Public square | Quebec identity is not in danger of extinction

Occasionally, Dialogue invites a personality to share their point of view on an issue or question that affects us all. Journalist and host Noémi Mercier is today interested in the statistical data from the latest Canadian census and its identity implications.

Something curious happened between the last two censuses of the Canadian population. The number of people who identify as Quebecois of origin has quintupled!

Pardon ? The Quebec identity, whose feared extinction justifies more and more policies, fuels more and more discourse, far from retreating, has made a giant leap in five years?

I came across this data by chance, buried in a publication on ethnocultural diversity in the country ^⁠1. In seeking to understand what this is all about, I plunged into a statistical-existential quest which led me to rethink the very notion of identity – the one which occupies a growing place in public debate, and the more intimate one, with which I juggle deep inside.

The way we tell ourselves where we come from and the epithets we choose to affirm who we are are eminently personal. They are also malleable. They continually evolve depending on the environment in which we live, the socio-political climate and even the way in which the question is asked.

Allow me a detour through the little history of “Canadian” identity, which is very instructive in this regard.

For a long time, the share of the population that claimed Canadian origins was so tiny that Statistics Canada did not even count it. The majority of citizens continued to refer to their European roots, even if they date back to colonization. The tide turned in the early 1990s. From a measly half a percent in the 1986 census, the proportion of “Canadians of origin” climbed to… 31% in 1996, then to more than 40% in 2001 , before dropping back to around a third during the following cycles ^⁠2.

Context and technical detail

Two factors could have awakened this surge of identity, according to the specialists who dissected it^⁠3. First, the socio-political context: faced with the prospect of an increasingly mixed society, and given the rise of the sovereignist movement following the failure of the Meech Lake agreement, more Canadians wanted to demonstrate their support for a common nation. (A right-wing daily even organized, in 1991, a campaign called “Count Me Canadian!” to encourage people to declare themselves “Canadian” in the census.) Then, a methodological subtlety also changed the course of things: From 1996, the word “Canadian” appeared in the list of origins cited as examples in the form. The conditions were ripe for a greater number of people to recognize themselves in this label, and adopt it to define themselves.

There may also be something behind the sudden increase in the number of “original Quebecers”: a newly favorable context for the expression of Quebec “pride”. ^⁠4combined with a technical detail.

In 2021, Statistics Canada replaced the examples that were included directly in the questionnaire (which were considered to guide the responses) with a hyperlink giving access to a list of 500 possible origins. Among these was the word “Québécois,” which had never before been offered as an example. Suddenly, almost 1 million people grasped this name; five years earlier, there were less than 200,000. And this is how “Québécois” rose to third place among the most often cited origins in Quebec, behind “Canadian” and “French”. In 2016, she was only the eighth^⁠5.

For me, if there is one conclusion to draw from this changing data, it is that our conception of identity is very narrow, very rigid. I like to believe that identity is neither a fossil nor a straitjacket. It is porous and flexible, sensitive to circumstances, open to the four winds.

Ethnicity

I was not at the end of my surprises in my statistical-identity quest. While some are rethinking their origins, others are changing their minds about their ethnicity, that is to say, belonging to the white majority or a visible minority. A few years ago, two researchers undertook to compare the responses provided by 1 million adults in two successive censuses, in 2006 and 2011. In the space of five years, almost one in ten Canadians had changed group ethnic ^⁠6 !

Mixed people were the most likely to change their minds. Often, after checking two boxes in 2006, they only retained one of the two in 2011, or vice versa. For example, 57% of people who identified themselves as “White and Black” one year offered a different answer the other year; 80% of those who said they were “White and Latino” and 81% of those who said they were “White and Arab” also changed their response between the two censuses.

Their choice depended in particular on their place of residence: people tended to marry the ethnicity of their neighbors.

Thus, someone born to a white father and a black mother will be more inclined to describe themselves as black if they live in an area where others have this skin color. Identity does not exist in isolation; we sometimes need the mirror of others to recognize it in ourselves.

We all experience these fluctuations when we travel: we can feel more Montrealer than ever in Baie-Comeau, resolutely Quebecois in Toronto and fundamentally Canadian in Texas. For people who live between several cultures, these comings and goings can even be daily.

A UQAM professor specializing in intercultural psychology, Marina Doucerain, asked around a hundred people from immigrant backgrounds to record, in a logbook, the cultural allegiances that held them at various times of the day. The volunteers assigned themselves an average of five distinct identities (such as “Montrealer”, “Asian” or “Chinese-Canadian”), and they alternated from one to the other depending on who they were talking to and where they were. or what they were doing^⁠7.

For Marina Doucerain and other specialists of this school of thought, there is nothing to deplore here. These back and forths are not necessarily a sign of unfinished integration or an ambivalence that needs to be corrected. In their eyes – and I admit that this idea is of great comfort to me – it is rather a reflection of the very nature of identity. A perpetual waltz between different scores, which overlap and intersect and are recomposed, without disappearing.

1. Consult the article “The Canadian census, a rich portrait of ethnocultural and religious diversity in the country” on the Statistics Canada website

2. These figures include those who identify as Canadian “simply” and those who identify as Canadian in combination with other origins.

3. Consult a study of Canadian Studies in Population (in English)

4. Read the column “Pride in question”

5. Canadian origin, which previously occupied a privileged place in the questionnaire, found itself buried in a list of hundreds of others. Result: in 2021, the proportion of respondents identifying as Canadian fell by half, to 16%.

6. Consult the study “Churning races in Canada: Visible minority response change between 2006 and 2011” (in English)

7. Check out a study fromInternational Journal of Intercultural Relations (in English)

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