More visible minorities ran and were elected in the spring federal election compared to the previous election, an increase that a new report found was driven by representation in parties on the right.
There were 315 visible minorities representing the six major parties, according to the report published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy. The candidates accounted for 20.1 per cent of the 1,568 candidates in the April 28 election. This was an increase from 18.2 per cent in 2021, 16.8 per cent in 2019 and 13.4 per cent in 2015.
While the Liberals, New Democrats and Greens all reported a drop in their visible minority representation from the 2021 race — by 0.9, 3.2 and 1.3 percentage points respectively — Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives and Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada saw their numbers up by 5.9 percentage points and seven points, with the Bloc Québécois up 1.3 points. (The People’s Party failed to win a seat.)
The report refers to “visible minorities” as persons, other than Indigenous people, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour, as defined by Statistics Canada.
“The Liberals almost seemed to have dropped the ball in terms of candidate recruitment compared to the Conservatives, who obviously were making a fairly concerted effort to recruit a larger number of visible minority candidates,” said Andrew Griffith, who co-authored the report with retired McGill University political science professor Jerome Black.
“They were still building off the Jason Kenney legacy that visible minorities are our natural conservatives,” added Griffith, referring to the former Conservative immigration minister tasked with building bridges with minority communities under the Harper government.
And the deliberate recruitment efforts seemed to yield results, with the proportion of elected visible minority MPs up by 2.4 percentage points, accounting for 17.8 per cent or 61 of the 343 MPs in the new Parliament.
While the number of Liberal MPs who are visible minorities fell by 2.2 percentage points, the Conservatives boosted their visible minority MPs in the House of Commons by 7.5 percentage points.
The MP breakdown, by ethnicity, was South Asian, 29 seats, Black, 11 seats; Chinese and Arab/West Asian, both seven; Latin American, two; Filipino and Southeast Asian, each with one; and three listed under “other/multiple” backgrounds.
University of Toronto professor Emine Fidan Elcioglu said she was not surprised by the shift as the Conservatives rebranded the party under prime minister Stephen Harper to cultivate support from ethnic communities.
“They wanted to seem like the new party of diversity, so they were very intentional in their ethnic outreach,” said the sociologist, who studies migration politics.
“They were (previously) pushing forward policies that alienated immigrant visible minority communities. They were also reframing themselves as pro-good immigrant, anti-bad immigrant.”
Over the years, she said, visible minority groups have also started to embrace that thinking as shown in recent public debates about the impacts of immigration on the housing and affordability crisis.
Poilievre is “very much looking at these groups as a potential part of his base,” Elcioglu noted. “But I think we need to be really careful to not assume that just because there is more visible minority candidates in the party, that is necessarily going to be fundamental in voter motivation.”
Having more racialized candidates doesn’t necessarily translate to more inclusion, she said, and it could just be a cover for more stringent immigration policies, more austerity measures and more gutting of the social security safety net that affect the society’s most marginalized and vulnerable.
“So, great, you recruit people who are not white men, but what are you doing with that?” asked Elcioglu.
The report also found the number of women running in the April election down from the 2021 election by 2.4 per cent to 553, and Indigenous candidates by 0.9 per cent to 48. In total, 104 women and 12 Indigenous people were elected.
“It seems like there’s almost a glass ceiling of about 30 per cent for women,” said Griffith. “For Indigenous MPs, it’s a bit different just because of how the population is distributed across the country, but that also has stalled.”
Candidate profiles and assessments in the analysis are based upon candidate photos, names and biographies, general web searches, and ethnic and other media that focused on particular groups.
