Abstract: "Research on immigrant integration often focuses on attachment to and identification with the host country as indicators of successful integration. Although very helpful, such a way of conceiving immigrant integration puts a strong emphasis on the role of immigrants in the process of integration. The burden of integration implicitly rests on immigrants’ shoulders. This paper proposes another perspective to examine immigrant integration. Rather than looking at immigrant identification and attachment with the host country, it proposes to examines whether immigrant feel accepted by the host country, putting the emphasis on how immigrants perceive the host country’s openness to their presence and acknowledgement of their contribution. The paper proposes to examine the feeling of being accepted among new Canadians in four provinces, namely Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia using data from the Provincial Diversity Project. The paper examines levels of feeling accepted, the factors structuring immigrants’ feeling of being accepted (discrimination, economic integration, social integration, and province of residence), as well as the implications for political integration. The Provincial Diversity Project provides a sample of 400 respondents in each of the four provinces examines (total sample size = 1600) of first and second-generation visible minority Canadians, and allows examining the feeling of being accepted by both Canada and the province of residence."

Abstract: Pierre Trudeau’s vision of Canada’s cultural policy was situated within a bilingual framework. Canada, so conceived, has “no official culture” and two official languages. Over forty years later, debate persists regarding the effects of that policy combination on relations between Canada’s “two founding nations” (Kymlicka 1998; McRoberts 1996). Empirical, survey-based research on Canadian multiculturalism has become increasingly abundant of late (Banting et al. 2006; Bilodeau et al. 2010; Johnston and Soroka 2001). Canadians’ attitudes towards official bilingualism, by contrast, have received considerably less attention. This paper explores Canadians’ attitudes towards federal language policy, using a combination of data from the Canadian Election Studies (2003-2011), Vote Compass (2011) and the Centre for Research and Information on Canada’s Survey on Official Languages (2003) to probe the dynamics of public attitudes toward federal language policy in Canada. In particular, we explore whether and to what extent the English-French composition of constituency, regionalism, and nationalism have independent effects on Canadians’ attitudes toward federal language policy.

Paper / Communication