Racial diversity in the 2011 federal election: visible minority candidates and MPs.

• Author: Black, Jerome H.
• Position: Members of Parliament - Report

The 2011 federal election was notable in many respects. The Liberal party won the fewest seats ever in its long history. The New Democratic Party elected its largest ever contingent of MPs enabling the party to form the official opposition for the first time. Another development was the first-ever direct election of a Green Party candidate. The election also produced record levels of gender and racial diversity within Parliament. When the votes were finally tallied, 76 women had won their way into the House of Commons, an increase of seven over the number elected in 2008. This article focuses on visible minority representation which also attained a high water mark in the 2011 election.

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Altogether, 28 visible minority MPs were elected in 2011, (1) or 9.1% of the chamber's membership of 308, a result that compares favourably with the 21 MPs elected in 2008 (6.8% of all MPs). Table 1 provides some broader context marshalling comparable information dating back to the 1993 election, when visible minority MPs were initially elected in noticeable numbers. Such a longitudinal perspective adds some weight to the significance of the 2011 outcome. Firstly, visible minority MP numbers have not always increased from one election to the next, and, indeed, across two election pairings, 1997-2000 and 2006-2008, they actually declined; thus, the improvement from 2008 to 2011 is noteworthy in and of itself. Secondly, the election of an additional seven visible minority MPs in 2011 deserves attention given the modest increments across some pairings, e.g., an increase of only two MPs from 2004 to 2006.

Another, more tempered perspective on the diversity-related impact of the 2011 election is possible: it did little to alter the fact that visible minorities remain significantly underrepresented in Parliament relative to their incidence in the general population. Table 1 also addresses this important vantage point by indicating (the ever increasing) visible minority population percentages and, as well, the result of their incorporation Into ratios with the MP percentages. As constructed, a ratio of one would indicate a visible minority presence in the House of Commons at a level that corresponds to their population share. A ratio of .5 would signal that representation is only one-half of what it "should be" given the population percentage. As can be seen, the 2011 ratio is close to this mark, at .48; (2) put differently, it would have taken the election of 59 visible minority MPs to completely eliminate the representation deficit. In addition, the gap did not diminish very much in 2011 compared to earlier elections. While it is less than it was in the 2008 election (with a ratio of .39), it is the same as the deficits for the 2004 and 2006 elections. Most strikingly, the ratio for 2011 is virtually the same as it was in 1993 (.47); six elections on, visible minority representation has not improved.

In short, visible minority representation following the 2011 election has both positive and negative aspects. Broad countervailing forces operate both to push the numbers upwards and to hold them down, so perhaps it is not surprising that change is more incremental than monumental. For instance, numbers may be boosted by heightened competition for the votes of new Canadians, most of whom are visible minorities; this leads parties to consider nominating more visible minorities as candidates. On the other hand, examples of status quo forces include incumbency effects and various forms of residual discrimination.

Visible Minority MPs and their Parties

It is clear that the NDP's unexpectedly strong performance, popularly characterized as an "orange wave," played the largest role in augmenting visible minority MP numbers. The party almost tripled its overall seat count relative to 2008 and in doing so elected 13 visible minority MPs, the most of any party. Table 1 translates this figure into a percentage: thus of the 28 visible minority MPs elected in 2011, 46.4% won as NDPers. Percentages are also shown for earlier elections and underscore how much of a departure the 2011 contest was for the NDP. In no previous election did the party manage to elect more than one visible minority MP. The Conservatives' performance --12 visible minority MPs elected--also contributed significantly to the overall total. In their case, however, the result continued a trend involving the party (and its various antecedent formations) increasing, almost monotonically, its percentage of all visible minority MPs; across the 1993-2008 period, their portion went from 7.7% to 38.1%. In 2011, the party reached a high point with a share of 42.9%.

Consideration of the Liberals and the BQ raises the question whether their poor performances in 2011 limited what otherwise would have been the election of an even greater number of visible minority MPs. At one level, the answer would seem to be an easy and obvious "yes." After all, the...