Canada’s Mosaic maps the origins reported across 55,499 census areas
Canada’s Mosaic colours 55,499 of Canada’s 57,932 census dissemination areas by the ethnic or cultural origins their residents reported, and 123 different origins rank first somewhere in the country. Live at mosaic.vtco.app.
VANCOUVER, BC, September 2, 2026. The Visual Thinking Company (VTCo) today published Canada’s Mosaic, an interactive map of the ethnic or cultural origins Canadians reported in the 2021 Census, at mosaic.vtco.app. A reader can look up any place and see the origins reported there, or pick an origin and see where in the country it is reported. Across the country’s dissemination areas, 123 different origins are the most frequently reported origin somewhere: the map shows where each of them is, at the finest geography available for this census data.
How the map is made
Each area’s colour is a blend of the colours of every origin reported in it, weighted by how often each was reported, over a palette of 19 chromatic families in which related origins share a region of the palette. Four of the nineteen are Indigenous: First Nations, Métis and Inuit origins, placed by Statistics Canada’s own classification of the same census variable, and a fourth for Indigenous responses that name no group.
The 2021 Census Profile reports ethnic or cultural origin for 36.3 million people in private households, based on 25% sample data. Statistics Canada publishes the 250 most frequently reported origins in that Profile; Canada’s Mosaic maps 243 of them, excluding 7 broad or ambiguous responses that could not be assigned unambiguously to a single colour family. Those 250 published categories contain 56.7 million responses, equivalent to about 1.6 reported origins per person in the Profile denominator. Because a person may report more than one origin, shares across origins do not sum to 100 percent, and the map never renormalises them.
What the map does not show
Of the 57,932 areas, 55,499 show a colour. The rest are stated, not painted over: 613 are suppressed by Statistics Canada for confidentiality, 574 publish too few responses to colour honestly, 817 are uninhabited, and 429 are reserves for which Statistics Canada published no 2021 population or origin count; Canada’s Mosaic labels each of those reserves “Reserve with no 2021 count published” rather than showing them as empty of people. The map shows reported origins, not identity and not race. The counts are not Indigenous identity, Indigenous ancestry, or registered or treaty Indian status, which Statistics Canada measures separately.
Stories, and the checking behind them
Canada’s Mosaic opens in two ways: 47 editorial stories across seven categories, and free exploration by origin, place or area. Each story frames the map on one pattern and states what the census data shows.
No number in a story is typed by a person; every figure is computed from the data, and an independent checker recomputes all of them, 9,084 checks in the current build, before anything is published. Separately, all 874,978 published area-and-origin shares were re-derived independently and checked against the rate Statistics Canada itself publishes, with zero mismatches: displayed shares follow Statistics Canada’s own rounding rule exactly.
Availability
Canada’s Mosaic is available now at mosaic.vtco.app, in light and dark themes. Every origin, place, area and story has a permanent address, and publishers can embed the map. The atlas is published in English and French, under /fr; the map’s own tile labels remain in English for now.
About The Visual Thinking Company
The Visual Thinking Company builds civic tools from public records, with a source on every figure. Canada’s Mosaic is a publication of The Visual Thinking Company. Media contact: rohan@thevisualthinkingcompany.com.