Quebec diaspora

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The Quebec diaspora refers to the millions of people who left the province of Quebec for the United States, Ontario and the Canadian prairies between 1840 and the Great Depression of the 1930s as well as those who began to leave during the 1960s following the Front de libération du Québec terrorism and the election of a Separatist Parti Québécois government in 1976.

Brought on by the "push" of overpopulation in rural areas that could not sustain themselves under the seigneurial system of land tenure, but also because the expansion of this system was in effect blocked by the "Family Compact" that ruled the Province of Quebec under the new British governors, who reserved new land developments for the English and the English system of colonization (see Eastern Townships) and the "pull" of industrialization in New England, approximately 900,000 residents of Quebec^[1] (French Canadian for the great majority) left for the United States seeking work. About half of those are reported to have eventually returned to Quebec.^[2] Often those who stayed organized themselves in communities sometimes known as Little Canadas. A great proportion of Americans with French ancestry trace it through Quebec. Certain early American centers of textile manufacturing and other industries attracted significant French-Canadian populations, like Fall River, Holyoke, and Lowell in Massachusetts; Woonsocket in Rhode Island; Manchester in New Hampshire and the bordering counties in Vermont and Maine. There are also sizeable populations of French-Canadian descent in Michigan and Minnesota — who began migrating there when the region was still part of New France.^{[citation needed]}

Contents 1 The second exodus 2 Notes 3 References 4 See also

[edit] The second exodus

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A second important exodus, this time by English-speaking Quebecers, occurred from the 1960s onwards, in the years following the acts of terrorism, its culmination in 1970 with the October Crisis, and the election in 1976 of the separatist Parti Québécois government. The 1977 adoption of the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) transformed Quebec from a traditionally bilingual province into a unilingual French province. The law helped the francophone majority economically and culturally, but made some non-francophones feel unwelcome and uncomfortable. Those anglophone Quebecers who had had roots for several hundred years in the province, where 18th century English and Scots-Quebecer immigrant entrepreneurs, and their descendants, had built the business infrastructure that allowed the province to keep pace with the growth in the United States and turned Montreal into an economic powerhouse and the finance capital of all Canada, ^[3] and many so-called "allophones", the more recent twentieth century immigrants, mostly from Europe, both felt the need to re-evaluate their home in Canada. This relates to those allophones who mostly assimilated to English rather than French, a problem for the majority culture in Quebec that the law attempted to correct (and did with some success). Another goal of the law was to allow majority Quebecers the right to work in French. The fact that Anglophones dominated business in Quebec since the Conquest was not unrelated to their dominating status and better connections in the British Empire. As a result, advancement was very limited for the vast majority of Quebecers. In the Anglo businesses, the executive jobs were reserved to a WASP boys' club. This was changed thanks to governement mesures and laws like Bill 101 in the 1960s and 70s. Understandably, many privileged Anglos did not accept well this loss of privilege. Those who did not want to accept that Quebec was a majoritarily French state (at 85%), left. The passage of Bill 101 led to an immediate and sustained exodus of anglophones from Quebec that, according to Statistics Canada (2003), since 1971 saw a drop of 599,000 of those Quebecers whose mother tongue was English. ^[4]

The largest single beneficiary of this second outward migration was the city of Toronto, which would rapidly surpass Montreal as the largest city in Canada and displace it as the country's economic hub. ^[5]

William Weintraub made the 1993 documentary film The Rise and Fall of English Montreal National Film Board of Canada which dealt with the Quebec diaspora.

The largest proportion of French-Canadians outside of Quebec trace their ancestry to Quebec (except in the Canadian Maritimes, which were settled by the Acadians).

Noteworthy among those whose parents settled in the United States are writer Jack Kerouac, Robert Goulet, Jonathan Lipnicki and historian Will Durant.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Bélanger, Claude (2001-08-09). Franco-American History (HTML). Québec History, Claude Bélanger, Marianopolis College. Retrieved on 2007-01-31.

• Roby, Yves (2004). Franco-American of New England. Dreams and Realities.. Septentrion, 550 pages. ISBN ISBN 2-89448-391-0. 

[edit] See also

• Diaspora
• French Canadian
• English-speaking Quebecer
• French American
• Canuck Letter
• Little Canadas