South Asian diasporas in Canada

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Notes

The conference was co-organised by Margaret Walton-Roberts and Simon Chilvers, and was funded by; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Wilfrid Laurier University, The International Migration Research Centre, and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. The production of this special issue benefitted from the research assistance of Lindsay Blackwell, editorial guidance of Ajaya Sahoo, and the constructive and insightful comments of many anonymous reviewers.

For example Lindsay's (2007, 8) report on South Asian Canadians states: ‘This profile is based on people who reported an ancestry that originates in South Asia, including those reporting their origin as at least one of Bangladeshi, Bengali, East Indian, Goan, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Pakistani, Punjabi, Nepali, Sinhalese, Sri Lankan, Tamil, or South Asian’. Another report based on official data (Tran et al. 2005, 21) included as South Asian those ‘with Bangladeshi, Bengali, East Indian, Goan, Gujarati, Hindu, Ismaili, Kashmiri, Nepali, Pakistani, Punjabi, Sikh, Sinhalese, South Asian, Sri Lankan and Tamil ancestry. South Asians may have been born in Canada, on the Indian sub-continent, in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Great Britain or elsewhere’.

Statistics Canada, ‘Canada at a glance 2012’ http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/12-581-x/2012000/pop-eng.htm#c03

A similar concern has been raised in the UK (see Taher 2005).