Michael Haan

The University of Western Ontario | UWO · Department of Sociology

In Canada, patterns of employment-related geographical mobility (E-RGM) are becoming more complex and nuanced, with implications for employers, workers, and their families. This article introduces the concept of E-RGM, and argues that because mobility is a pervasive aspect of working lives in Canada, it deserves more systematic and extensive resear...

This paper presents results from a survey on attitudes toward climate change in Alberta, Canada, home to just 10% of Canada’s population, but the source of 35% of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions (Environment Canada 2011). Results show high levels of awareness, but much lower levels of perceived climate change impacts for one’s self or region...

As immigrants adapt to their new country, they experience both increased access to homeownership and an increase in independent household formation. This paper examines residential assimilation, as measured by homeownership and household formation, among five young immigrant cohorts in Los Angeles and Toronto over a five-year period in the early 20...

Compared to the Canadian-born, immigrants are under-represented among Canada's homeless popula-tion, when their decline in economic wellbeing is considered alongside their relative absence in homeless shel-ters. One way to explain this oddity, proposed in both academic and popular literature, is that immigrant communities employ unique avoidance st...

Although rates of residential crowding in Canada declined between 1971 and 2001, the drop for immigrants was not nearly as pronounced as it was for the Canadian-born. This paper determines the extent to which the differential trends in residential crowding can be attributed to changes in educational attainment, household composition, economic chara...

RÉSUMÉ Cette étude examina comment les réseaux de soutien socials, la santé, et les caractéristiques économiques ont façonné les choix résidentiels des Canadiens âgés et prédit comment ils sont susceptibles de le faire à l’avenir, en faisant usage de L’Enquête sociale generale: Le soutien social et le vieillissement (ESG), la logique de régression...

The potential role that a religious background plays in determining adult levels of community participation in Canada has, to date, received limited research attention. The present study examines this relationship by testing whether involvement in a religious organization as a youth positively predicts four measures of adult community participation...

Recently, home-ownership rates have been dropping for Canadian immigrants. These declines, although substantial in their own right, are particularly striking when read alongside the trends of the Canadian-born, who've experienced a comparative surge in recent years. Given that immigrants overwhelmingly cluster in Canada's ‘gateway’ census metropoli...

English In this paper we use the Aging and Social Support Survey (GSS16) and the theoretical conception of a ‘housing career’ to identify the correlates of housing tenure (rent vs.own) among Canadians age 45 and over. We draw on primarily US literature to isolate three general explanatory clusters (social support, health, and economic characterist...

In recent years, successive cohorts of immigrants to Canada have experienced a striking level of deterioration in their economic well-being. At the same time, more immigrants than ever before are choosing to live in Montréal, Toronto, or Vancouver, Canada’s three-first-tier or ‘gateway cities’. This paper uses instrumental variable regression techn...

Using the 1971–2001 census of Canada master files, in this paper it is shown how employment in banking/finance, construction and real estate, and living in multiple family households reduces unexplained homeownership disparities between groups in Canada's seven largest immigrant-intake Census Metropolitan Areas. Although these characteristics are i...

In this paper two gaps in North American immigrant homeownership research are addressed. The first concerns the lack of studies (especially in Canada) that identify changes in homeownership rates by skin color over time, and the second relates to the shortage of comparative research between Canada and the United States on this topic. In this paper...

Although migration is not a new phenomenon, several contemporary aspects arguably warrant a reconsideration of its basic theoretical and empirical underpinnings. As only one example of this, in 2008 the province of Alberta admitted more temporary foreign workers than it did permanent immigrants, marking a watershed moment for both the province and...

Numerous studies equate immigrant homeownership with assimilation into the residential mainstream, though only rarely is this claim verified by studying the ethnic character of neighbourhoods where immigrants actually buy homes. In this paper, the 1996 and 2001 Census of Canada master files and bivariate probit models with sample selection correcti...

This article summarizes findings from the research paper entitled Are immigrants buying to get in? The role of ethnic clustering on the homeownership propensities of 12 Toronto immigrant groups, 1996-2001. Spatial assimilation theory is a model of status attainment that links the spatial and social positions of minority group members (Massey and De...

In the past, working-age immigrant families in Canada's large urban centres had higher homeownership rates than the Canadian-born. Over the past twenty years however, this advantage has reversed, due jointly to a drop in immigrant rates and a rise in the popularity of homeownership among the Canadian-born. This paper assesses the efficacy of standa...

Par le passé, les familles d'immigrants en âge de travailler dans les grandes agglomérations urbaines du Canada présentaient des taux de propriété de l'habitation supérieurs à ceux de la population de souche. Ces 20 dernières années cependant, l'avantage est passé à la population de souche à cause tant d'une baisse des taux d'immigration que d'une...

Le present article r�sume les conclusions de le document de recherch� intitul�e Les immigrants ach�tent-ils pour s'int�grer? : Le r�le du regroupement ethnique dans la propension � devenir propri�taire chez douze groupes d'immigrants � Toronto, 1996 � 2001. La th�orie de l'assimilation spatiale est un mod�le d'accession � un statut social reliant l...

A debate has recently re-emerged about whether Hinduism in India is a colonial invention or antedates European colonialism. Drawing on the Indian censuses of 1872–1921, I argue that Hinduism is both. It has complex linkages both to European colonialism and to indigenous Indian culture. Traditions like Hinduism are better conceived of as a negotiate...

In recent decades, nearly three-fourths of all Canadian immigrant arrivals have gone to Montréal, Toronto, or Vancouver. Their impact in these cities can not be overstated; during 1996 to 2001, Montréal gained 126,000 newcomers, Vancouver attracted 180,000, and Toronto received a substantial 445,000 new arrivals, or roughly 10 per cent of its overa...