Mexican Canadians are Canadian citizens of Mexican origin, either through birth or ethnicity, who reside in Canada. According to the National Household Survey in 2011, 96,055 Canadians indicated that they were of full or partial Mexican ancestry. those born in Mexico are the largest subgroup of Latin American Canadians. The Mexico-origin population in Canada is small despite Canada's proximity to Mexico and especially when compared to the United States where as of July 2014 there were 35,320,579 Mexican Americans comprising 11.1% of the population. Mexico-related Canadians trace their origins to Mexico, a country located in North America, bounded south from the UnitedStates. Some originate ethnically from many European countries, especially Spain, its colonial ruler for over three centuries.
Most Mexican-Canadian settlement concentrations are found in Canada's metropolitan areas, with the highest concentrations in Greater Toronto and Quebec, also in other provinces of Canada such as British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba. Some Canadians of Texan ancestry are in Alberta, dating a presence since the first oil industry booms in the 1930s. While approximately 5,000 people of Mexico origins enter Canada each year as temporary students or contract workers for agriculture, these are not counted as immigrants because of their explicitly temporary legal status. Unlike the United States’ Bracero program, the temporary-worker program in Canada has various mechanisms to discourage workers from overstaying their permits. Migrant workers from Mexico are prevalent in Leamington, Ontario's cucumber and tomato harvesting industry. Leamington has one of the largest Mexico-born communities in Canada. There are 2,700 Mexican immigrants living in Leamington, as of 2011. In the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Mexico-born labourers are employed in the wine and orchard industries. Kelowna has a sizeable community of Mexico-born. In the summer of 2016, about 2,000 of Mexico-origin labourers were working on Okanagan Valley farms.
