New study challenges Canada’s systemic racism narrative

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Significant federal program spending is premised on the idea that visible minorities in Canada are systemically disadvantaged.

Take the latest: Earlier this fall, the federal government released a 45-page anti-racism strategy for 2024-2028, which “aims to tackle systemic racism and make our communities more inclusive and prosperous.” Such a strategy is necessary, according to the government, because systemic racism exists throughout our institutions and “(perpetuates) a position of relative disadvantage for racialized persons.”

But where is the evidence for this premise? Not in the income statistics.

Directly contradicting the idea that visible minorities are systemically oppressed, a new Statistics Canada study shows many Canadians from minority backgrounds thrive and even do better on average than their white counterparts.

The StatCan study started with 1996 and 2001 census data, used T1 and T4 tax files and other data to measure cumulative earnings over 20 years among Canadian-born men and women from four racial cohorts – white, South Asian, Chinese, and Black – and found minorities outperforming the majority population.
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Specifically, among Canadian-born men, cumulative earnings over 20 years were highest on average among Chinese men ($1.58 million in 2019 dollars), followed by South Asian men ($1.51 million). Only black men ($1.06 million) earned less than white men ($1.31 million).

Clearly, if Chinese and South Asian men have higher earnings power than white men, it is difficult to conclude Canada is systemically racist against minorities.

What about the inverse? Does the data suggest Canada is systemically racist against white men? No. “The fact that Chinese and South Asian men have higher education levels than white men and are more likely to be in STEM fields is the single most important factor explaining why these two groups have higher cumulative earnings than white men,” the StatCan report found.

In other words, education, not racism, drives the difference in earnings.

So what happens when we control for education and other factors like employer size, industry, and geography? The earnings gap between white and black men remains. As well, while Chinese and South Asian men out-earned white men, after controlling for education and other factors, white men actually earned more.

Alas, have we found evidence of systemic racism? Is this evidence that the country is systemically racist because these employers paid minorities less than their white counterparts with similar educational backgrounds?

There’s no hard evidence of this. First, discrimination by employers against visible minorities has been illegal for decades. Second, as the study suggests, many factors affect earnings besides the ones researchers can observe and control for, including differences in social networks, job search methods, and preferences for certain working conditions, so automatically blaming racism doesn’t make much sense. Third, if Canada is systemically racist against minorities, how did Chinese and South Asian men find themselves overrepresented in the higher-paying STEM fields to begin with?

And if racism against black Canadians is to blame for the earnings gap among men, what explains the fact that black women earned more than white women? Among Canadian-born women, before controlling for education and other factors, the cohort that earned the least over two decades was white women ($0.80 million). Chinese women had the highest cumulative earnings ($1.14 million), followed by South Asian women ($1.06 million), and then black women ($0.82 million). Is Canada full of racists who only discriminate against black men but not black women?

Another outcome of the StatCan analysis is that after controlling for the same factors (e.g. education), Chinese women out-earned white women – by $38,000, on average. So, do racist employers systematically favour white men over Chinese men while also disfavouring white women relative to Chinese women?

The narrative that Canadians from visible minority backgrounds are systemically disadvantaged just doesn’t hold up to the data.

Moreover, this latest StatCan study only considered four groups (Chinese, South Asian, white, and black) of Canadian-born individuals, but other StatCan research provides similar evidence against systemic racism. Weekly earnings data from 2016 show that in addition to Chinese and South Asian men, Canadian-born Japanese and Korean men had higher earnings than their white counterparts. Among women, seven of 10 minority groups (Korean, Chinese, South Asian, Japanese, Filipino, “other visible minorities,” and Arab or West Asian) had higher average weekly earnings than the white population.

Simply put, the earnings data do not provide evidence that Canada is a society that systemically disadvantages minorities. Rather, the data show the exact opposite. Politicians and bureaucrats might want to consider these facts before wasting large sums of taxpayer dollars drawing up lengthy “anti-racism” plans.

Matthew Lau is a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and author of Systemic racism claims in Canada: A fact-based analysis.

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