Brazilian Canadian

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Brazilian-Canadian is a term used to describe a person of mixed Brazilian and Canadian heritage, or a person who is of Brazilian heritage or originally from Brazil, but who has gained citizenship of Canada.

Sizable Brazilian emigration to Canada is too recent to have produced an extensive literature: no-one knows how many Brazilians were involved in the large-scale immigration of the late 1980s, nor how many returned to their homeland.

The 1991 Canadian census reports 2,520 individuals of wholly Brazilian origin and another 2,325 who describe Brazilian as one of their ethnic origins (NB: Brazilians themselves may be of varied European, African and Amerindian ethnicity/ethnic origins), giving a total of 4,845. This figure can be taken as an official minimum and corresponds to Brazilian consular estimates.

However, in the 1980s and 1990s a large number of younger Brazilians established families in Toronto. The local newspaper Abacaxi Times estimated that the total number of Brazilians living in Toronto in the 1990s was about 9,000. Probably an equal number of legal immigrants entered Ontario to that date. The total for Canada was 14,976. When refugee claimants and illegal immigrants are added, the total in Ontario alone may approach 12,000, with a few thousand more in Quebec and British Columbia; there are smaller groups scattered across the country. New immigrants have continued to enter the country, but at a much slower pace than the previous decade.