Why is it that so many journalists and writers have no clue how to verify demographic information? I was reading the new edition of the Rough Guide to Montreal the other day and it claimed that Montreal's Chinese population is 20,000. The NOW Guide to Toronto claims that Toronto has 300,000 Chinese people and 600,000 Italian people. I'm beginning to think they just make numbers up.
In reality, the 2001 census pegged the number of Chinese in Montreal at 52,000. Considering the high rate of immigration over the past few years and the fact that the census tends to undercount ethnic communities, the current number is probably around 75,000 or more.
(In Toronto, the Chinese and Italian populations were both about the same size in 2001: around 450,000. I have no idea how NOW came up with 600,000 for the Italian community.)
So where do all of these other numbers come from?