The 2006 and 2008 Canadian Federal Elections and Minority Mps (Report‪)‬

Abstract This paper investigates how ethnoracial minorities fared in getting elected as MPs in the Canadian general elections of 2006 and 2008--an analysis guided by descriptive characterizations and interpretative themes discerned from studies of minority parliamentary representation over the 1993-2004 period. This paper also examines more specific categories that make up the minority population, thus allowing for perspectives on both inter-group differences and longitudinal effects. A key finding is that for minorities taken as a whole, as well as for the overall category of visible minorities, the 2006 and 2008 results fit an already-established pattern of quite modest increases in minority representation (as in 2006) interrupted by occasional decline (as in 2008). In addition, for both visible minorities as a group and for most of their constituent subcategories, the overwhelming evidence is of persisting representation deficits which are defined by MP percentages that are less than the corresponding population percentages. There is also evidence that the association of minority MPs with the Liberal party, observed as waning over the 1993-2004 period, continued to do so in 2006 and 2008.