Ethnic minority belonging in a multilevel political community: the role of exclusionary experiences and welcoming provincial contexts in Canada

ABSTRACT

Numerous studies demonstrate that immigrant and ethnic minority populations’ sense of belonging to the political communities in which they reside depends in part on the welcoming context: the constellation of policies, discourses, identities and prevailing attitudes relating to ethnocultural diversity in those political communities. However, while these studies typically focus on national belonging, in multilevel political communities belonging may be expressed at the national and subnational levels. Relying on a survey of ethnic minority group members in Canada, this study compares national and subnational belonging in three provinces where subnational and national welcoming contexts are very similar, to one case, Quebec, where the subnational welcoming context is significantly different from the national one. The results show a distinctive set of dynamics in Quebec, where ethnic minorities who feel excluded are more likely than those in other provinces to hold the subnational community responsible for their exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• federalism
• migration
• national identity
• nationalism
• politics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors are grateful to Audrey Gagnon, Colin Scott and the reviewers for their helpful and thorough comments. The authors are solely responsible for the analysis and interpretation of the results.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For their part, Banting and Soroka (2012) conclude that ethnic minority group members in Quebec express weaker attachment to both the provincial and the Canadian political communities than ethnic minority group members elsewhere in Canada.

2 The sample of visible minorities is part of the Provincial Diversity Project. Respondents pre-identified as members of a visible minority group received an email invitation. Each invitation contained a unique invitation link (url) that could only be used once. Respondents were all members of an Internet panel of more than 400,000 people currently living in Canada who were recruited randomly over the phone (61%) or by various other means. The annual recruitment rate for the panel is approximately 15,000 new members a year, while about 10,000–12,000 panellists are removed from the panel or opt out each year. Panellists are rewarded for their participation over time with a series of financial incentives. No specific response rate can be calculated for an online survey because, unlike telephone surveys, it is not possible to evaluate whether people refused to participate or did not read or receive the invitation. The data are weighted so they are representative of the sociodemographic characteristics (sex, age, education, mother tongue and ethnicity) of each province, using the 2011 National Household Survey as the point of reference. The survey was offered in both English and French.

3 In 1986, the federal government of Canada formally introduced the category of ‘visible minorities’ as part of the Employment Equity Act to help document and address the systemic discrimination experienced by members of these communities (Public Service Commission of Canada, 2011).

4 Pearson's r correlation between the feeling of being accepted and the feeling of attachment is 0.43 for Canada and 0.50 for the province.

5 Cronbach's alpha for the discrimination scale is 0.86.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Insight Grant number 435-2015-1106].