Talk of decline and ‘exodus’ comes easily to Quebec commentators, but federal figures are far more realistic
by David Winch, October 1, 2017
MONTREAL – The touchiness in Quebec about demographic issues could be described, apologies to Jane Austen, as census and sensibility. Following the release of the 2016 mid-term federal census (in August 2017), reactions to population numbers were strongly affected by one’s political intuitions.
Surprisingly vivid fears were aroused by tepid census figures. These showed tiny changes, up or down, for the major language groups. On the French side, as critic Robert Everett-Green outlined (Globe and Mail, Aug. 19, 2017 (https://tinyurl.com/Globe-2017-on-Franco-fears), a vocal minority fans embers of insecurity. Few weekends’ Le Devoir would be complete with a doomsaying op-ed.
But Anglos’ chronic misreading of population trends was just as outsized. English Quebecers and their media, unsettled by the astounding social revolution of the 1970s, have historically overstated their losses. Many such “anxiety stats” are relayed uncritically in the broader Canadian media, even if they are irreconcilable with the census or mathematically impossible.
Apocalyptic narrative
I had experience of this distortion at an online news forum in mid-2017, when I ventured that the 2016 federal census showed the English Quebec population was “basically stable”. This notion was immediately shouted down. —No! retorted one indignant poster: There was “a 600k loss … the greatest mass migration in Canadian history!”
The federal census doesn’t support this apocalyptic view. It reports that Anglo numbers — using the most current and active category of “language spoken most often at home” — are indeed largely stable. There were 782,185 English home speakers in 2016, compared to 767,415 in 2011. The share of English-speakers so defined has bobbled up and down around the 10 per cent mark of Quebec’s population for decades.
Ottawa decision-makers have relied on somewhat higher figures. Hence a 2003 Privy Council Office document reported that, while in 1971 there were 887,875 people in Quebec using English as their main home language, 30 years later in 2001, that figure was 746,895 people or 10.5 per cent of the provincial population. In 2009, the Office of the Commissioner for Official Languages reported that, using the broader criterion of “first official language learned”, which also accounts for the languages adopted by new immigrants, there were 1,058,250 English speakers in Quebec, or roughly 13.5 per cent of the population.
Such evidence of the Anglo community’s stability has proven unappealing to the English Canadian media. An “exodus infatuation” is common in the information business. One documentary film-maker bemoans the departure of “over 600,000” Anglos, a number that doesn’t match any census totals. The usually astute Montreal Gazette cartoonist Aislin commented off-handedly in a July 2017 review of his caricatures on Anglo themes that “perhaps 800,000 people had left” Quebec. Not to be outdone, an agitated Conrad Black opined in 2010* that the oppressive policies of Quebec had “driven a million people out of the province” and prompted “15 per cent of its population to flee”.
1970s social upheaval
Luckily, serious analyses are available. The same year as Black’s bombastic guesstimates, a team of three demography professionals at Statistics Canada (Jean-Pierre Corbeil, Brigitte Chavez and Daniel Pereira) drafted an “analytical paper” probing for the truth about anglophone numbers (see https://tinyurl.com/UOttawa-study-on-Anglo-numbers ).
The StatsCan researchers concluded that in the 1970s — the big-bang years for social upheaval in Quebec, between the 1971 to 1981 censuses — the number of English mother-tongue speakers declined by 11.9 per cent. This meant a net drop of 96,345 people. That demographic shock visibly slimmed a deeply rooted community.
After 1981, losses from net-migration slowed sharply, but chronic declines continued through the 1980s and ’90s for a total outflow of 178,696.
However, after 2000, Anglo numbers stabilized and started to grow again, rising by 2.7 per cent between the 2001 and 2006 censuses, faster than the Quebec average and remaining steady since then. These figures denote a shaken but resilient community. Most important, they are nothing like the apocalyptic scenarios that some observers offer.
Steadily growing
Since 1970 Quebec has grown steadily, jumping by at least half a million people in every census decade. There has never been any net population loss for the province. It has grown from just under 6 million people to 8.5 million today. Overall, Quebec has been quite dynamic, adding 2.4 million new residents, compared for example to the 2.5 million added to the population of Alberta in the same period. The most similar-sized U.S. state in 1970 was Massachusetts, with just under 5.7 million people compared to Quebec’s 5.9 million. Since then QC has surged ahead, gaining 2.4 million new people compared to Mass’s much slower 1.1 million gain. New Quebecers have come largely from immigration, but also from net births and deaths and interprovincial movements. Those gains have accelerated with a strong economy.
The more assertive Quebec of the 1970s was a shock that some Anglos rejected, while most others just carried on. In the short and medium terms, the emergence of French as the economic language sparked a net loss of English people, aided also by the westward tilt of the Canadian economy.
But the term “exodus” denotes the mass movement of a people, often leading to their demise. No such phenomenon is occurring in English Quebec, nor certainly for French-speakers.
The federal census offers no basis for apocalyptic fears. But however fanciful or mathematically impossible, such culturally loaded headcounts are a Rorschach blot onto which we project cultural fears.
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* Conrad Black replied in 2011 to some comments I made about Quebec demography, writing in his National Post blog: “I don’t know why David Winch feels that an increase of 1.7 million people in Quebec” is anything to cheer about.
OK, maybe it isn’t an extraordinarily high growth rate; but it does entirely contradict Black’s amateur demography.
