Canada’s Mosaic
Interactive atlas of the 2021 Census, in English and French. The Visual Thinking Company, 2026.
Canada’s Mosaic shows, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, where the people of Canada say their families come from. Each of 55,499 areas takes its colour from the mix of origins its residents reported, so a mixed place looks mixed. Nothing is flattened into a single answer, and where there is no answer, the map says so rather than guessing.
“I remember learning in second grade that Canada was a mosaic. It was one of those ideas you hear when you’re young and somehow keep carrying with you: different histories can live beside one another without disappearing into one another. When I came across this census data, I realized you could actually see that idea at the scale of everyday life. Millions of people had described something about where they came from. I wanted to take that record seriously enough to make it visible, carefully and beautifully. Canada’s Mosaic is my attempt to show the country back to itself.”
Start with where you live. Forty-seven stories open other ways in, and every figure is drawn from the census and checked again before it is published.