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Liberal nationalists argue that identification with the nation promotes feelings of mutual obligation, including support for redistribution. Existing attempts to test this hypothesis have focused on whether the higher sense of national identity among the majority increases support redistribution. We argue for a twofold shift in focus. First, beyond the majority's own national identity, we need to explore their perceptions of whether minorities share this identity. Second, we need to shift from one-dimensional ideals of 'identity' to more complex ideas of attachment and commitment. Do members of the majority view minorities as committed to the nation and willing to make sacrifices for it? Drawing on a custom-designed online survey in Canada, we show that three salient out-groups (Aboriginal peoples, French-speaking Canadians and immigrants) are seen by majority respondents as less committed to Canada, and that this is a powerful predictor of support for general and inclusive redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada has often been seen as immune from the powerful backlash against globalization and immigration that has driven political shifts elsewhere. This article challenges this belief, at least in part, by tracing the evolution of public attitudes toward immigration and analyzing the factors that have shaped the trajectory for over three decades. Drawing on nearly forty years of Environics Focus Canada surveys, combined with annual data on macro-economics and immigration flows, findings here suggest that Canadians' tolerance toward immigration responds to immigration flows and is heavily influenced by macro-economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, many Western countries have implemented restrictions on immigrants' access to welfare programs, thereby creating new lines of exclusion between immigrants and the native-born. Canada is commonly seen to have resisted this trend. This view overlooks, however, that exclusion can come in different forms. In addition to direct formal exclusion from welfare programs, immigrants can also have more limited access because of indirect or informal mechanisms of differentiation. Reviewing five core welfare programs, this paper shows that direct, indirect, and informal types of exclusion exist in the Canadian welfare state, albeit with different consequences for different categories of newcomers. While this conclusion is not meant to suggest that immigrants face as much exclusion as they do in some other Western countries, it does demonstrate the need to avoid the complacency regarding immigrants' social rights in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrant integration is currently a prominent issue in virtually all contemporary democracies, but countries in which the historic population itself is deeply divided - particularly those with substate nations and multiple political identities - present some interesting questions where integration is concerned. The existence of multiple and potentially competing political identities may complicate the integration process, particularly if the central government and the substate nation promote different conceptions of citizenship and different nation-building projects. What, then, are the implications of minority nationalism for immigrant integration? Are the added complexities a barrier to integration? Or do overlapping identities generate more points of contact between immigrants and their new home? This article addresses this question by probing immigrant and non-immigrant 'sense of belonging' in Canada, both inside and outside Quebec. Data come from Statistics Canada's Ethnic Diversity Study. Our results suggest that competing nation-building projects make the integration of newcomers more, rather than less, challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widespread fear in many western nations that ethnic diversity is eroding support for the welfare state. This article examines such fears in the Canadian context. In-depth analysis of public attitudes finds remarkably little tension between ethnic diversity and public support for social programs in Canada. At first glance, then, the country seems to demonstrate the political viability of a multicultural welfare state. But this pattern reflects distinctive features of the institutional context within which public attitudes evolve. The Canadian policy regime has forestalled tension between diversity and redistribution by diverting adjustment pressures from the welfare state, absorbing some of them in other parts of the policy regime, and nurturing a more inclusive form of identity. These institutional buffers are thinning, however, potentially increasing the danger of greater tension between diversity and redistribution in the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role of national identity in sustaining public support for the welfare state. Liberal nationalist theorists argue that social justice will always be easier to achieve in states with strong national identities, which, they contend, can both mitigate opposition to redistribution among high-income earners and reduce any corroding effects of ethnic diversity resulting from immigration. We test these propositions with Canadian data from the Equality, Security and Community survey. We conclude that national identity does increase support for the welfare state among the affluent majority of Canadians and that it helps to protect the welfare state from toxic effects of cultural suspicion. However, we also find that identity plays a narrower role than existing theories of liberal nationalism suggest and that the mechanisms through which it works are different. This leads us to suggest an alternative theory of the relationship between national identity and the welfare state, one that suggests that the relationship is highly contingent, reflecting distinctive features of the history and national narratives of each country. National identity may not have any general tendency to strengthen support for redistribution, but it may do so for those aspects of the welfare state seen as having played a particularly important role in building the nation or in enabling it to overcome particular challenges or crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In much of the world, and particularly in Europe, there is a widespread perception that multiculturalism has failed, and Canada has not been immune to these rising global anxieties. A number of commentators have argued that smug complacency is blinding Canadians to growing evidence of stresses and failures in ethnic relations in their country. In this article, we explore this evolving debate. We briefly review the global backlash against multiculturalism, and why some commentators see warning signs in Canada as well. We then look at the evidence about how the multiculturalism policy in Canada operates, and about trends in immigrant integration and ethnic relations. We show that there are indeed stresses and strains within Canadian multiculturalism, with real issues that require serious attention. But we misdiagnose the problems, and their remedies, if we read the Canadian experience through the lens of the European debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a look on immigration, multiculturalism and the welfare state in Canada. The increase in ethnic diversity due to immigration poses a threat to the welfare state due to ethnic diversity's difficulty to sustain expansive social programs. Multiculturalism policies promote greater social solidarity by combating the stereotypes and stigmatizations that erode feelings of solidarity across ethnic and racial lines.

This commentary evaluates the new social policy paradigm, which shifts the emphasis from income redistribution to investment in human capital. Canadian governments have embraced the first side of this approach, restructuring income-security programs in ways that reduce the level of economic security assured to working-age Canadians. But their approach to investing in human capital is weakened by uncertain public commitments, problems of timing and sequence, and a failure to come to grips with the policy implications of the socio-economic gradient in educational attainment. The commentary concludes that education and training are carrying too much weight in new social discourse, and that a successful strategy of investing in human capital cannot be divorced from issues of poverty and inequality. The key challenge is one that is largely being ignored: to design a redistributive complement to a human-capital strategy, one that makes meaningful the promise of education as an instrument of economic security, and compensates for its significant limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the social security review launched by the release of the `Improving Social Security in Canada' federal discussion paper. Contradictory pressures shaping contemporary Canadian public policy; Tensions surrounding the role of public consultants in an era of tight fiscal constraints.

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This article focuses on the emergence of Canada as a counter-narrative about the relations among diversity, recognition and redistribution. It presents summaries of comparative evidence of heterogeneity and redistribution trade-off, drawing on cross-national quantitative analysis of Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. It analyzes two case studies involving the U.S. and Canada, multicultural countries that generate different narratives about the politics of the multicultural welfare state.