How the colours work

Nineteen chromatic families, one mixing rule, and the tones the map draws where there is no blend to make.

The mixing rule

Each dissemination area is coloured by blending the colours of the mapped origins reported in it, weighted by their published counts, so a mixed neighbourhood reads as a mixture rather than as a single label. Every specific origin sits at a hue near its family’s anchor, and related origins therefore share a region of the palette: a neighbourhood where several origins of one family are reported reads as that family, and one where two distant families meet reads as the colour between them. The blend is a description of the answers given, never a classification of the people in an area, and no colour on the map is a class an area belongs to.

The nineteen families

• First Nations origins
• Métis origins
• Inuit origins
• Indigenous, unspecified
• Canadian and North American
• British Isles
• French and Francophone
• Northern European
• Western and Central European
• Eastern European
• Southern European
• Jewish
• Middle Eastern and North African
• South Asian
• East Asian
• Southeast Asian
• Sub-Saharan African
• Caribbean
• Latin American

The same nineteen, under colour-vision simulation

The three most common forms of dichromacy, simulated with the Machado, Oliveira and Fernandes (2009) model — the same simulation the palette is gated on — into each dichromat’s own colour plane. Families that stay apart in a row stay apart on the map for that reader; families that converge do not. This is why colour is never asked to carry the reading alone: pointing at an area names the origins reported in it and their shares in words, and every story states its claim in a sentence.

Where there is no blend

Five tones stand outside the palette. None of them is a colour of an origin, and none is ever mixed into one: an area drawn in one of these is an area the map has nothing to blend for, and the tone says which of the five reasons applies.

Uninhabited

Nobody was counted living here in 2021, so there is no origin to report. A fact about the place.

Water

The tone the map paints water with. No dissemination area is drawn on it.

Reserve with no 2021 count published

The 2021 Census published no count for this reserve or settlement. A fact about the publication, not about the place: people live in these areas and are not counted in them.

Suppressed by Statistics Canada

Statistics Canada withheld the breakdown for confidentiality. The area exists and is populated; its answers are not published.

Too little data to colour

Too few responses to display, or no census data published for this area. Nothing here is estimated to fill the gap.