It is erroneously believed by some that the original U.S. constitution had a clause decreeing that a black man was "worth" only 60% of a white man. The three-fifths compromise, rather, was a mechanism for determining how slaves (not blacks, though in the 1770s only 8% of the black population were 'free', so there was little difference) should be counted in determining how many representatives each state received in the House.
Canada's electoral system, however, does inadvertently make the votes from voters of some races worth less than others.
Using data from Pundits Guide, I considered 3 groups that have the long-form census monikers of 'Black', 'Chinese' and 'West Asian'. As a crude measure, I looked for ridings where one of the groups made up a significant portion of the population.
- There are 13 ridings where 10% of the population is "Black"
- There are 13 ridings where 20% of the population is "Chinese"
- There are 13 ridings where 20% of the population is "West Asian"
The 13 figure was a coincidence, but a happy one. For each group, I examined the average population, measured in 2006, of the 13 ridings vs. the population of the 295 ridings that did not meet the cut-off. Here are the results.
"Black" Ridings
- Avg. Population of a "Black" Ridings: 119,772
- Avg. Population of a "Non-Black" Ridings: 101,884
- Value of a Vote in a "Black" Riding vs. a "Non-Black" Riding: 90%
"Chinese" Ridings
- Avg. Population of a "Chinese" Riding: 123,320
- Avg. Population of a "Non-Chinese" Riding: 101,728
- Value of a Vote in a "Chinese" Riding vs. a "Non-Chinese" Riding: 82%
"West Asian" Ridings
- Avg. Population of a "West Asian" Riding: 127,521
- Avg. Population of a "Non-West Asian" Riding: 101,543
- Value of a Vote in a "West Asian" Riding vs. a "Non-West Asian" Riding: 80%
These are admittedly crude measures – a more accurate measure of the worth of a "Black Vote" rather than "The Vote of Someone Living in a Black Riding" may yield slightly different results. I believe these figures understate the problem, as the population measures are from 2006, and it is safe to say the population of these ridings is growing faster than the Canadian average.
Measures by the Conservatives to add more seats to B.C., Alberta and Ontario would reduce but not eliminate the disparity, as some provinces will still be over-represented in Parliament (none of the ridings for the 3 groups are in PEI), and rural ridings are made to have smaller populations than urban ones (all the ridings for our 3 groups are urban). As well, there is talk of giving Quebec more seats; none of the "West Asian" or "Chinese" ridings are in Quebec, though some "Black" ridings are.
Updated to Add
I figured out how to navigate Pundits Guide a bit better, so I was able to collect more data to make a more robust determination.
I wanted to determine how many MPs different groups were electing, versus how many they actually were. If a riding was 1/8th "Chinese", they can be thought of as electing 1/8th of an MP. Visually think of it as if each ethnic group were it's own province. How many ridings does that province get now, and how many does it get by rep-by-pop. Not surprisingly, the results are quite similar to above.
I'll add other census groups in the next couple of days.
My question to you is: Given the other tensions the electoral system needs to consider, how much under-representation is acceptable? Is it acceptable for the vote from a "West Asian" be worth 95% of an average Canadian? 90%? 80%? 70%? Where is the cut-off?
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
I’m curious about the impact of voter turnout on these figures. If voter turnout is significantly higher or lower than the non-cut-off ridings, that should change how much each vote was “worth” in that particular election.
Attempting to link a couple of the many electoral inequalities to racism is idiotic.
That’s not how I read the post, Robert. Presumably the effects on race are simply a by-product of the delay in adjusting ridings to population. People disagree on whether it is correct to call such by-product effects “racist”. But this is done.
Mike, if you ever wondered what the hidden agenda behind the elimination of the long-form census was – wonder no longer. It will be impossible to do this kind of analysis with the new national household survey, because there is no way for correcting for differential response rates across ethnic groups.
The phenomenon you describe is basically a product of underrepresentation of cities, especially rapidly growing cities, and the concentration of said ethnic groups in those cities.
Aboriginal voters are probably overrepresented, by these same criteria.
The traditional argument has always been “you can’t equalize number of voters per riding between urban and rural seats because then the rural seats would cover such a huge land area that effective representation would be impossible.” How would you respond to that?
This is really just an application of the urban/rural split, which should be done away with. And I’m not sure, but it looks to me like these minority-heavy ridings might actually be better represented than the average urban riding.
In a time when you might have to ride a horse for multiple days to visit your MP, keeping a riding physically small might have had some merit. But in an age where you can pick up the phone or send an email, there’s no reason for it.
Nick, he explicitly calls it institutional racism, “…how much instutional racism is acceptable?”
There must be some legal recourse to fight this injustice, right? Please?
A Charter ruling or something? Anyone?
Mike, you should measure your words when talking about racism. I take exception with your simplistic characterization of the option of giving Quebec more seats as deepening “racism”. Politics is more complex than this and so are electoral systems.
Just watch “John A.” and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about.
It seems to be a little known feature of the U.S. system that, at one point, the U.S. Supreme Court said all districts had to have equal populations, some time in the ’60s, I think. Some states (no prizes for guessing which ones) threatened secession over it, but it’s now an accepted part of the system.
Perhaps something similar is needed for Canada, to get rid of the “ruralist” bias that produces this racial inequity. It does seem a bit provocative to call it racism, though.
Institutional racism exists, even if it is inadvertent. As I mention here: “Given the other tensions the electoral system needs to consider”, I don’t think full equality is necessary. But how far is too far? Does anyone want to tackle that question?
“The traditional argument has always been “you can’t equalize number of voters per riding between urban and rural seats because then the rural seats would cover such a huge land area that effective representation would be impossible.” How would you respond to that?”
Get rid of “one member one vote”. If you represent half as many people, your vote should be worth half as much.
Definition of institutional racism:
“Institutional racism describes any kind of system of inequality based on race. It can occur in institutions such as public government bodies, private business corporations (such as media outlets), and universities (public and private). The term was coined by Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s.[1] The definition given by William Macpherson within the report looking into the death of Stephen Lawrence was “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin”.1”
The phenomenon I describe in this post certainly fits.
Or this:
Definition: The term “institutional racism” describes societal patterns that have the net effect of imposing oppressive or otherwise negative conditions against identifiable groups on the basis of race or ethnicity.
The term was coined by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) at some point during the late 1960s.
Carmichael felt that it was important to distinguish personal bias, which has specific effects and can be identified and corrected relatively easily, with institutional bias, which is generally long-term and grounded more in inertia than in intent.
(Emphasis added)
This has been previously documented in Sujit Choudhry’s work; see for example http://www.irpp.org/choices/archive/vol13no1.pdf or http://www.scribd.com/doc/20191510/2007-report-on-vote-distribution
Mike, i don’t think any of your quotes undermine what I said. Injustice, short or long term, is in the eye of the beholder.
Any of you who seriously think this is not a social injustice are completely deluded and lack moral courage.
It’s not enough to chalk it up to complex politics and/or electoral systems. Give me a break.
Mike “Get rid of “one member one vote”. If you represent half as many people, your vote should be worth half as much.”
Given your Green politics, I guessed that was where you were going with this.
Proportional representation means that coalitions form post-election, rather than pre-election. And that can lead to small groups having grossly disproportionate say in policy choices also (see, e.g., Israel). Also it influences who ends up running for, and getting elected to, office. Though some Green-ites I know figure the Irish model is a good one.
This topic on racism entice me to experiment with your methodology on the 14 ridings where 20% or more of the population is “aboriginal”. I believe that the discussion would be quite different…
You don’t need PR. I meant literally that the member for Brampton West gets 1.7 votes because he/she represents 1.7 times as many people than the average.
Frances, forget about proportional representation a la popular vote. That has its cons as you say, for sure.
Insisting ridings have equal populations has nothing to do with that.
Your definition of institutional racism is irrelevant, Mike. You’ve failed utterly to make the case that it exists. Just to begin with, where is your control group?
RE: Aboriginal. I’m kind of curious about the numbers myself – I think I’ll calculate them.
Robert: You’d expect that the numbers would be “1” if it did not exist. But you don’t like those numbers? I’ll post more.
Great news! An marginal inequality of outcomes does not automagically prove racism! I know, I know, you’re a blogger and merely inviting commentary by using torqued up language; still, it’s a bit much.
I would have gone: “While Canada’s electoral system obviously does not intentionally under-represent some groups, it unfortunately has that effect to a marginal degree.” Racism is a big, big, grownup word, not to be casually tossed around like a frisbee, especially by an esteemed and accomplished academic such as yourself.
This, especially: “how much instutional racism is acceptable?” just reeks of flamebait. If you want to see some explicitly and intentionally racial gerrymandering then look to the USA, where the courts have forced legislatures to create “minority majority” districts so the votes of minorities aren’t diluted by the majority (among other reasons); see for example en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#United_States and especially en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
It should also be noted for context that quite a few countries simply do not let immigrants (at least those who retain dual citizenship) vote: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote
I agree that this effect is a consequence of the bias toward rural over-representation. This problem should be fixed, but I don’t believe it is a racial issue.
Start off with the QC riding of Montcalm, Mike. It’s what you’d call a white riding and has a pop of 122k. Add 12 similar ridings to the dataset and you’d find the same sort of “institutional racism” against white people. The point is, you could pluck 13 ridings out the list that make a similar case for discrimination against any group identified on the census.
“Start off with the QC riding of Montcalm, Mike. It’s what you’d call a white riding and has a pop of 122k. Add 12 similar ridings to the dataset and you’d find the same sort of “institutional racism” against white people. The point is, you could pluck 13 ridings out the list that make a similar case for discrimination against any group identified on the census.”
Except that’s not what I did, Robert. I picked the Top 13 ridings based on percentage. I didn’t cherry pick ridings.
Posting more data now.
There.. a more robust measure added, which shows pretty similar results.
Concur with those who say this has nothing to do with institutional racism – even (or especially) according to the definitions you cite (e.g. “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin”). A poll tax would be an example because it was intended to take advantage of black people being poor.
This is merely a statistical relationship that, while it is real, is not institutional racism. Each individual is equal to another (by race anyway). If urban ridings were gerrymandered to group visible minorities into larger ridings than urban whites, you’d have a case. But just saying that statistically, ridings that have more minorities have larger populations doesn’t prove anything. You could play that game indefinitely unless all ridings have same #. Inequity and racism/discrimination not same thing.
Of course, in a FPP system, a large fraction of the pop’s votes have no effect in any case – but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
Bigger question: what does this have to with economics???
Before anyone else starts shouting about “moral courage” and other cheap shame-based rhetoric, I would like to suggest that this is no big deal.
Measuring (or opining on) justice in a country by measuring seat allocations based on racial compositions seems useless. To accept the urgency of this is to assume that everyone votes, that everyone who votes is reasonably well-informed, that politicians represent themselves accurately and should be expected to implement all policies, and that the policies are developed in good faith. Where is the evidence of this?
When a party wins an election, it is not a public victory. It is a private victory for a private organization, its members, and its financial supporters and political allies. What is the Solyndra scandal? How did Doug Finley end up in the Senate? As for the relationship between electoral rhetoric and political outcomes, go to Berkeley or Chicago and ask all those Obama supporters how they got to be such backers of corporate welfare, war in Libya and Afghanistan, tax breaks for the rich, and subsidies for private health insurance companies.
So there are politics about seat distribution–big deal. Whether it is institutional racism or not seems immaterial to me. I (who am technically “Chinese”) haven’t voted for 11 years and the world of government doesn’t look too different. What I see is people taking money from people and handing it over to their friends, and a dearth of good policy whatever the party.
Mike, I do not mean to mock your post–I appreciate that you would want to shed light on these kinds of institutional issues, and I always read your posts with interest. However, I feel strongly that this is a minor outcome. Ethnic minorities would be best served by living in a country where their safety and basic rights were secure (and they mostly are), rather than additionally living in a country where all kinds of groups were contesting for disproportionate power over others.
“If urban ridings were gerrymandered to group visible minorities into larger ridings than urban whites, you’d have a case.”
Institutional racism does not have to be intentional to exist.
For those of you saying “this isn’t a problem” – how large does the disparity get before it becomes a problem? Curious that no one has tackled that issue.
“Aboriginal” Ridings
Avg. Population of a “Black” Ridings: 64,542
Avg. Population of a “Non-Black” Ridings: 103,322
Value of a Vote in a “Aboriginal” Riding vs. a “Non-Aboriginal” Riding: 160%
Somewhat a problem of “too much geography, and too little history…”
Messed up the Copy/paste…
“Aboriginal” Ridings
Avg. Population of a “Aboriginal” Ridings: 64,542
Avg. Population of a “Non-Aboriginal” Ridings: 103,322
Value of a Vote in a “Aboriginal” Riding vs. a “Non-Aboriginal” Riding: 160%
Somewhat a problem of “too much geography, and too little history…”
I’ll start by answering my own question – A vote value of under 95% should be worrying and anything under 90% should be unacceptable in a free and democratic society.
I see that you have already corrected your “West Asian” to “South Asian”. I was going to point that out.
I would like to point out that some ridings cross over in your samples. Scarborough – Rouge River, for example, shows up in all three. It’s the riding with the highest rate of visible minorities in Canada.
Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to calculate based on visible minority status?
Third, why are you calculating based on population rather than electors? Wouldn’t that make more sense, since you are counting votes?
I agree that is post is flamebait that isn’t designed to elevate the discussion, and thus unworthy of WCI. I won’t get into another flamewar here, the last one didn’t end well. And I certainly won’t answer to anybody saying that I “lack moral courage”.
All I want to say is that there are a number of historic reasons why we have a suboptimal electoral system, and you just can’t calculate them away. Urban under-representation is one of the problems, and it might account for a large share of Mike’s “institutional racism” (but maybe not all). Had the Charlottetown accord been accepted, Quebec would be entitled to a quarter of the seats (its share has already fallen below that). I don’t know about the situation of aboriginals, but I wouldn’t be surprised their share is not exactly equal to their weight.
Now is it fair? Perhaps there is a better way, but you’ll have to be more convincing and careful to win me over.
This is a well understood problem within the fair voting community. Mike has the effects nailed.
It is hard to solve with First Past The Post (FPTP). Pace Neil, the northern ridings have much worse infrastructure than southern ones, lack of telephones, let alone internet.
Proportional representation does address this issue. With a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system northern ridings could be smaller but the region would have fewer regional seats.
Israel has political problems because it is Israel, not because it has proportional representation. A much better comparison is New Zealand, which converted from FPTP to MMP and is far happier as a result.
@Frances in what way does PR negatively affect who runs?
@Sina If you don’t like this effect and you don’t like PR how do you propose to fix it?
Marion: Good catch! I used the West Asian census definition for the first one, and the South Asian one for the update. Hadn’t realized I had done so. Will update again and use both in update.
As per final question: Data availability.
I was using “Institutional Racism” in the sense that it’s used in the social sciences. It’s a term in the literature. But I see it’s making people uncomfortable, which was not at all my intent. Will change to something else – any suggestions?
It’s not intentional racism; it’s a byproduct of the fact that immigrants largely choose to settle in big cities and the fact that we guarantee seats to smaller provinces out of proportion to their population.
We have the Senatorial Clause (1915) that means a province must have at least one more Commons seat than it does Senators, and the Grandfather Clause (1985 that means no province can have fewer seats in total than it did in the 33rd Parliament in 1976.
If we had pure rep-by-pop Prince Edward Island would only have one seat.
The root problem is Canada has always been unbalanced in terms of population since Ontario is so big and Quebec is not far behind. We might try to work something out with the Senate but we can’t agree on that.
Further in a Westminster system with the Confidence Convention it is disastrous for the Upper House to block to Lower House for any extended period of time or for a money bill. When the Senate blocked th eGST in 1990 Mulroney had to activate Section 24 of the Constitution Act, 1867. This allows the government to appoint eight extra senators. It can only be done by the Sovereign directly, it is the one thing the Governor General can’t do. Mulroney had to call the Queen at Balmoral to do it.
In Britain the the Lords block the Commons in 1910 over the budget it led to the Parliament Act, 1911 which gutted the Lords veto. In Australia in 1975 when their Senate blocked supply it led to the dismissal of the Whitlam government.
We aren’t the United States. A Senate blockade of the House always leads to fireworks in Westminster systems.
And Guillaumne is right that John A., which I saw last night is a terrific movie. But the old Province of Canada was utterly dysfunctional and the new Government of Canada, Ontario and Quebec all moved to pure rep-by-pop after Confederation.
Marion: “Third, why are you calculating based on population rather than electors? Wouldn’t that make more sense, since you are counting votes?”
Hmmm. That is a good point. Even accepting Mike’s response about data. If vismin is correlated strongly enough with either: percentage of population who are under 18; percentage of population who are not citizens, it might mean there’s no effect.
I’m dredging my memory, but I think the Star published a long piece on this. The effect is real.
I’m curious too how controlling for those things would change the figures. Not enough of a data ninja to be able to implement those controls.
And yeah, I agree with Determinant. I would not make any kind of claim of intent.
It’s difficult to maintain a positive “thought experiment” without getting into the normative when words like “racism” are so full of history. I’d use under-representation, as was used in the article “Visible Minorities and Under-Representation: The Views of Candidates” published in Dec. 2006 in Electoral Insight (elections.ca)
That doesn’t mean that any statistical relationship that shows any disparity between ethnic groups is institutional racism. Think about it: if you can find a statistic showing that vis min have lower voter turnout than whites (which prob is the case), does that mean our system of voting for leaders is institutional racism? In fact, I think that a non-mandatory voting system does impact different groups differently – but it’s not institutional racism.
No one has tackled it because there’s no prospect of the problem increasing substantially – at worst, it would reflect the urban/rural numbers. But in any case, using it as an argument for anything other than changing distribution of urban/rural seats would be pointless.
Pierre-Yves. I like that – will make the change. Next we’ll have to convince the sociologists to change their terminology.
Neil raises an interesting point, I’d expect that the “minority” ridings (at least for the three minority groups you discuss) would also have a higher proportion of non-citizens than average (they are, after all, generally the fastest growing ridings and at least some of that growth comes from immigration). Since non-citizens don’t get a vote, it may well be that the votes of citizens in those ridings are not as discounted as you might suggest.
For example of the 13 “Chinese” ridings, in all but one non-citizens make up more than 10% of the population (and in 7, they make up more than 15% – Scarborough-Agincourt has the highest percentage of non-residents in this group at 20.5%). In contrast, in the median Canadian riding “non-citizen” would only make up 3.1% of the population Moreover, just a casual glance at the list of ridings with large proportions of non-citizens suggests that they would include a number of the “South Asian” or “Black” ridings as well. On a voter-by-voter basis, arguably these ridings aren’t under-represented (or aren’t as under-represented).
Mind you, Canada’s always had representation by population, not voter (although I know people from Quebec have broken out this argument recently as an excuse for getting more seats in the house). On the other hand, to the extent that an “under-represented” riding includes a large proportion of non-citizens, that does make me less sympathetic to the claims about under-representation. Ironically, that’s a claim that parrots the arguments of the US Southern states for getting representation based on their total populations including the non-voting slave population (and, I suppose, for both north and south, the non-voting male and female populations, though presumably those would generally cancel out). Certainly, in that extreme case, it’s easy to see why the argument is unsympathetic (why should people who can’t vote be counted towards the representation of the people – and in the case of post-revolutionary US, the decided minority – who do?).
And, in practice, because we’ve always been a bit slow to change our riding boundaries and numbers of seats, we’ve probably defacto controlled for non-voters, by having a lag between when the population increases, and when the ridings are changed or added (i.e., to give time for new arrivals to become citizens. Although I doubt that has been a conscious objective, it may well have been the ultimate result.
Interesting discussion, and many thanks to Yves, Guillaume and Determinant for their words.
Since a few have pointed out the attraction of urban settings to immigrants (and this is about all Vis Min, not just new arrivals), I would suggest an alternate view. Personally, it doesn’t worry me. But I would further add that the decisive and well-known benefits of urban habitation for minorities vastly outweigh the murky and very speculative “harm” some might infer from electoral under-representation. If disproportionately high representation of rural areas is politically unavoidable, then it seems like an excellent trade-off to me.
@Guillaume: Yes, let’s de-flamebait this.
Wow.. looking at citizenship data is interesting. Don Valley East has 22.8% non-citizens. Interestingly enough it wasn’t included in any of the 3 groups, as the “vis min” numbers are split between many different groups.