Definitions and concepts used by the Labour Force Survey

Immigrant type

Very recent immigrant: Very recent immigrants are individuals who have been landed immigrants to Canada for 5 years or less.

Recent immigrant: Recent immigrants are individuals who have been landed immigrants to Canada between 5 and 10 years.

Established immigrant: An established immigrant is an individual who have been landed immigrants to Canada more than 10 years.

Other: Persons residing in Canada who were born outside of Canada and are not landed immigrants. Examples of people in this category include temporary foreign workers, live-in caregivers, Canadian citizens born outside Canada and those with student or working visas.

Core working-age

The LFS includes those persons aged 15 and over (working-age) in its sample. However, those between the ages of 25 to 54 are defined as ‘core working-age’. These individuals are more likely to have completed school and less likely to have entered retirement than those in the 15 and over group. They will be the primary focus of the analysis in this report.

Comparability with the Census of Population

When developing the immigrant questions for the LFS, care was taken to ensure that immigrant concepts and variables arising from the questions would be comparable to the Census of Population. However, since the LFS is a sample survey, the estimates are subject to more sampling variability than the Census and could therefore differ from those that will be published by the 2006 Census.

Atlantic Provinces

Due to small sample sizes for employment and unemployment and their corresponding rates, immigrants living in the Atlantic Provinces have been aggregated for the sake of analysis. An exception to this was the discussion of the share of the provincial population who were landed immigrants to Canada, where a sufficiently large sample size permitted analysis for each of the Atlantic Provinces.