56,000 people in 1976, over 350,000 today
Markham
A 19th-century farming village named for an Archbishop of York became Canada's self-declared "high-tech capital" and one of its most ethnically diverse cities, largely within a single generation.
_Centre-ville_de_Markham_(Rougeside_Promenade)_(38469952964).jpg)
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Markham, in York Region north of Toronto, took its name from William Markham, Archbishop of York and a friend of Upper Canada's first Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe — a quiet 19th-century farming pedigree that gives no hint of what the town would become.
From village to Canada's high-tech capital
Markham branded itself "the high-tech capital of Canada," and the numbers back it up: more than 860 technology companies are based there, including Canadian operations of IBM, AMD, Toshiba, Motorola and American Express, with roughly 400 of those headquartered in the city itself — a remarkable concentration for a municipality that was still mostly farmland within living memory.
Explosive, sustained growth
Markham's population was just 56,000 in 1976. It reached 161,000 by 1995 and crossed 300,000 a decade after that — including a single year, 2006, when its 15.3% growth rate was roughly three times the national average, one of the fastest sustained expansions of any municipality in the country.
One of Canada's most diverse cities
That growth was disproportionately driven by immigration, especially from Hong Kong and mainland China starting in the late 1980s and 1990s. By the 2016 census, Chinese Canadians made up 45.1% of Markham's population and South Asian Canadians 17.8% — among the highest visible-minority majorities of any city in the country, and part of the same broader immigration story covered in our ethnic enclaves and multiculturalism guides.
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Sources
- The Canadian Encyclopedia — Markham
- The Globe and Mail — Markham's Rapid Change Into Canada's Most Diverse City
- Wikipedia — Markham, Ontario