Census fix shows fall in Quebec anglophone numbers
OTTAWA — Quebec’s anglophone population is declining, rather than booming, Statistics Canada said Thursday as the agency officially corrected a census finding that stoked political fires in Quebec’s emotionally charged language debate.
The change is the result of a computer error that recorded 55,000 people in last year’s census as English speakers, when they really had French as their mother tongue. Correcting the mistake cut the increase in the anglophone population in half and pushed the francophone population up by more than 145,000 between 2011 and 2016.
Statistics Canada officials suggested the revisions did little to change the overall narrative captured in the census that showed an increase in the number of French speakers in the country, largely driven by Quebec.
The country’s revised bilingualism rate dropped to 17.9 per cent from 18 per cent, but remains at an all-time high.
The census data originally indicated about one-half of the 57,325 increase in Quebec’s anglophones over five years came from outside Montreal, a finding that puzzled experts, given trend lines and other information like school enrolment figures that pointed in the opposition direction.
What officials found was that a mistake in the online prompts for 61,000 respondents who did a follow-up step when they failed to complete the questionnaire and then had their answered flipped. A panel of outside experts reviewed the corrections before Statistics Canada released the figures almost a week after publicly reporting the mistake.
About 40 per cent of the wrongly classified responses were in Montreal.
Jean-Pierre Corbeil, who heads the census language division at Statistics Canada, said the changes were more dramatically felt in communities with small English-speaking populations. In Quebec City, instead of some 6,400 anglophones residing in the city, there were about 660.
Statistics Canada now says anglophones make up 7.5 per cent of Quebec’s population, rather than 8.1 per cent, and that English as a mother tongue declined by two-tenths of a percentage point in the overall share of the population between 2011 and 2016, instead of an increase of four-tenths of a percentage point, as first reported.
“From a community standpoint, these things are quite significant,” said Jack Jedwab, executive vice-president of the Association for Canadian Studies, who first flagged the issue. “So I’m not following in terms of the way it’s being communicated that you can describe this as minimal in any way or a slight decrease to use those words.”