How do members of minorities survive in our democracy?

• Author: McKay-Panos, Linda
• Position: Feature on Democracy

Democracy may be defined as a "form of political organization in which citizens, together, equally share power." (British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Citizenship Teaching Module: "What is Democracy?" www.bccla.org/citizenship/lesson1.html). Democracy is based on the idea of majority rule, which would seem to mean that the country is governed based on the will of the majority. However, in our liberal democracy in Canada, individual citizens have rights, which can act as a check on the will of the majority. If the government ignores the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals, including those who are from minority groups, these individuals can rely on various protections in our laws in order to be heard.

Evelyn Kallen (Ethnicity and Human Rights in Canada, Oxford University Press, 2003) defines a minority as "[a]ny social category within a society:

1) that is set apart and defined by the majority as incompetent/inferior or abnormal/dangerous on the basis of assumed physical, cultural, and/or behavioural differences from majority norms;

2) whose members are categorically discriminated against by the majority on the basis of arbitrarily imposed, inferiorizing labels;

3) whose members are subject to some degree of oppression (denial of political rights), neglect (denial of economic rights), diminution (denial of social rights/human dignity), and/or deculturation (denial of cultural rights); and

4) that, as a consequence of the self-fulfilling prophesy of systemic discrimination, comes to occupy a socially subordinate, disadvantaged, and inferiorized position within the society."

Thus, if power is a critical aspect of democracy, how does it relate to being part of a minority? Being part of a minority does not necessarily mean counting the numbers of people in a group. One could be one of five persons with the same unique qualities in a group of one hundred persons and be part of the numeric minority. Nevertheless, political, economic, and social power are often more important in determining minority status than are pure numbers. If the five people who make up the numeric minority happen to possess more power than those who make up the larger group, they are not truly a minority. An example of a numeric minority possessing the power in a society could be demonstrated by the situation in South Africa where a white minority held political and economic power before Apartheid was vanquished in the 1990s.

In Canada, we have many people...