GMCDI In the News

March 19, 2007
Quebec group looks to map out Montreal's anglophone community
www.cbc.ca
Canadian Press

 

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 keeping the city's English 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 is 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."

They are 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 mishmash," 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 partially funded by Canada's Heritage Department.

The $165,000 grant helped pay for papers on six topics key to the Anglo community: demographics, economics, health and social services, education, arts and culture and levels of social participation such as volunteering and voting.

© The Canadian Press, 2007