People born in Canada are more likely than immigrants to have their first marriage or common law relationship end in divorce or separation, a new Statistics Canada report says.
The report, released March 11, analyzed the results of the 2017 General Social Survey-Families by looking at differences in responses from people born in Canada and landed immigrants. The report defines landed immigrants as permanent residents, people who Canada’s immigration authorities say can stay in the country permanently.
In the General Social Survey, there is only one respondent per household. Couples do not fill out the survey together, explained Clémence Zossou, an analyst at Statistics Canada who co-authored the report.
In 2017, 36 per cent of people in Canada older than 20 had had their first marriage or common law relationship end in divorce or separation. Yet, landed immigrants experienced divorce or separation much less than people born in Canada, with only 24 per cent having their first union end compared to 43 per cent of people born in Canada.
The analysis showed women born in Canada were more likely than landed immigrant women to have their first relationship dissolve at a faster rate. There was no significant difference for men, whether they were born in Canada or elsewhere.
This difference in the divorce rate does not surprise Margaret Tuimising, a marriage and family therapist at Aurora Family Therapy in Winnipeg whose clients are all immigrants and refugees.
Newcomers to Canada — whether immigrants or refugees — often do not have any relatives in Canada, she says. Their immediate family “is all they have.”
“They kind of get closer because that’s all they have right at the beginning when they get here,” she said. Separation is not an option because they likely do not know what support could be available to them if they left their relationship. It makes financial sense to stay in their relationships.
The lack of social support outside the family may keep some immigrants in abusive relationships though, says Tuimising. “Some of them are not [in the relationship] because they want to be but because they don’t know any better, or they don’t have choices,” she said.
The team at Aurora Family Therapy has worked with immigrant women who were able to leave abusive relationships after they arrived in Canada, Tuimising said in an email.
Cultural reasons
There are also cultural reasons for the longevity of immigrants’ relationships, Tuimising says.
Many come from more “communal societies,” where the expectation is that once people make a commitment “they are expected to carry that through.”
In Canadian society, it is more acceptable to leave a relationship if you are no longer happy in it, says Tuimising. But in many other societies, it is shameful to break your relationship and be alone, she said.
“Most Canadians find marriage as nice but not necessary,” said Peter Jon Mitchell, who researches issues related to families for Cardus, a think tank that studies social institutions. People are often looking for a “soulmate” who will make them happy and personally fulfilled, said Mitchell. This view is very “personal,” said Mitchell. This view of marriage does not consider how marriage, as an institution, can contribute to society as a whole, he says.
For example, marriages are more likely to provide stability to raise children. The Statistics Canada report indicates that common-law couples separate more often than couples who officially marry, and that couples who adopt or raise children together are more likely to stay together.
The success of parents’ unions can impact their own children’s marriages. Children of separated or divorced parents were more likely to divorce or separate as well, the report says. This trend was most noticeable for women who were born in Canada. Canadian-born women whose parents had separated or divorced were 43 per cent more likely to separate or divorce themselves. Parental separation or divorce was only “statistically significant” for people born in Canada, the report says.
The report did not identify immigrants’ countries of origin. Including that information “would make it possible to measure the effect of divorce norms and values in the countries of origin of landed immigrants, as well as the conditions of integration into the host society, on the duration of their unions once they have settled in Canada,” the report says.
Social institution
In general, the Statistics Canada report found that common-law relationships are significantly more likely to end in separation than marriages. While 24 per cent of all first marriages ended in separation or divorce, 65 per cent of all first common law relationships ended in separation.
Nearly one third — 32 per cent — of all people whose marriages began with a common-law relationship separated or divorced.
The high number of separations among common-law couples is important, says Margo Hilbrecht, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, a think tank devoted to studying family life in Canada. People who separate from common-law relationships often have fewer legal rights than people whose marriages end in separation or divorce, she says.
“Often, it’s assumed that [common-law relationships are] treated just like a marriage in the eyes of the law. It’s really not,” she said. “There’s different rights depending on which part of the country that you’re in.”
In Ontario, Quebec, all the Atlantic provinces and the Yukon, there is no legal right for equal division of property after a common-law couple separates, a November report from the Vanier Institute of the Family says.
Canadian family law is often designed to reflect the “ideal family type,” Hilbrecht said. But more and more families do not fit that pattern, she says.
People who participated in religious or spiritual practices were also less likely to separate or divorce. This was true for people born in Canada but was most noticeable for women born in Canada.
Religious communities often highly value the permanence of marriage, says Mitchell. Religious leaders may also be able to support struggling couples to make their relationships better.
Marriage “is a social institution that requires the support of other social institutions to thrive,” he said. “Religious community… provides the kind of support that helps marriages succeed and certainly helps people out when their marriages are struggling.”
The 2017 General Social Survey is the most recent data Statistics Canada has about family structure in Canada. New data should be available within the next 18 months to two years, said Clémence Zossou, the analyst who co-authored the report.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to clarify that women born in Canada were more likely than landed immigrant women to have their first relationship dissolve at a faster rate.
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