Toronto declared the world’s most diverse city

The newly minted mayor of London, Sadik Khan, has been happily bragging that it is the British capitol that deserves the world’s diversity title.

But is London really that diverse?

A program on Britain’s own BBC radio has declared (while playing the Canadian national anthem) that it is in fact Canada’s most populous city that deserves those bragging rights.

On the BBC Radio program WS More or Less, reporter Ed Davey explained why Toronto tops his list by examining the different ways to define diversity. For example, the International Organization for Migration made a list of the 19 cities with the most foreign born residents. Topping that list was Dubai, with some 83 per cent of its population born abroad. But is Dubai actually diverse? Not really, says Davie. It’s true that city has a lot of South Asian workers from abroad, but the majority are from just a handful of countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. So while there are a lot of foreigners, it’s not exactly a diverse population.

Another way of doing the math is by looking at the total number of nationalities or languages spoken in a given city. Sounds like a good idea, but it gives big cities an unfair advantage. Think about it: in a city the size of New York, your bound to find at least one person from pretty much every country on earth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the city is diverse, it just means you’re humongous.

Davie says that you need to look at more than a single metric to find out which city is really the most diverse, and according to his calculations, Toronto, Canada is at the top of the list.

A rundown of Toronto’s numbers are impressive: the city’s population is 51 per cent foreign born, and there are more than 230 nationalities represented. According to the 2011 census, the city’s population is 12.3 per cent Pakistani and Indian, 10 per cent Chinese, 8.5 per cent black, and 5 percent Philipino, with a whole lot of other groups making up the mix in smaller percentages.

So who comes in second? London? Paris? New York?

Surprisingly, it’s Brussels. Half of the city’s population hails from outside of Belgium, and there is a real mix of origin countries because the city is the headquarters of the European Union.

And because we’re Canadian, we’ll go ahead and apologize on behalf of Toronto to mayor Sadik Khan, for the fact that London will have to settle for sharing third place with Aukland, Sydney, and Los Angeles.