Left wing logic (when it's convenient) - it doesn't matter if trust goes down as long as it's still above the global average.
If elites undermine trust by lying, clearly the "far right" and "misinformation" are to blame.
Since integration is racist, good luck rebuilding trust.
Clearly, if you oppose mass migration, you're racist.
"Canada is a high-trust country. Surveys consistently show that Canadians are more likely than most people in the world to say “others can be trusted,” to respect the rules, and to view government and civic institutions as broadly legitimate. In Q4 2024, for instance, 43.5 percent of Canadians reported that “most people can be trusted”, which is significantly higher than global averages and among the highest in the OECD.
This sense of collective trust is a huge advantage for the country. It helps to explain why our markets function as well as they do, why our democracy is relatively stable, and why Canada is generally seen as a good place to live and invest.
Scholars often note that only a small cluster of countries consistently report that a majority of people can be trusted. That makes Canada an outlier in the global context. Preserving that advantage has, among other benefits, major economic upside. Economic research, for instance, links a one-point rise in generalized trust to several percentage points of GDP per capita in the long run.
Trust isn’t a static inheritance. It’s continually shaped by social change, economic developments, and political choices. Immigration, in particular, has long interacted with these trust dynamics—sometimes straining them but more often reinforcing them. For decades, newcomers have contributed to Canada’s economy, enriched its culture, and, over time, come to share in its high-trust norms.
But the unprecedented scale of today’s immigration experiment raises new questions that haven’t yet been squarely addressed by policymakers or commentators.
The central issue is this: What happens when a high-trust society welcomes large numbers of newcomers from countries with lower levels of trust? Do newcomers converge toward Canada’s institutions and norms of cooperation, or does the sheer scale of change begin to alter those norms themselves?
In the past, the answer has generally been positive. Over generations, immigrants and their children have converged toward Canadian levels of trust. Yet scale, speed, and segregation matter. When half the population in some of our cities is already foreign-born, and when housing and settlement patterns reduce day-to-day mixing, can we still assume the same outcome?
This DeepDive essay aims to explore that question by surveying the best theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between immigration, diversity, and social trust. The research shows that high-trust societies can remain resilient, but only if their institutions function well and integration is actively managed. Canada’s unprecedented immigration levels make those conditions harder to sustain...
The highest-trust societies are typically in Northern Europe. In Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, for instance, more than 60 percent of respondents say that most people can be trusted. At the other end of the spectrum, in countries like Brazil, Colombia, and the Philippines, the share can be as low as 5 percent. The United States falls somewhere in the middle, with roughly a third of respondents expressing generalized trust.
Canada consistently ranks as a high-trust country. Roughly 40 percent of Canadians tell survey researchers that most people can be trusted—though the number has been falling in recent years. According to Statistics Canada’s Canadian Social Survey, for instance, the share of Canadians who believe that most people can be trusted has fallen from 46.8 percent in Q2 2022 to 43.5 percent in Q4 2024 (see figure 1).
The downward drift in Canadian trust levels may seem small, but longitudinal research shows that even modest declines can signal important shifts...
High levels of social trust are rightly seen as a civic and engagement advantage. Scholars have shown that trust acts as a source of social capital that lowers transaction costs, facilitates cooperation, and enables societies to organize at scale. High-trust societies can build dynamic economies and robust democracies. Low-trust societies often rely on family ties, informal networks, or heavy state coercion.
Studies estimate that differences in trust can explain up to one-fifth of the variance in economic growth across advanced countries. Trust lowers the cost of credit, increases investment horizons, and reduces reliance on costly monitoring. In low-trust societies, firms tend to remain family-owned and small; in high-trust ones, large corporations can emerge because strangers are more willing to collaborate...
In high-trust contexts, people are able to cooperate beyond kinship networks, which in turn enables the rise of large-scale firms, vibrant civic associations, and credible political institutions. In low-trust societies, by contrast, confidence rarely extends beyond the family, constraining organizational scale and leaving more functions to the state. For Fukuyama, generalized trust is a cultural inheritance that’s transmitted across generations and rooted in historical experience...
[In] E Pluribus Unum, Putnam addressed the role of diversity more directly. His large-N empirical work showed that more ethnically diverse communities often reported lower levels of trust—not only between groups, but even within them. He described this response as people “hunkering down.” Yet Putnam was careful to stress that this outcome wasn’t inevitable. In his view, the long-term trajectory could still be one of rising trust if institutions fostered integration and common identities. The critical variables were the scale and speed of demographic change, and the strength of institutions tasked with absorbing it.
Political scientist Eric Uslaner advanced the debate by shifting attention from observable networks to moral orientation in his 2002 book, The Moral Foundations of Trust. For Uslaner, generalized trust isn’t simply a reflection of civic participation or rational calculation, but an ingrained belief that society is fair and the future is hopeful. In this sense, trust functions almost like an ethical disposition: it’s passed down across generations and thus proves remarkably “sticky.”
Yet, once eroded, it’s extraordinarily difficult to rebuild...
Trust also underpins democratic resilience. Research shows that when citizens lose confidence in one another and in institutions, they become more susceptible to populist appeals, conspiracy theories, and polarization. In this sense, Canada’s high-trust inheritance has acted as a shock absorber against global currents of populism...
Canadian scholars note that our immigration and settlement policies have served as institutional buffers. Yet these studies often drew on periods when annual immigration was in the range of 200,000 to 300,000. Today’s levels are several times higher, and the evidence base for what happens at this unprecedented scale is thin.
Canada has long been a case study in successful immigration. Research has found that while ethnic diversity can reduce neighborhood-level trust, strong national institutions and redistributive policies mitigate the effect. Other Canadian studies likewise find that the diversity–trust effect is strongest at the micro level (e.g., neighbourhoods) but tends to dissipate at larger scales where institutions and national identity buffer it...
Immigration levels today are unprecedented. In some metropolitan areas, more than half of residents are foreign-born. In 2021, nearly 47 percent of Toronto’s CMA residents were foreign-born, and several GTA municipalities—Markham, Richmond Hill, Mississauga, Brampton—are now majority-immigrant. Vancouver is at about 42 percent. Rising housing costs, long health-care wait times, and crowded transit raise the risk that institutions may no longer deliver the same integrative outcomes. There is, in short, less margin for error...
Europe, especially Scandinavia, has been a laboratory for studying trust under immigration pressure. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are historically the highest-trust societies in the world.
Yet research shows immigration has modestly lowered generalized trust, particularly where migrants cluster in segregated neighbourhoods. Swedish studies find that negatives tend to weigh more heavily than positives in diverse neighbourhoods, and the effects are strongest when segregation and socio-economic disadvantage overlap. Germany’s experience with Turkish “guest workers” illustrates how weak integration policies can entrench bonding trust within enclaves, which in turn slows convergence.
In Scandinavia, where trust has historically exceeded 60 percent, even small declines are taken seriously. Danish and Swedish policymakers debate immigration in explicitly trust-related terms, reflecting an awareness that their high-trust inheritance is both precious and fragile.
Cross-country studies add nuance. A 2020 meta-analysis found that while ethnic diversity often correlates with lower trust, effect sizes are small to moderate and heavily context-dependent. Where institutions are strong, education is high, and integration policies are robust, trust recovers. Where those conditions are absent, the negative effects are more persistent...
The empirical literature suggests three takeaways. First, immigration can lower trust in the short run, especially at the neighbourhood level. Second, over time and across generations, convergence is possible, but it’s not automatic. Repeated, structured contact across groups—through schools, public services, or civic programs—consistently improves outcomes. The policy lever isn’t diversity itself but how it is managed in daily life. Third, scale and speed matter. Smaller, gradual inflows are easier to integrate; rapid, large-scale inflows can overwhelm institutions and delay trust-building...
In earlier decades, immigration was significant but gradual, which gave time for convergence in trust, culture, and civic identity. Today’s scale compresses those timelines and strains the capacity of institutions to mediate the process.
It’s also far more highly geographically concentrated than historic patterns. More than 90 percent of newcomers settle in just four provinces—Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and Alberta—and within them, overwhelmingly in a handful of large metropolitan areas. In Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Montreal, the scale of immigration is transforming the cities’ demography and putting pressure on housing, infrastructure, and social services.
Housing is the best-known example. A supply-constrained housing market is absorbing record demand from newcomers, which in turn has pushed affordability to historic lows. But growing evidence from other parts of civic life is notable too.
The Hub recently published an analysis, for instance, that showed in some of the country’s largest school districts, a third or more of students spoke neither English nor French. The school system is a bellwether. When more than 30 percent of students speak another language at home, the classroom becomes a primary site of integration. If schools succeed, they can generate bridging trust. Yet if they struggle, they risk entrenching divides.
These bottlenecks matter for trust because effective institutions are the mechanisms through which integration takes place. When institutions falter, both newcomers and existing citizens may lose confidence in them—and, by extension, in each other.
Spatial segregation compounds the problem. Rising housing costs have pushed newcomers into concentrated enclaves. The 2021 Census showed that 46.6 percent of residents in the Greater Toronto Area were immigrants, and municipalities like Markham (58.6 percent), Richmond Hill (58.2 percent), Mississauga (53.2 percent), and Brampton (52.9 percent) are now among the most immigrant-concentrated in Canada. Over time, the clustering trend has accelerated: in the early 2000s, visible minority shares in Mississauga rose from 40.3 percent (2001) to 53.7 percent (2011), and in Brampton from 40.2 percent to 66.4 percent, which points to intensifying ethnic concentration in suburban areas.
Economists note that segregation can produce “tipping points”: once a neighbourhood crosses a certain threshold of linguistic or cultural concentration, the likelihood of further out-migration by majority residents increases. That dynamic, documented in U.S. and European cities, may already be unfolding in parts of the GTA and Metro Vancouver.
This matters because segregation slows the development of bridging trust and increases reliance on bonding trust within communities. The long-run risk is that instead of convergence toward Canadian norms, we see the persistence of parallel yet separate societies."