Ethnoracial minorities in the House of Commons.

• Author: Black, Jerome H.

The 35th Parliament (1993-1997) was the first to be subjected to a new methodological approach designed to assess the ethnoracial origins of MPs. In a country that is multicultural both in fact and its official commitment, the reliable classification of origins is a key requisite for an effective understanding of the degree to which Canada's mainstream institutions, including its political structures, reflect the diversity of the country's population. The specific methodology developed to accomplish this task is eclectic in nature as it employs biographical information, last name analysis (aided by surname dictionaries), and, importantly, survey responses directly provided by federal legislators themselves. This article applies that same methodolgy to the present Parliament.

The 35th Parliament was a particularly appropriate choice for initiating this measurement approach because the 1993 election heralded an unprecedented increase, indeed almost a surge, in the election of MPs of minority (i.e., nonBritish, nonFrench) background.(1) Altogether, 71 such individuals or 24.1% of the House's membership had minority origins,(2) (while a further 27 had mixed majority-minority ancestry). Not only did traditional ethnic groups of European descent attain a record presence but visible minorities nearly tripled their numbers from the previous election, growing from five to 13. However, the figure still represented only 4.4% of the House's membership compared to an estimated population share of 9.4%, suggesting that visible minorities had not even reached the half-way point in numerical representation (i.e. a "proportionality" index of .47). The same methods applied to the Parliament produced by the 1997 election revealed further progress for ethnoracial minorities, though the augmentation was of a very modest nature.(3) Altogether, minorities came to hold 24.9% of the slightly expanded Commons in the 36th Parliament. For their part, 19 visible minorities were elected that year, a figure that translates into 6.3% of the membership, a percentage still far removed from the 1996 census population estimate of 11.2%.

The November 2000 general election provides an opportunity to extend this investigation further. The section that follows presents the results for the 37th Parliament and, for comparative purposes, juxtaposes the two earlier findings. The subsequent section investigates some of the main characteristics displayed by minority MPs in order to make inferences about their heterogeneity with regard to gender, party affiliation, and region of representation and, as well, their educational and occupational achievements. To do so, the MPs are pooled across the three elections, yielding a working data base of 446 legislators elected in one or more of the last three general elections. This assemblage boosts the number of cases for the various minority categories examined and thereby provides for more reliable inferences about the patterns observed.

Diversity in the House of Commons, 1993-2000

The low level of turnover of MPs from 1997 to 2000 effectively meant that there were few MPs whose ethnoracial origins had not already been established in the prior two elections. Indeed, 247 of the 301 incumbents were reelected and of the 54 new MPs, two had been in the 1993 Parliament. This meant that the ancestry of only 52 Parliamentarians, newly victorious in 2000, needed to be ascertained. Since MPs' first-hand responses are judged to provide the best information on origins, the survey method (by fax) was given the strongest emphasis. An intensive follow-up programme to encourage participation, characterized by repeated telephone contacts (at both Ottawa and constituency offices), turned out to be quite successful, producing a response rate of 75% (39 replies). The ancestral backgrounds of the remaining 13 MPs were reckoned on the basis of biographical material and last name analysis. Validity checks for the two earlier studies have previously indicated that these more "indirect" methods are effective in...