The following is a chapter excerpt from the Aristotle Foundation’s new book, The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished—Not Cancelled. Purchase your copy here.
It is accepted as fact in many quarters that Canada is a systemically or institutionally racist country. The federal government’s Department of Canadian Heritage, for example, posits in its 2019-2022 anti-racism strategy that “we know that even today there are people and communities who experience systemic racism and discrimination.” Likewise, the federal government echoes in its 2021-2024 anti-racism strategy the Prime Minister’s assertion that there are in Canada “profound systemic inequities and disparities that remain present in the core fabric of our society, including our core institutions.”
The evidence does not bear this claim out.
To be sure, if the question is only as to whether personal prejudice or racism exists in Canadian institutions, then the answer is that there is some. Institutions are made of people, and as long as some people hold some prejudices (some always will) and reveal and act upon them (hopefully rarely), there will be racism in institutions.
However, the personal prejudices of people within institutions does not constitute institutional racism in the classical sense, in which the rules or policies of the institution are discriminatory. Historical examples of real institutional racism include colleges and universities in decades past limiting the proportion of Jewish students on campus, or the minimum wage law implemented in British Columbia nearly a century ago, which had, as Thomas Sowell has written, “the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.”
But if the typical anti-racism activist today is looking for widespread institutional or systemic discrimination of the kind that existed before the mid-twentieth century, which was directed at minorities or women, they simply will not find it.
Ironically, the most socially accepted and likely most common form of institutional racism today is the discrimination practiced in the name of social justice or anti-racism.
In 2016, the University of Manitoba Senate approved a new admission policy for the Bachelor of Education Program in which only 55 per cent of admissions would be based on admissions scores, and 45 per cent on “diversity” categories that included racial preferences. Today, the federal regulator requires the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to apply racial preferences by dedicating a certain percentage of its programming spending to producers from minority backgrounds.
Such examples show that in Canada there are still institutional policies that outright discriminate based on race. Yet such examples clearly do not fit the governmental definition of systemic or institutional racism, in which “racialized persons” are put at relative disadvantage.
What the statistics show—and what they do not
Accusations of systemic racism in Canada are often made by pointing to disparities in labour market outcomes. However, a top-line look at the statistics does not support such accusations. Using data from the 2016 Census on the weekly earnings of Canadian-born individuals, a pair of Statistics Canada researchers compared the weekly earnings of 10 visible minority groups to those of the white population.
Among men four had higher earnings than the white population (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and South Asian), and among women seven had higher earnings than the white population (Korean, Chinese, South Asian, Japanese, Filipino, “Other,” and Arab or West Asian).
The white cohort therefore finds itself somewhere in the middle of the pack, so the evidence in favour of the theory that Canada’s institutions are rigged to disfavour visible minorities is indeed slight.
Of course, the raw data alone may not mean much. It could be that, for example, Chinese men must be 25 per cent more productive than white men to earn three per cent more, and that black women earn 10 per cent less than white women despite being equally productive. In other words, an apples-to-apples comparison requires controlling for education, occupation, and other factors that affect earnings.
Importantly, the Statistics Canada report does attempt to control for such factors, again with results that dispel the notion that white Canadians have an unfair advantage over minorities. Segmenting the minority population into 10 racial groups and the two sexes yields 20 minority groups that can be compared against their white counterparts.
Of these, five minority groups have earnings statistically higher than the white population after controlling for employment and sociodemographic factors (South Asian men, Chinese women, South Asian women, Filipino women, and Southeast Asian women), while only four (men from the Black, Latin American, Filipino, and “Other” racial backgrounds) have lower earnings, with the other 11 groups showing no statistically significant difference from whites.
In other words, according to the Statistics Canada data, although the Korean and Japanese populations enjoy far higher weekly earnings than the white population, this is accounted for by differences in sociodemographic and employment characteristics (and thus we cannot infer from statistics that there is any discrimination that favours Koreans or the Japanese). Among the Chinese, however, relatively high earnings are explained by the sociodemographic and employment characteristics present among men, but not among women.
Thus, if we were to attribute to unfair discrimination earnings disparities not explained by the Statistics Canada’s researchers’ attempts to control for sociodemographic and employment characteristics, we would have to conclude that labour market discrimination favours Chinese women, but not Chinese men, and not Korean or Japanese women. We would likewise have to conclude that labour market discrimination favours Filipino women relative to white women, but white men relative to Filipino men. Moreover, the discrimination faced by Latin American and black workers singularly affects only men and not women.
If this does not make any sense—which one must admit that it does not—then it must be allowed that unfair discrimination is a poor explanation for racial disparities in earnings.
Clearly, caution is needed when trying to draw inferences from statistics. It cannot be that disparities, even after researchers try to control for relevant factors (such as education, profession, and so on), can simply be put down to unfair discrimination. Other factors are always at play, and the reality is that the number of factors that affect earnings are innumerable and many of the material ones—such as individual preferences and family culture—are difficult or impossible for researchers to observe or measure.
Invariably, researchers cannot control for everything and so many find through statistical inference disparities that cannot be explained by the factors controlled for. There is no reason to suppose that the explanatory factor is unfair discrimination. Other possible explanations exist, and many are more plausible. Assigning to discrimination differences in income (even after controlling for sociodemographic and employment characteristics) leads to conclusions that simply make no sense.
A coherent story of Canada as a systemically racist country simply cannot be formed by statistical analysis and direct evidence. That does not mean that no personal prejudice or racism exists in Canadian institutions. It is only to say that the portrait of Canada as a systemically racist country painted by some is not supported by evidence.
Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer and a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. This chapter excerpt is from the Aristotle Foundation’s new book, The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished—Not Cancelled, edited by Mark Milke. Purchase your copy here.
