Confidence in Canada’s public institutions like government, courts, media and the police appears to dwindle the more time one spends in Canada, according to a recent study. However, of all public institutions, immigrants across generations were least confident in the media.
Statistics Canada surveyed Canadians’ levels of confidence in public institutions through a variety of lenses like age, race and generational status as a Canadian and found that the newer a person was to Canada, the more likely they would be to have a rosy notion of them.
According to Statistics Canada, while levels of confidence in public institutions vary across generations and racialized groups, “their perceptions of public institutions become less favourable with longer residence in Canada and much less favourable from the first to the second generation or more.”
The study found that on average, recent immigrants, being in Canada for 10 years or less, held the country’s public institutions with the most confidence.
Whereas, “racialized Canadian-born people, who are mostly second-generation Canadians, confidence in the police was far lower than among non-racialized Canadian-born people,” reads the study.
The study found that first-generation immigrants reported 46.9% confidence in the media, while the second-generation had 38.3% confidence and by the third confidence was at 41.7%. For every generation, the Canadian media had the lowest level of reported confidence when compared to the police, justice system and federal Parliament.
A similar pattern can be found when it comes to Canada’s justice system and courts, with declining confidence by generation.
“Canadian immigrants also appear to perceive public institutions through the lens of their pre-migration experiences,” reads the study, which went on to say that those who’ve come from countries that have authoritarian regimes have more favourable perceptions of public institutions.
However, while they may initially hold a higher level of confidence in institutions compared to Canadian-born people, “immigrants from full democracies have perceptions that are similar to those of Canadian-born people.”
“Immigrants who arrived in adolescence and adulthood have memories of their source-country institutions to use as a frame of reference, but immigrants who arrived in childhood will have no or few memories of these institutions,” reads the study.
Race played a role in people’s confidence as well, with four-fifths of Latin, south-eastern Asian and Arab immigrants having higher levels of confidence, while that number dropped to two-thirds among White, Black and Chinese immigrants.
That figure dropped to one-half of all Canadians who were third generation or more.
“Among immigrants who came to Canada from ages 0 to 14, only Chinese people had higher levels of confidence in the justice system and courts than Canadians of the third generation or more,” reads the study.
“Among first-generation Canadians, there was a broad difference between immigrants who came to Canada in childhood and those who arrived in adolescence and adulthood.”
Statistics Canada concluded that “immigrants who arrived as adults had the highest level of confidence, and this favourable perception of Canadian institutions weakened with younger age at arrival.”
The government agency noted that the age-at-arrival pattern was “largely consistent across immigrants from different racialized groups” and that second-generation Canadians had lower levels of confidence in the police, the justice system and courts, and the Canadian media, followed by those third-generation.