Quebec’s Uninhabitable Community: Identity and Community among Anglo-Quebecer Out-Migrants
Abstract
How do Anglo-Quebecers who have migrated to Ontario in the past 45 years perceive and negotiate their identity in relation to Quebec? Since 1971, 600 000 anglophones have left Quebec for other parts of Canada. This out-migration coincided with political tensions that influenced a complete economic and linguistic shift in power from English to French. The symbolic and literal reclamation of Quebec as a French province set the conditions for the partial erasure of the Quebec anglophone (Anglo-Quebecer) community and sense of identity. From a series of semi-structured interviews with anglophones who left Quebec within the past 45 years, I illustrate how Quebec’s monolingual French language ideology has created a sense of identity and community that is “uninhabitable” for Anglo-Quebecer out-migrants. These migrants are researchable as a community but are not socially accepted or visible as one in broader society. The French nationalist discourse in Quebec no longer recognizes their presence or their language. This study contributes to the broader research on Canadian linguistic minorities and decolonisation efforts in Quebec by focusing on the Anglo-Quebecers that migrated from the Montreal area to the Greater Toronto Area, where previous research has only focused on Anglophones still living in Quebec.