Is it time to rethink ‘visible minority’?
With inroads being made in workplaces, some experts believe the term is outdated
As Canadians prepare to celebrate the nation’s 147th birthday, newly released demographic data show how rapidly the complexion of our 35 million residents is changing — breathing new fire into the debate over whether the term “visible minority” ought to be dropped from the Canadian lexicon.
In 2011, the percentage of visible minorities was 19.1 per cent, according to Statistics Canada. By 2031, that number is expected to grow to 30.6 per cent, with South Asian and Chinese immigrants driving much of that growth. Vancouver and Toronto are expected to become “majority-minority” cities with three out of five people — 60 per cent — belonging to a visible minority group by then.
Compare that to 50 years ago, when the visible minority population was just two per cent and the majority of immigrants were from Europe.
“Personally, I have never liked the term ‘visible minority,’” said Frank Trovato, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta. “I doubt that most people belonging to these groups actually think of themselves as such. It may be that in the future, Canadians will simply do away with this concept.”
The official use of the term can be traced back at least as far as the 1980s, when federal lawmakers established the Employment Equity Act, which set out to remove barriers in the labour market for four “disadvantaged” groups: women, aboriginals, people with disabilities and visible minorities.
The act was a response to the recommendations of the 1984 Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, led by Justice Rosalie Abella, who wrote, “Ignoring differences and refusing to accommodate them is a denial of equal access and opportunity. It is discrimination. To reduce discrimination, we must create and maintain barrierfree environments so that individuals can have genuine access free from arbitrary obstructions to demonstrate and exercise fully their potential.”
On visible minorities, Abella wrote of the need to attack racism, which she described as “pervasive,” to provide language training for immigrants, to accommodate religious and cultural differences, and to find a better way to assess qualifications of those who did not attend school in Canada or who have no work experience in this country.
Three decades later, many of the gaps in workforce representation have narrowed and there are some visible minority groups that are doing just as well as their white counterparts, said Frances Woolley, an economics professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University who favours retiring the term “visible minority.”
“(The act) was written for another time ... when the workforce was majority male, when the population was overwhelmingly white,” Woolley said.
There are still some groups that are disadvantaged — such as African-Canadian men — but the legislation “lumps everybody together in this visible minority category when some people are doing just fine and other people aren’t,” she said.
Woolley recommends moving away from directing policies at specific groups and focusing instead on eliminat- ing the barriers to the labour market, such as lack of language training and lack of credential recognition, and improving hiring practices that benefit everybody.
Woolley isn’t alone in calling for the removal of the term “visible minority.” A United Nations committee in 2007 criticized the Canadian government for using the term, saying that it was racist to use “whiteness” as the standard that determines who belongs to a visible minority.
One of the defenders of the continued use of the term in the context of employment equity is Sen. Mobina Jaffer, chair of the Senate committee on human rights. While there has been progress over the last 30 years to remove barriers in the workplace, visible minorities continue to be under-represented, she said. According to the most recent data, visible minorities make up 12.6 per cent of the federal public service.
The lack of representation is particularly evident in the executive ranks, she said. “There has been quite a movement, but in the lower ranks. We still don’t have a deputy minister that is a visible minority. That says a lot,” she said. “If we believe in the concept that the federal service should be representative, we certainly aren’t.”
Andrew Jackson, a social justice professor at York University in Toronto and senior policy adviser to the Broadbent Institute, said he’s not crazy about the term “visible minority” — he prefers “racialized persons” — but agrees that the principles underlying employment equity are still relevant today.
“I think the underlying concept is that some people operate at a disadvantage in the job market, in society as a whole, because of their nonwhite racial status. I think that was true, is true, and it’s important to keep track of that,” he said.
“It doesn’t mean that every- body who is a visible minority status person is doing worse than everyone else. But, on average, there’s some difference.”
Asked this week if the term “visible minority” is an outdated one, a spokesman for Labour Minister Kellie Leitch said in an email: “The minister strongly supports the objectives of the Employment Equity Act — the protection of the rights of all workers and the fairness of Canadian workplaces.”