From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Tibetans/Brian J. Given
The first Tibetan refugees in Canada, numbering 228 persons, arrived from India and Nepal during 1971–72. Young couples who were already well established were officially favoured for resettlement. Different provinces of the country varied greatly in their implementation of the settlement program. For example, Quebec provided institutional language training but minimal assistance in other areas. According to a federal government report (1974), that province provided the most comprehensive assistance, emphasizing both language education and job training. In the prairies the first Tibetan arrivals were offered little in the way of orientation programs or language courses, although some Tibetan Canadians reported that they received considerable help from a settlement officer for about one month. Their experience was extremely difficult because they knew so little about Canada that they were not sure whether living as resident-labourers on prairie farms represented a typical Canadian lifestyle. At present, there is a sizeable Tibetan-Canadian community in British Columbia, largely as a result of secondary migration, mostly from the prairies.
There is no official data on the number of Tibetans in Canada, because the Canadian census data lists people born in Tibet under the rubric “China” (a serious affront to Tibetans) and the Tibetan language is coded as “other/ Asian.” A reasonable estimate of the size of the current Tibetan population in Canada would be 600–700 people. Some of the larger communities are in Ontario (300), Quebec (100), Alberta (100), and British Columbia (80).
