The making of an 'arcane' infrastructure: immigrant practitioners and the origins of professional engineering regulation in Ontario

Many immigrant professionals have difficulty securing the appropriate licenses required to practice their professions in Canada. Complex licensing procedures managed by professional regulatory institutions compose what a former federal immigration minister called an 'arcane infrastructure'. This article draws on a discourse analysis of historical professional periodicals to investigate the origins of these institutions, using the regulated engineering profession in Ontario as a case study. Within a conceptual framework based on institutional cultural capital, cultural regulation of labour and habitat, the article analyzes the justifications employed by Canadian engineering societies to establish institutional qualification standards. We conclude that these standards represented a strategic effort on the part of engineering society members to protect their professional, social and economic interests by excluding non-members and foreign engineers. Passage of engineering licensing legislation in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s institutionalized these processes of exclusion and established the professional regulatory framework that is still in place today.     

Residential segregation of visible minorities in Canada's gateway cities

Although the influx of visible minority immigrants has created an atmosphere of diversity and multicultural‐ism in Canada's three major gateway cities, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, immigration has also produced metropolitan landscapes of fragmentation and ethnic separation. The objective of this study is to compare the residential patterns of visible minority populations in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, using a rigorous and consistent method that examines the temporal and spatial nature of segregation and its links to local housing characteristics. The paper reviews the literature on models of urban separation, and ethnic and visible minority segregation in Canadian cities, and develops four propositions regarding expected residential patterns and concentrations of visible minorities. It tests these propositions using an analysis of 1986, 1991 and 1996 Census data, in which residential patterns in the three cities are examined and related to the distribution of different types of housing. Our findings confirm previous research results of fragmentation and dispersal, but we uncover decisive differences between cities. Bien que l'afflux d'immigrants appartenant à des minorités visibles ait créé un climat de diversité et de multiculturalisme dans trois des principales portes d'entrée au Canada, à savoir Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver, il n'en reste pas mains que cet afflux a aussi produit des paysages métropolitains de fragmentation et séparation ethniques. L'objectifde cette étude est de comparer les modèles résidentiels des populations minoritaires visibles de Montréal, Toronto et Vancouver; pour ce, nous avons utilisé une méthodologie rigoureuse qui examine la nature de cette ségrégation, du point de vue temporel et spatial ainsi que ses liens avec les caractéristiques des habitats locaux. L'article fait une recension des écrits portant sur les modèles de séparation urbaine, ainsi que sur la ségrégation des minorités ethniques et visibles. II développe quatre propositions concernant les modèles résidentiels et les concentrations de minorités visibles anticipés. L'article vérifie ces propositions à partir de l'analyse des données du recensement des années 1986, 1991 et 1996, dans lesquelles les modèles résidentiels étaient étudiés et mis en rapport avec la distribution des différents types d'habitat. Nos conclusions confirment les résultats de recherches antérieures sur la fragmentation et la dispersion, mais dévoilent en même temps des différences cruciales entre les villes.