INTRODUCTION

Ontario is Canada's second largest province, with a land mass of some 916,733 square kilometres. Its population is the largest and most urbanized of any Canadian province or territory (10,084,855 according to the 1991 federal census, with 81.8 per cent classified as urban). Ontario is the country's industrial base: it has always been the leading manufacturing province and it includes Canada's largest city (and business and financial centre), Toronto, and the national capital, Ottawa. These demographics help explain the province's present-day multicultural, multilingual makeup, outlined below.

While 84 per cent of Ontarians report speaking English as their home language, this figure masks considerable linguistic diversity. While Ontario's francophone population is a small minority, 300,000 people report French as their home language and almost 500,000 identify French as their mother tongue; indeed, Ontario is home to by far the largest (and the healthiest) francophone population in Canada outside of Quebec. Equally noteworthy is the fact that, since World War II, well over half the immigrants coming to Canada have settled in Ontario and, of these, the majority settle in the metropolitan Toronto area. The 1950s saw heavy immigration from the United Kingdom and continental Europe and, more recently, there have been significant levels of immigration from India and Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America.