The institutionalisation of minority communities in Canada: from political communities to community policies? As an enigmatic object, communities are the topic of original analyses in Canada, which are nevertheless embedded in the dichotomy between “society-centred” and “state-centred” approaches of the politics identity. In this paper, we propose a neo-institutionalist perspective of minority communities that helps to apprehend communities as the result of the interaction between the group’s (internal) social dynamics and the (external) nation-building public policies implemented by the federal government. The first part of the paper is devoted to scientific literature on minority identities which, in terms of regional nationalism or institutional completeness, considers that communities are mini-polities where the use of identity allows a collective management of community issues. In a second part, we examine recent literature suggesting that formally “weak” North American states should be considered as having a strong effective capacity for action, an “infrastructural power” to construct a meta-polity. The federal state has thus implemented community public policies that construct communities consistent with its strategies for nation-building. The conclusion focuses on the “nature” of the minority communities in Canada to question the relevance of the concept of “institutional completeness” as a bottom-up response to the top-down governmentality of the federal state.