Ottawa Citizen

StatCan blames computer error for Quebec towns’ excess anglos

- JORDAN PRESS

Statistics Canada has to correct the census results from thousands of Canadians after finding an error in its system that reported unusually high increases in the number of English speakers in some smaller Quebec communitie­s.

Instead, it appears that about 61,000 of those reporting English as a mother tongue were actually French speakers, but their answers were flipped by a computer error.

In Quebec, the jump in Englishlan­guage speakers caused emotional ripples, with provincial politician­s talking about legislativ­e means to ensure the survival of the French language in the province.

The announceme­nt Friday was an embarrassi­ng admission from the internatio­nally renowned agency after it faced increasing pressure this week to double-check all of its data.

“We have an important responsibi­lity to ensure the accuracy of these figures and we also want to be sure that we have a thoughtful and well-informed discussion, particular­ly here in Quebec where the issue is a bit emotional,” said Jack Jedwab, executive vice-president of the Associatio­n for Canadian Studies, who first flagged the issue.

The census data on language released last week indicated roughly one-half of the 57,325 increase in the number of anglophone­s in the province over five years came from outside of Montreal.

Jedwab quickly began to question the increased number of English speakers in small communitie­s in Quebec far from major urban centres like Montreal, where English is often spoken.

Drilling down into the numbers, Jedwab said he found that English as a mother tongue was doubling or tripling over a five-year period in predominan­tly francophon­e communitie­s like Trois-Rivieres, Riviere-du-Loup and Dolbeau-Mistassini.

Statistics Canada did a sweeping review and blamed a now-fixed computer programmin­g error as the culprit. The agency is crunching all the census data again and expects to have revised linguistic data available next week.

“We were reporting that the proportion of people reporting speaking English only was slightly up in Quebec, French proportion­ately was slightly down across the country including in Quebec. Those stories will most likely remain the same, but the magnitude of those changes since 2011 will change slightly,” said Marc Hamel, director general of the census program.

Hamel said officials have also done a check of all other data released to date from last year’s census and haven’t found any other issues.

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