At its core, a healthy society depends on people feeling that they belong, that their voices matter, and that they can trust their fellow citizens and institutions. These three elements—belonging, voice, and social trust—are interconnected foundations of social cohesion. When they are strong, communities can navigate disagreements, address challenges collectively, and maintain solidarity across differences. When they weaken, societies fragment into isolated groups, public discourse degrades, and institutions lose legitimacy. In Canada, concerns about declining social trust and increasing polarization make understanding these concepts more urgent than ever.
Understanding Belonging
What Belonging Means
Belonging is the feeling of being accepted as a full member of a community—not merely tolerated but genuinely included. It involves recognition that one's presence is valued, one's identity is respected, and one has a stake in the community's future. Belonging operates at multiple scales: within families, neighbourhoods, workplaces, cities, and nations. It is both emotional and practical—a sense of being at home combined with actual opportunities for participation.
Who Belongs?
Not everyone experiences belonging equally. Racialized Canadians may face subtle or overt signals that they do not fully belong, regardless of citizenship or how long their families have lived in Canada. Indigenous peoples have been systematically excluded from belonging in their own lands. Immigrants may feel welcome in some contexts and rejected in others. LGBTQ2S+ Canadians have gained legal recognition but may still face exclusion in many settings. People with disabilities often encounter physical and social barriers to full participation. Understanding patterns of belonging and exclusion is essential to creating more inclusive communities.
Threats to Belonging
Various forces can undermine belonging. Discrimination and prejudice send direct messages of exclusion. Economic inequality creates separate worlds where affluent and struggling Canadians rarely interact. Geographic sorting concentrates like-minded people together, reducing exposure to difference. Polarized politics can divide communities into hostile camps. Social media may connect like-minded individuals while fostering conflict with others. When belonging weakens, people may retreat into smaller identity groups, reinforcing divisions.
Understanding Voice
What Voice Means
Voice is the capacity to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect one's life and community. It includes formal political voice—voting, running for office, engaging in democratic processes—and informal voice—being heard in workplaces, organizations, and public conversations. Voice is not just the ability to speak but the experience of being listened to and having one's perspective taken seriously. A society where some voices are routinely ignored or dismissed lacks genuine voice for all.
Barriers to Voice
Many Canadians face barriers to exercising meaningful voice. Lack of information or civic knowledge limits effective participation. Language barriers exclude some from public conversations. Time constraints from work and caregiving leave little energy for civic engagement. Distrust of institutions may lead people to disengage entirely. Some face active suppression of voice through intimidation or structural exclusion. Those whose perspectives differ from dominant narratives may find that speaking up brings criticism or dismissal.
Voice in Digital Spaces
Digital technologies have both expanded and complicated voice. Social media allows anyone to publish, potentially reaching wide audiences. Marginalized groups have used digital tools to organize and amplify perspectives previously excluded from mainstream discourse. Yet digital spaces also create new problems: harassment that silences vulnerable voices, algorithmic amplification of extreme content, misinformation that distorts public understanding. The democratization of voice through technology is incomplete and contested.
Understanding Social Trust
What Social Trust Means
Social trust is confidence that others will generally behave honestly and considerately—that strangers will not cheat you, that institutions will function fairly, that agreements will be honoured. High-trust societies can cooperate more easily, transact with lower costs, and solve collective problems more effectively. Low-trust societies require more enforcement, generate more conflict, and struggle with collective action. Trust is a social resource that, like other resources, can be built up or depleted.
Types of Trust
Trust operates at different levels. Interpersonal trust is confidence in specific individuals—family, friends, neighbours. Social trust is generalized confidence in unknown others. Institutional trust is confidence in organizations—governments, courts, media, corporations. These types are related but distinct; one can trust friends while distrusting strangers, or trust local institutions while distrusting national ones. Healthy societies generally require reasonable levels of all three, though patterns vary across cultures.
Trust in Canada
Survey data suggests that trust in Canada, while still relatively high by international standards, has declined in recent decades. Trust in government varies with political context and has been particularly strained by polarization. Trust in media has fallen significantly as the information environment has fragmented. Interpersonal trust remains higher but shows generational and regional variation. These trends are not unique to Canada but reflect broader patterns across Western democracies.
How These Elements Connect
Reinforcing Cycles
Belonging, voice, and trust reinforce each other in virtuous or vicious cycles. When people feel they belong, they are more likely to participate, giving them voice. Having voice builds confidence that the community responds to their concerns, building trust. Trust makes belonging feel secure, completing the cycle. Conversely, exclusion breeds disengagement, which reduces voice, which depletes trust, which deepens exclusion. Intervening in vicious cycles requires attention to all three elements.
Inequality Effects
Economic and social inequality affects all three elements. Those with resources have more capacity to participate and more confidence that their voice matters. They belong to networks of influence that others cannot access. They can trust systems that work reasonably well for them. Those without resources may feel like outsiders in their own communities, voiceless in decisions that shape their lives, unable to trust systems that consistently fail them. Addressing belonging, voice, and trust without addressing inequality is incomplete.
Identity and Division
Identity groups provide belonging for their members but can also become bases for division. When identities become politicized—when partisan, ethnic, religious, or other identities become primary and opposing—they may strengthen in-group belonging while weakening broader social cohesion. Voice for one group may come at the expense of others. Trust across group lines may collapse. Managing identity in ways that maintain both particular belonging and broader social cohesion is a persistent challenge.
Building Stronger Foundations
Inclusive Institutions
Institutions that genuinely include diverse Canadians build belonging. This means not just formal access but substantive inclusion—leadership that reflects diversity, decision-making that incorporates diverse perspectives, cultures that welcome difference. Schools, workplaces, civic organizations, and government agencies all have roles to play. Inclusion cannot be mere performance; it requires changing who has power and how decisions are made.
Deliberative Democracy
Deliberative democratic practices—citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, structured public dialogue—can strengthen voice and trust simultaneously. When citizens participate directly in discussing and deciding issues, they experience their voice mattering. Exposure to others' perspectives can build understanding across difference. Seeing that their participation influences outcomes builds trust. Canada has experimented with such practices but has not institutionalized them widely.
Bridging Social Capital
Social capital that bridges across groups—connections between different communities rather than only within them—builds broader belonging and trust. Opportunities for cross-group interaction through shared activities, mixed neighbourhoods, integrated schools, and diverse workplaces all contribute. These connections do not happen automatically in a society that tends toward sorting and segregation; they require intentional design and investment.
Truth and Accountability
Trust requires that institutions be trustworthy—that they actually function fairly and honestly. Anti-corruption measures, transparency, accountability mechanisms, and effective governance all matter. Where institutions have failed—as with the treatment of Indigenous peoples, or historical discrimination against various groups—acknowledgment and redress can rebuild trust. Empty rhetoric without genuine accountability deepens distrust.
Challenges and Tensions
Disagreement Without Division
Democratic societies inevitably involve disagreement. The question is whether disagreement can occur within a framework of shared belonging and mutual trust, or whether it spirals into division and hostility. Healthy societies can disagree about policies while maintaining commitment to shared institutions and respect for opponents. Achieving this requires norms and practices that are currently under strain.
Inclusion and Standards
Building belonging requires welcoming diverse people and perspectives. But belonging in a political community also requires some shared commitments—to democratic norms, to basic human rights, to peaceful dispute resolution. Tension can arise between inclusion and these standards. A society that tolerates intolerance faces difficult questions about the limits of belonging.
Digital Transformation
Digital technologies are transforming how belonging, voice, and trust operate. Online communities provide belonging for those who find none locally. Digital tools give voice to previously marginalized perspectives. But they also enable harassment, misinformation, and polarization. Navigating this transformation requires understanding both the opportunities and the risks, and developing new norms and institutions for digital public life.
Questions for Further Discussion
- What can communities do to help those who feel excluded develop a sense of belonging?
- How can political systems be reformed to give citizens more meaningful voice between elections?
- What would it take to rebuild trust in institutions that have lost public confidence?
- How can digital spaces be designed or regulated to support belonging, voice, and trust rather than undermine them?
- What responsibilities do individuals have for building social trust in their own communities and interactions?