GMCDI In the News

March 19, 2007
Mapping out a widening anglo divide
We're now polarized into old-stock haves, immigrant have-nots
The Gazette
Jeff Heinrich

 

What is a Montreal anglophone?

It used to be an easy question to answer. A Montreal anglo is someone who grew up in English and still speaks it - point final.

But with immigration now the main source keeping the city's anglo communities afloat, and with Quebec's French-language laws diluting the pool of English-only citizens, it's getting hard to define just what an anglo is.

It's not even clear whether most anglos want to be identified that way in French-speaking Quebec.

The Quebec Community Groups Network wants to know why.

The umbrella group of 24 anglo community organizations is working on a special project called the Greater Montreal Community Development Initiative.

It's mapping out the demographic and day-to-day realities of Montreal's 700,000 anglos - 400,000 whose mother tongue is English and 300,000 allophones who speak English regularly.

Together, those English-speakers are "Canada's largest official-language minority," more numerous than francophones outside Quebec but poorly represented because they are ill-defined, according to the network.

"We're trying to examine not only what (the anglo community's) concerns and needs are, but also to examine what it is, what it looks like," said Derek Taylor, a retired Montreal school board administrator who chairs the project.

"The community is kind of a mish-mash," he said, noting that one in two anglos now living in the city was born outside Quebec, while one in three is an immigrant.

Besides a weak sense of collective identity, Montreal anglos face a number of other issues: demographic stagnation, high levels of unemployment and a widening divide between older, wealthier anglos and younger, poorer immigrant families.

The network's project is funded with a $165,000 grant from the federal Heritage Department.

So far, that's helped pay for the drafting of a series of lengthy and statistics-filled discussion papers on six topics key to the anglo community: its demographics, economic situation, health and social services, education, arts and culture, and levels of social participation such as volunteering and voting.

In the first two weeks of March, those papers were used as the starting point of five small-scale community meetings organized in different parts of Montreal, including the West Island, the South Shore and Laval.

Next up is a large public forum to be held at a downtown hotel on April 11, six more meetings in April and May to debate each of the sectors covered in the discussion papers, and finally a report summing up all the discussions and findings, to be made public in the summer.

Why all this activity now?

Because anglos are at a crossroads in their history and need to organize themselves better to be heard in Quebec's corridors of power, the people behind the project say.

They're not alone. Ottawa also funds another anglo umbrella group, the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network, which promotes knowledge of the province's English-speaking history.

On April 1 at the McCord Museum, that group is holding a "heritage summit" to promote links with what it calls "English-speaking Montrealers who do not define their cultural identity strictly in terms of British ancestry," including Mohawks, blacks, Italians, Jews, south Asians and Greeks.

The introspection and bridge-building marks a change from what used to be called the "angryphone" approach of such

anglo rights defenders of the 1990s as Howard Galganov, William Johnson and Alliance Quebec, the veteran lobby group that disbanded in 2005 after Heritage pulled its financing.

Now, if anyone's talking about a linguistic divide, it's not between the anglos and the francophone majority, or even between rival anglo political factions. It's between ordinary anglophones themselves, the rich ones and the poor ones.

"The anglophone community is increasingly polarized into two groups at opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum," the Development Initiative states in one of its discussion papers.

"One group is highly educated, bilingual and well-equipped to succeed in Quebec society. The other is poorly educated, less bilingual and faces challenges to fully participate in society."

The better-off anglos are older and have better networks to make money and contacts. The worse-off are immigrants who are often young and inexperienced, with few established networks to draw on, another of the papers points out.

Immigrant anglos are more often unemployed (11.1 per cent compared with 8.4 per cent of the city's Canadian-born anglos) or simply out of the labour force entirely, people like students, homemakers and farm workers idle in winter (40.1 per cent compared with 34.8 per cent of Quebec-born anglos).

With this divide widening with increasing immigration, and with such other issues looming as access to English-language education in an era of declining enrolment, what will Montreal's anglo community of tomorrow look like?

That's anyone's guess, but a lot will depend on what the numbers show.

"The new federal census data from 2005 is just starting to leak out now," Taylor said, referring to the release by Statistics Canada last week of the first census data to become available, on national population growth and places of residence.

"Once we get the newer data, we'll be incorporating that into our documentation," Taylor said, and from there, start to get some real, up-to-date answers.

For more on anglos in Quebec, to read the discussion papers and learn more about upcoming activities, go to the Quebec Community Groups Network's website at www.qcgn.com and the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network's site at www.qahn.org.

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Where the most anglophones are

Montreal 244,295

Laval 53,390

Dollard des Ormeaux 33,788

St. Laurent 32,308

LaSalle 31,738

Communities with the highest concentrations of anglophones

Municipality by % by number

Montreal West 77.3 3,990

Cote St. Luc 77.1 22,475

Westmount 75.1 14,550

Hudson 73.6 3,523

Pointe Claire 71.4 20,758

Dollard

des Ormeaux 70.6 33,788

Beaconsfield 70.2 13,478

Source: Statistics Canada's 2001 federal census