What are Canadians’ perceptions on race relations? Here’s what a national survey found

Always useful to have tracking over time. Encouraing:

Canadians are more optimistic about race relations than they were three years ago, despite a world that’s increasingly defined by inter-group conflict and social divisiveness, says a national survey on racism, race relations and discrimination.

The survey shows that those who view race relations as generally good outnumber those who think otherwise by a three-to-one ratio — with many believing that people from different groups get along with one another and have equal opportunity to succeed, said the report by Environics Institute and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.

The 2024 survey found that most Canadians acknowledge the reality of racism, prejudice and hate, recognizing these issues both from personal experience and through their understanding of broader societal trends.

Keith Neuman, senior associate at Environics and the report’s lead author, said that compared to racialized people surveyed in 2021, the experiences of those surveyed this time didn’t worsen, and their perceptions of race relations improved slightly. “That, I think, is a point of optimism,” he said.

The survey comes at a time when Canada’s immigration policy is at a crossroads, with anti-immigrant sentiment rising, most recently directed at South Asians here as international students and foreign workers, scapegoated for the housing crisis and socioeconomic challenges. The ongoing war between Hamas and Israel has also led to tensions in Canada. 

This was the third wave of a national survey that started in 2019 to monitor the attitudes, perceptions and experiences of race relations among Canadians. The second survey in 2021 was in the wake of the racial reckoning from the Black Lives Matter Movement and surge of anti-Asian racism amid the pandemic….

Source: What are Canadians’ perceptions on race relations? Here’s what a national survey found