* Allophones & Anglophones in Quebec  In Quebec, the 1996 census found that the number of people having as mother tongue a language other than English or French -- the so called "allophones" -- exceeds the number of people with English as a mother tongue (9.7% vs 8.8%). Conversely, in 1971, anglophones constituted 13% of the Quebec population, while allophones accounted for only 6%.
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, Dec. 2/97

*Mother Tongue and Home Language.  Between 1971 and 1996, the proportion of the Canadian population with mother tongue other than English or French increased from 13% to nearly 17%. Furthermore, almost one in every ten persons in Canada spoke a language other than English or French most often at home in 1996.
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, Dec. 2/97.

* Variations in.   There are dramatic variations in average youth literacy scores across Canada's provinces, according to findings of the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). Socio-economic background is only one key factor in explaining inequalities in provincial literacy scores for youths (persons aged 16 to 25). While youth from advantaged backgrounds scored well in all provinces, youth from disadvantaged backgrounds exhibited wide variation in their literacy scores across the provinces. Approximately 39% of the variation in youth literacy scores among the provinces was attributable to differences in socio-economic background factors. Years of schooling cannot, by itself, account for all of this variation. This suggests the involvement of other factors, such as a school's cultural orientation toward academic success, and parental involvement in school activities and in supporting learning activities at home. For the IALS, literacy was measured in terms of understanding of prose (e.g., news stories), understanding documents (e.g., job applications, transportation schedules, tables, maps, and graphics), and quantitative literacy (e.g., balancing a cheque book, figuring out a tip).
Source: Statistics Canada Daily, Sept. 8, 1997

QUEBEC AS A DISTINCT SOCIETY

* Common Law Unions. Quebec has by far the highest rate of common law unions (and, correspondingly, the lowest marriage rate) among all provinces in Canada. In Quebec, 25% of all couples were in a 'common law' union in 1995, whereas for the rest of Canada the corresponding figure was 11%.
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, March 25, 1997

* Suicide. Quebec's suicide rate has risen to become the highest in Canada. Between 1990 and 1994, Quebec averaged 27.2 suicides for every 100,000 people, compared with an average of only 16.3 between 1970 and 1974. The rate in most other provinces has fallen.
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, March 25, 1997

RACIAL AND ETHNIC RELATIONS

* Symbolic Recognition. Sociologists hold that individuals expect to recognize themselves in public institutions. They expect a certain degree of consistency between their private identities and the symbolic contents upheld by public authorities, embedded in societal institutions, and celebrated in public events. Otherwise, individuals feel that they are strangers in society -- that the society is not their society. That is, if they are not reflected in the symbolic output of the state, they will experience alienation and often will withdraw legitimacy from those institutions.
Source: Sociologist Raymond Breton, "Multiculturalism and Canadian Nation-Building", pp. 31-32 in Alan Cairns and Cynthia Williams (eds.), The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity and Language in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986.

Visible Minorities.  The 1996 Census of Canada found that "visible minorities" (excluding aboriginal people) comprise 11.2% of the Canadian population, which is up from 9.4% in 1991 and 6.3% in 1986. The following lists the percentage of the population which "visible minorities" (defined below) comprise in selected Canadian cities: Toronto, 32%; Vancouver, 31%; Calgary, 16%; Edmonton, 14%; Montreal, 13%; Ottawa-Hull, 12%; and Winnipeg, 11%. The term "visible minorities" is used here as in the federal Employment Equity Act to encompass Chinese, South Asians, Blacks, Arabs and West Asians, Filipinos, Southeast Asians, Latin Americans, Japanese, Koreans, and Pacific Islanders.
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, Feb. 17, 1998.

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

The social structure of modern industrialized societies, like Canada, is experiencing a profound transformation in various respects, one of which can be called "disintermediation". This refers to the elimination of intermediaries in economic activity. Examples of intermediaries or "middlemen" are: agents, brokers, wholesalers, some retailers, broadcasters, and anything that stands between producers and consumers.
Source: Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence. McGraw-Hill, 1996, pp. 68-71.

THE STATE

Foreign aid spending among the 21 donor countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) decreased by 4.2% from 1995 to 1996. Aid amounted to $55 billion, which is one quarter of one percent of the total Gross National Product (GNP) of those countries. Canada's $2.6 billion in donations (about $90 per capita) amounted to 0.31 percent of our GNP and lowered us from fifth place to eleventh among the 21 OECD countries.
Source: Canadian Council for International Co-operation, The Reality of Aid, Oct. 15, 1997.

THE WORK WORLD

* Aboriginal Employment Equity.   Aboriginal people increased their representation in the 370 firms covered by the federal Employment Equity Act from 3,862 employees in the first year of the legislation being in effect (1987) to 6,882 employees in 1995. That 1995 figure constitutes 1.2% of the 587,400 employees in those firms, but aboriginal people constitute 2.2% of the Canadian labour force. Thus, to date, aboriginal people have greater representation in firms not covered by the Employment Equity Act than in firms that are. Over the nine reporting years, aboriginal males exhibited a slight proportionate increase in the so-called "good jobs" (managerial, professional, supervisory, semi-professional/technical, and foreman/forewoman), from 23.4% to 24.3%, while the corresponding gain for aboriginal women was more substantial (from 17.1% in 1987 to 22.2% in 1995). That is, in 1995, 22.2% of the aboriginal full-time labour force in the firms covered by the federal Employment Equity Act consisted of females in "good jobs" and 24.3% consisted of males in "good jobs". The greatest growth over the nine years for aboriginal males was in clerical occupations, while for aboriginal females it was in managerial occupations.
SOURCE: Ministry of Supply and Services Canada, Employment Equity Act Annual Reports to Parliament, as reported in Cora J. Voyageur, Employment Equity and Aboriginal People in Canada, Ph.D. Dissertation, Dept. of Sociology, University of Alberta, 1997, Chapt. 5.

* Gender Gap in Wages.     Women working full time throughout 1996 earned, on average, 73 cents for each dollar earned by their male counterparts, a new high for the female-to-male earnings ratio.   Women who have never been married earned 93 cents for every dollar earned by single men in 1996.   By comparison, married women earned 69 cents for each dollar earned by married men. For women who were widowed, divorced or separated, the comparable figure was 80 cents for each dollar.   The overall female-to-male earnings ratio has followed an upward trend since the data were first collected in 1967. That year, women earned 58 cents to each dollar earned by men. Most of the advance in the ratio since the mid-1980s has been due to the significant gains in average female earnings, which occurred while average male earnings changed relatively little.
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, Mar. 23, 1998.

Immigrants at Risk in Workplace.   International immigrants to Calgary have an higher probability of being injured on the job than do non-immigrants, according to research findings by University of Calgary researchers Wilfreda Thurston and Marja Verhoef (Community Health Sciences Department, Faculty of Medicine). Immigrants experienced a lost-time injury rate of over 6%, while the overall provincial rate (1996) is 3.4%, where these figures are the number of reported injuries as a percentage of the number of person-years worked. Explanations for immigrants' higher lost-time injury rate have been offered in terms of such factors as number of hours worked and immigrants' greater reluctance to refuse high risk work due to fear of deportation or fear of losing one's job. Interestingly, immigrant workers are often reluctant to report their injuries. In such cases, for an injury to involve time lost from the job, it is likely a serious injury.
Source: Calgary Herald, November 8, 1997, pp. 1-2 and interpretation by webmaster.

* Interruption of Women's Careers.  Women in the 1990s have been less likely than women in earlier decades to interrupt their careers for family or other reasons. Those who did take an hiatus were more likely to return to paid work and to return quickly. University graduates are least likely to interrupt their careers. In the 1990s the majority (55%) of women who had their career interrupted for family or economic (e.g., layoff) reasons returned to work within two years and an even larger majority (71%) returned eventually. However, slightly less than half (47%) who had full-time jobs before their interruption took full-time jobs upon regaining employment.
Source: Statistics Canada Daily, Sept. 16/97, quoting an article in the Fall 1997 issue of CANADIAN SOCIAL TRENDS, which was based on the 1995 General Social Survey.

* Job Satisfaction.    The proportion of Canadian workers who are satisfied with their jobs has declined from 70% in 1991 to 62% in 1997, according to the Watson Wyatt workplace survey of 2004 workers across Canada. In addition, only about a quarter of the sample said that they trust the people for whom they work. The results are accurate to within about two percentage points, 19 times out of twenty.
SOURCE: Canadian Press, quoted in The Calgary Herald, May 29, 1998, p. F12.

* Shift Work and Couples.     Four out of ten dual-earner couples working full time had at least one spouse doing shift work, according to the 1995 Survey of Work Arrangements. The time spouses could spend together was shorter among those who did shift work. Because of staggered schedules, and on average longer workdays, couples where one partner did shift work had considerably less time off together (11.5 hours) compared with couples who did not perform shift work (16 hours).
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, 98-09-09.

* Traditional Jobs in Minority.    A majority of Canadian workers has a job that differs from traditional job schedules in some important ways. Only 39% of employees in a November 1995 Canada-wide survey had a so-called "normal" job involving (i) Monday to Friday work, (ii) with fixed hours that (iii) start at normal morning times, and (iv) total 30 to 49 hours of work per week.
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, August 29, 1996

* Unemployment of the Educated.  The unemployment rate of high school leavers is nearly three times higher than that of university graduates (12.5% vs 4.8%, respectively).
Source: Statistics Canada Daily, Sept. 10/97

* Unionization.  The Canadian labour force is much more heavily unionized than is the American labour force, although even in Canada only slightly more than one third (about 36% in 1990) of the paid non-agricultural labour force belongs to a union. In the USA, the corresponding figure is about 16%.
Source: John Richards, "A Tangled Tale: Unions in Canada and The United States", pp. 65-82 in David Thomas (ed.), Canada and The United States: Differences That Count.  Broadview Press, 1993.

Value of a University Degree.   Data from the 1997 National Graduates Survey of 1995 graduates show the economic advantage of holding a university degree rather than a community college or vocational/technical school diploma. According to the summer 1997 survey of 43,000 individuals who graduated in 1995, university graduates have a notably lower unemployment rate (8.9%) than community college grads (9.8%), and a much lower rate than vocational/tech school grads (15.4%). Similarly, university graduates also enjoyed a significant earnings advantage over persons who chose other post-secondary routes. The 1997 median earnings for university bachelor graduates who were working full-time two years after graduation were $32,000. The earnings for masters or doctorate graduates were substantially higher at $47,000 in 1997. However, community college graduates working full time two years after graduation had median earnings of only $26,000 in 1997, while their counterparts from trade/vocational schools earned only $23,000.
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, Mar. 13,, 1998.

YOUTH

* Smoking.  Young women in Alberta exhibit a higher prevalence of smoking than young women in any other province. Almost half (48%) of Alberta females aged 15 to 24 were smokers in 1996, according to the 1996 General Social Survey conducted by Statistics Canada. Sociologists point to role modelling and social pressures (e.g., peer pressures to be slender and to be "cool") as explanations for teen smoking.

MISC.

* Charitable Donations.   The median charitable donation reported by Canadian tax filers in 1996 was $150, which was unchanged from the previous year. Twenty-seven percent of tax filers claimed charitable donations, but this varied widely by age group. Manitoba and P. E. I. had the highest proportion of taxfilers who reported donations to charity, at 30%. Saskatchewan and Ontario were close behind with 29%. However, among those who reported donations, Newfoundland again led all provinces and territories in 1996 with the highest median charitable donation ($260), which was unchanged from 1995. Yet, Newfoundland donors had the lowest median total income. Quebec and Alberta were the provinces with the lowest median donations ($100 and $170, respectively).
SOURCE: Statistics Canada Daily, Nov. 27/97.

Source: Statistics Canada and various media reports, Oct. 28, 1997.

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