Quebec diaspora

The Quebec diaspora refers to the hundreds of thousands 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 Quebecois 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, and the "pull" of industrialization in New England, approximately 900,000 residents of Quebec (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. 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.

The second exodus

A second mass exodus, this time by English-speaking Quebecers, occurred from the 1960s onwards, in the the years following the acts of terrorism, its culmination in 1970 with the October Crisis, and the election in 1976 of the separatist Parti Quebecois 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 made 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, and those so-called "allophones", the more recent twentieth century immigrants, mostly from Europe, both felt the need to re-evaluate their home in Canada. 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.

The largest single benefator 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.

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.

References

• Bélanger, Claude (2001-08-09). "Franco-American History" (HTML). Québec History, Claude Bélanger, Marianopolis College. Retrieved 2007-01-31. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

• Roby, Yves (2004). Franco-American of New England. Dreams and Realities. Septentrion. pp. 550 pages. ISBN ISBN 2-89448-391-0. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |coauthors= and |month= (help)

See also

• diaspora
• French Canadians
• English-speaking Quebecer
• French Americans
• Canuck Letter
• Little Canadas