A Distinct Society? Understanding Social Distrust in Quebec

Following public debates on the topic of trust in Quebec, this article examines the alleged social capital differential between Quebec and the rest of Canada. The literature has found lower levels of generalized trust in Quebec, but explanations offered are diverse and conjectural, with historical, sociological and political factors all in contention. We test contextual and compositional influences, including cohort differences, language and linguistic ability, religion, ethnicity, and neighbourhood-level measures of diversity, using pooled cross-sectional data from the Canadian General Social Survey (2003, 2008 and 2013) linked with precise measures of neighbourhood-level ethnic and linguistic diversity drawn from the Canadian census. We identify those Quebecers who have low levels of trust and those who more closely resemble their counterparts in the rest of Canada. We find that individual linguistic ability and linguistic heterogeneity of the neighbourhood are important correlates of trust and that among francophone populations, social distrust is found most in unilingual homogenous communities.