Letter: Counting anglophones in Quebec’s civil service
By QCGN DG Sylvia Martin-Laforge, The Gazette
In our appearance before the commission studying Bill 14 on Thursday, the question of how many English-speaking Quebecers are working for the provincial civil service was raised.
Counting Quebec’s English-speaking minority population is a tricky business, because who gets counted depends on who is counting.
Using data from the Canadian census, there are generally three ways to count the English-speaking community of Quebec: mother tongue, corrected mother tongue and first official language spoken. Of course Canada has two official languages (English and French), while Quebec only has one (French).
The government of Quebec defines anglophones as citizens whose mother tongue (first language learned and still understood) is English. The data from the 2011 census was 599,225 people. So people using this approach say there are 600,000 anglophones in Quebec.
