale and Northeast will look like, yet what we will know for sure is that immigration will shape it.
