Townshippers release new data on English community vitality

English speaking communities in the Eastern Townships are, for the most part, less well paid, older, and not as well educated as their French speaking counterparts according to results published yesterday in a report by the Townshippers’ Association and the Community Health and Social services network (CHSSN). The report draws its information from an analysis of the 2016 census conducted by Dr. Joanne Pocock, and is meant to help support the work of the association in promoting and supporting the interests of the local Englishspeaking minority language community.

“An up-to-date knowledge base is really important for the Townshippers’ Association because it’s the basis for our development of grants, our discussions with stakeholders from all departments and levels of government and our regional stakeholders,” said Townshippers’

Executive Director Rachel Hunting, explaining that the association shared the data to help other local organizations who might not have the resources on hand to comb through census data themselves.

The report, entitled “Socio-demographic Profile of the English-speaking Community of the Historical Eastern Townships,” looks at the CLSC territories within the boundaries of the region that the Townshippers work within, including the whole of the Estrie and parts of the Centre-du-québec, Chaudière-appalaches, and Montérégie administrative regions, in order to try to identify key statistics about the local English speaking populations.

According to the data, there are 1,097,925 individuals living in Québec whose first official language is English. This represents 13.9 per cent of the overall population of the province and is up slightly from the 2011 numbers, when the English speaking population was recorded as 1,058,248.

In the Historical Eastern Townships, the 2016 census recorded 39,670 English speakers, or 5.8 per cent of the overall population, the majority of whom reside in the Cowansville-farnham-bedford, Sherbrooke and Memphrémagog territories.

According to the report, English-speaking populations have a slightly lower proportion of youth 0-14 years of age than their French-speaking counterparts, although the gap is wider in some regions than in others. In the Acton Regional County Municipality (MRC), for example, French speaking youth make up 17.4 per cent of their language group whereas the area registers no English speaking children at all. On the other hand, the proportion of children in the English populations of the Les Appalaches and Coaticook MRCS is actually higher than that of the French language group.

By contrast to those youth figures, the proportion of people 65 years of age and older in the local English speaking populations is higher than the French in 11 out of 14 regions, and 52.6 per cent of English speakers in the Townships are 45 or older.

Provincially seniors make up 14.5 per cent of the English-speaking population, but in the Townships that figure sits at 22.5 per cent with only the Les Appalaches region not surpassing the provincial norm.

On the education front, 53.2% of Englishspeakers residing in the Historical Eastern Townships had a high school diploma or less in 2016 compared to 45.2% of the French-speaking population in the region. That figure rises to 62.4 per cent in youth 15-29 years of age.

Regionally, despite showing higher levels of higher education, only 18.9% of the Englishspeaking population earned an annual salary of $50,000 or more in 2016 compared to 23.5% of their French-speaking counterparts

A second report focusing specifically on youth aged 15 to 29 in the Province reveals that this demographic actually represents a higher proportion of the English population(20.5 per cent) than French youth of the same age do to theirs (17.5 per cent).

English-speaking youth are more likely to be members of a visible minority community, and are significantly more likely to be low-income earners (defined as $20,000 or less per year) or unemployed.

The full text of the reports is available on the Townshippers’ website at http://townshippers.qc.ca/research/