Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
On how playing with the census creates problems with the data, cf Canada 2011
The results of the 2011 Canadian census are in, and informative press releases have been coming out, like the release of the 24th of October outlining the changing patterns of language spoken and used in Canada.
There's a problem. I made a series of posts at Demography Matters concentrating on how the desire of the incumbent federal government in Canada to abolish the long-form census, putting questions on identity and such matters off to a voluntary form, would damage the integrity of the data series. Well, as reported by CBC, that happened.
Forgive the extended quote, but it's necessary to make the point.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's cancellation of the long-form census has started to take a toll on Statistics Canada's data.
The agency released its final tranche of the 2011 census last week, focusing on languages, but it included a big warning that cautions data users about comparing key facts against censuses of the past.
"Data users are advised to exercise caution when evaluating trends related to mother tongue and home language that compare 2011 census data to those of previous censuses," Statistics Canada states bluntly in a box included in its census material.
[. . .]
In the past, the language questions were mostly included in the long form, which went to 20 per cent of households. When Harper cancelled the long form, several groups concerned about tracking the vibrancy of French in Canada went to court to make sure information about official language usage was properly collected.
As a result, the Harper government agreed to move the language questions to the short form, which went to 100 per cent of households.
The problem was that the language questions in 2011 were presented in a different context than they were in 2006, explained [Jean-Pierre Corbeil, the lead analyst for the languages part of the 2011 census]. In 2006, they were preceded by other questions about ethnicity and birthplace. Now, they appear suddenly after basic demographic questions.
The context of the questions has changed dramatically, likely prompting people to answer the questions truthfully, but differently, Corbeil said.
"We reviewed everything. Everything is really OK. The only thing is, we know that the responses we get are really influenced by the context and the placement in our questionnaires."
The main problems arise in how respondents reported their mother tongue and the language they spoke at home. Based on what Statistics Canada knows about immigration, there were far too many people claiming to have two mother tongues -- an official language plus a non-official language -- and speak an official language plus another language at home.
What first set off alarm bells for Corbeil was the proportion of people reporting English as a mother tongue. The raw data from the 2011 census told him it was 58 per cent. That was the same percentage as in 2006, but in the meantime, Canada had received about 1.1 million new immigrants.
And Citizenship and Immigration data, as well as Statistics Canada's own research, told him that 80 per cent of those immigrants did not have English or French as a mother tongue.
If people had responded to the 2011 census in the same way as the 2006 census, the proportion of English-speakers "would have been lower," Corbeil said.
He looked further and found more strangeness. Between 2001 and 2006, the census found there was an increase of 946,000 in the number of people who claimed a non-official language as a mother tongue. But between 2006 and 2011, that number dropped to 420,000.
That's less than half the increase noted earlier in the decade, even though immigration levels continued to rise at the same rate.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
A new perspective on Eurabia
The Vancouver Sun's columnist Douglas Todd produced an interesting column, "Do Muslims seek to dominate the West? And could they do it?", with an associated conversation at his blog. It mentions me by name, and perhaps unsurprisingly it also deals with Eurabia.
It is a frightening vision of future Europe, the logic of which Canadians would be wise to monitor.
It goes like this: The population of Europe will be 40-per-cent Muslim by 2020.
Due to high immigration and birthrates, the forewarning declares, Muslims from the Middle East and Africa will soon dominate much, if not all, of European politics, education and the courts.
Some prophets warn Muslims in Europe will impose shariah law on everyone -- banning homosexual relationships, forcing all women to wear headscarves and allowing men (not women) to be polygamous. The continent might as well become known as "Eurasia."
It's a disturbing vision.
Is there anything to it?
- Will hundreds of millions of Muslims soon take over Europe, demographically?
- If they do, would they impose conservative moral values on non-Muslims?
After pointing out the numerous studies demonstrating that Muslims are in fact not taking over Europe demographically, as Muslim immigrants tend to adopt the demographic patterns of their new countries sooner or later, whether through immigration or through completed fertility, Todd--a religion in culture writer--examines the qu
Moderate Muslims are increasingly becoming influential in Europe and North America. I have interviewed Muslim leaders in the Netherlands, such as Turkish immigrant Haci Kraceur, who was encouraging Muslim immigrants to fully embrace the Dutch approach to religious freedom and free speech.
Kraceur's organization, called Milli Gorus or National Vision, was calling on Dutch Muslims to avoid living in all-Muslim neighbourhoods and to open up the country's 400 mosques to everyone with cafes, bakeries and Turkish massage parlours.
I've also talked to the influential European Muslim intellectual, Tariq Ramadan. He's calling on Muslims everywhere to be more "self-critical," while urging Christians, Jews, secularists and others in Europe and North America to resist the temptation to make Muslims the new enemy.
Ramadan, a gracious man and subtle thinker, was recently asked a tough question by a Dutch interviewer: Would Muslim leaders want to ban homosexuality if they ever became a majority in parts of Europe?
Ramadan maintained Muslims don't want to "silently colonize" Europe. As beneficiaries of multiculturalism and human rights, most Muslims, he said, want to respect over-riding Western values, which include tolerating homosexual relationships.
Closer to Canada, Todd also has a long history of interviews with Canadian Muslims.
[T]he Canadian Muslims I have met are a mixed bag when it comes to how seriously they follow their religion. Many Canadian Muslims are basically "non-practising Muslims," like France's Zinedine Zidane.
However, I have talked to many devout Metro Vancouver Muslims, including young people. The teenagers I met are, like many Muslims, left-wing about economic issues, but morally conservative about sex outside marriage, homosexuality and drinking.
They both celebrate and criticize North America's libertarian culture. I was glad they attended public universities and public high schools (even though many others attend separate Muslim schools, which raises legitimate questions).
The Muslim teenagers I met interacted with Canadians from all ethnicities and walks of life. They did so especially through sports teams. Perhaps most important of all, the Muslim teens deeply appreciated the freedom they have in Canada. Most said either they or their parents come from countries in the Middle East and Asia where free speech and association is not at all a given. They were grateful to be in a democratic country.
Douglas Todd is quite right to observe that culture is as much of a factor in Eurabia fantasies as demographics, that Eurabia is the product of an ill-founded existential fear for the future of a culture that can't be explained away by, well, reality. (See the comments at Todd's blog if you don't believe me.) This sort of sloppiness hurts all of us interested in population trends, as I noted last year.
For people like ourselves, interested in researching population trends here at Demography Matters and elsewhere, this sort of rhetoric creates yet another set of myths that have to be debunked. It is interesting to trace out some of the likely population futures of different regions, countries and continents, as is determining the different factors operating in different communities within a given territory. Turning a field that could be filled by an ongoing stream of productive research into an endless cycle of disproved popular mythologies would be boring. More to the point, the constant repetition of myths like the ones enunciated by Romney -- that the European continent is declining, that Europe is threatened by foreigners -- poisons public discourse by legitimating ever more radical statements. If Europeans at large are concerned about the extent to which communities of recent immigrant origin are or are not acculturating to the norms of a wider society and want to influence public policy accordingly, how likely will the debate be calm and rational if many the people who participate seriously believe things scarcely more sophisticated than "OMG the Muslims are going to P3WN Europe"?
Culture certainly plays a role in the study of demographics, especially in multicultural societies like the ones that nearly all of our readers now live in. Understanding the peculiarities of the demographics of the different component groups--the degree and speed of fertility and mortality convergence to national averages, the rate and extent of cultural assimilation, the changing spatial distribution of population, and so on--is very important indeed. But again, we have to make sure that we're not studying their differences all the better to produce alarmist propaganda.
It is a frightening vision of future Europe, the logic of which Canadians would be wise to monitor.
It goes like this: The population of Europe will be 40-per-cent Muslim by 2020.
Due to high immigration and birthrates, the forewarning declares, Muslims from the Middle East and Africa will soon dominate much, if not all, of European politics, education and the courts.
Some prophets warn Muslims in Europe will impose shariah law on everyone -- banning homosexual relationships, forcing all women to wear headscarves and allowing men (not women) to be polygamous. The continent might as well become known as "Eurasia."
It's a disturbing vision.
Is there anything to it?
- Will hundreds of millions of Muslims soon take over Europe, demographically?
- If they do, would they impose conservative moral values on non-Muslims?
After pointing out the numerous studies demonstrating that Muslims are in fact not taking over Europe demographically, as Muslim immigrants tend to adopt the demographic patterns of their new countries sooner or later, whether through immigration or through completed fertility, Todd--a religion in culture writer--examines the qu
Moderate Muslims are increasingly becoming influential in Europe and North America. I have interviewed Muslim leaders in the Netherlands, such as Turkish immigrant Haci Kraceur, who was encouraging Muslim immigrants to fully embrace the Dutch approach to religious freedom and free speech.
Kraceur's organization, called Milli Gorus or National Vision, was calling on Dutch Muslims to avoid living in all-Muslim neighbourhoods and to open up the country's 400 mosques to everyone with cafes, bakeries and Turkish massage parlours.
I've also talked to the influential European Muslim intellectual, Tariq Ramadan. He's calling on Muslims everywhere to be more "self-critical," while urging Christians, Jews, secularists and others in Europe and North America to resist the temptation to make Muslims the new enemy.
Ramadan, a gracious man and subtle thinker, was recently asked a tough question by a Dutch interviewer: Would Muslim leaders want to ban homosexuality if they ever became a majority in parts of Europe?
Ramadan maintained Muslims don't want to "silently colonize" Europe. As beneficiaries of multiculturalism and human rights, most Muslims, he said, want to respect over-riding Western values, which include tolerating homosexual relationships.
Closer to Canada, Todd also has a long history of interviews with Canadian Muslims.
[T]he Canadian Muslims I have met are a mixed bag when it comes to how seriously they follow their religion. Many Canadian Muslims are basically "non-practising Muslims," like France's Zinedine Zidane.
However, I have talked to many devout Metro Vancouver Muslims, including young people. The teenagers I met are, like many Muslims, left-wing about economic issues, but morally conservative about sex outside marriage, homosexuality and drinking.
They both celebrate and criticize North America's libertarian culture. I was glad they attended public universities and public high schools (even though many others attend separate Muslim schools, which raises legitimate questions).
The Muslim teenagers I met interacted with Canadians from all ethnicities and walks of life. They did so especially through sports teams. Perhaps most important of all, the Muslim teens deeply appreciated the freedom they have in Canada. Most said either they or their parents come from countries in the Middle East and Asia where free speech and association is not at all a given. They were grateful to be in a democratic country.
Douglas Todd is quite right to observe that culture is as much of a factor in Eurabia fantasies as demographics, that Eurabia is the product of an ill-founded existential fear for the future of a culture that can't be explained away by, well, reality. (See the comments at Todd's blog if you don't believe me.) This sort of sloppiness hurts all of us interested in population trends, as I noted last year.
For people like ourselves, interested in researching population trends here at Demography Matters and elsewhere, this sort of rhetoric creates yet another set of myths that have to be debunked. It is interesting to trace out some of the likely population futures of different regions, countries and continents, as is determining the different factors operating in different communities within a given territory. Turning a field that could be filled by an ongoing stream of productive research into an endless cycle of disproved popular mythologies would be boring. More to the point, the constant repetition of myths like the ones enunciated by Romney -- that the European continent is declining, that Europe is threatened by foreigners -- poisons public discourse by legitimating ever more radical statements. If Europeans at large are concerned about the extent to which communities of recent immigrant origin are or are not acculturating to the norms of a wider society and want to influence public policy accordingly, how likely will the debate be calm and rational if many the people who participate seriously believe things scarcely more sophisticated than "OMG the Muslims are going to P3WN Europe"?
Culture certainly plays a role in the study of demographics, especially in multicultural societies like the ones that nearly all of our readers now live in. Understanding the peculiarities of the demographics of the different component groups--the degree and speed of fertility and mortality convergence to national averages, the rate and extent of cultural assimilation, the changing spatial distribution of population, and so on--is very important indeed. But again, we have to make sure that we're not studying their differences all the better to produce alarmist propaganda.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The decadent shall inherit the Earth
The concern about excessive aging in developed countries is obviously not limited to this blog but also extends to the governments in question. Among other things, this has lead the OECD to establish the OECD Family database, which is a nice collection of data about things like fertility, public spending on family benefits and child care, parental leave, female employment etc. in the developed world.
One of the more interesting things is the correlation between fertility and the share of births outside wedlock.
The correlation is even clearer when you exclude the formerly communist countries as well as countries like Mexico and Turkey:
Now, obviously this flies in the face of the socially conservative meme that the dissolution of family values leads to the dissolution of society and people becoming too "selfish" to have children. Correlation is not causation, but I do feel that the share of births outside marriage is a useful proxy for how traditional the family structure is. The problem with the traditional family from a demographic perspective is that it often forces the mother to choose between career and children. In very traditional societies, where women do not have the opportunity to pursue careers, this does lead to high fertility rates. But once you give the women the opportunity to pursue careers, the traditional family structure makes them choose, and a lot of them will choose their careers and maybe one child. Countries with more flexible family structures that give women the opportunity to combine their careers with motherhood get a double bonus: both higher female employment rates, since those who would prioritize motherhood in a more traditional society get the chance to work, and higher fertility rates, since those who prioritize their careers have more children. Indeed, an often-noted trend in the demographic literature is the emergence of a strong correlation between female labor force participation rates and fertility in developed countries.
Note that this graph is from 2001. If I had the time to make a more recent one, it would show an even stronger relationship.
One of the more interesting things is the correlation between fertility and the share of births outside wedlock.
The correlation is even clearer when you exclude the formerly communist countries as well as countries like Mexico and Turkey:
Now, obviously this flies in the face of the socially conservative meme that the dissolution of family values leads to the dissolution of society and people becoming too "selfish" to have children. Correlation is not causation, but I do feel that the share of births outside marriage is a useful proxy for how traditional the family structure is. The problem with the traditional family from a demographic perspective is that it often forces the mother to choose between career and children. In very traditional societies, where women do not have the opportunity to pursue careers, this does lead to high fertility rates. But once you give the women the opportunity to pursue careers, the traditional family structure makes them choose, and a lot of them will choose their careers and maybe one child. Countries with more flexible family structures that give women the opportunity to combine their careers with motherhood get a double bonus: both higher female employment rates, since those who would prioritize motherhood in a more traditional society get the chance to work, and higher fertility rates, since those who prioritize their careers have more children. Indeed, an often-noted trend in the demographic literature is the emergence of a strong correlation between female labor force participation rates and fertility in developed countries.
Note that this graph is from 2001. If I had the time to make a more recent one, it would show an even stronger relationship.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Demography and culture: French Canada's fall and Québec's isolation
Over the past few months, Statistics Canada has been releasing data sets and analysis from the 2006 Census. Statistics Canada released information on language use, immigration and citizenship, and inter-provincial migration. The textual analyses at Statistics Canada's website are good, but the interactive map created by the Canadian Press and hosted at CBC.ca is wonderful. Of note is the continuing fall in Francophone numbers and proportions outside of Québec and New Brunswick.
What happened? It's important to note that the belief in a French Canadian revanche des berceaux, of a nationalism-driven birth rate under British occupation that saw every family produce large numbers of children, is a legend. The disparity between Ontarian and Québec (and fertility fertility rates emerged after 1870, when Ontario moved in the direction of a demographic regime characterized by sharply falling death and infant mortality rates in tandem with falling birth rates, while Québec--more conservative, more rural--lagged behind. For a long while, this was enough to keep the Francophone proportion of Canada's population stable at roughly 30%. But then the 1960s hit.
Between 1850 and 1950, owing to a high fertility rate among French Canadian women, the proportion of Francophones in the Canadian population held at 30%. The fertility of the Francophones then dropped below the Canadian average toward the mid-1960s, contributing to a decrease in the proportion of the total Canadian population speaking French as a mother tongue -- from 29% in 1951 to 25% in 1986. Between 1926 and 1960, the fertility rate of women in Quebec moved closer to that of other Canadian women. In effect, the ratio of the fertility rate of Quebec women to other Canadian women dropped from 1.45 in 1926 to 1.30 around 1940 and 1.15 around 1950. Between 1960 and 1970, fertility declined very rapidly. The total fertility rate of women in Quebec dropped from 3.9 to 2.1; the fertility of other Canadian women declined but not so markedly, from 4.0 to 2.5. By 1974, fertility in Quebec had declined to 1.8 children/woman, and by 1986 the fertility rate had fallen still further to 1.4, while that of other Canadian women held at between 1.7 and 1.8. The fertility rate was 20% lower in Quebec in 1986 than in the other provinces. These differences in fertility between Québec and the rest of Canada have significantly affected the demographic situation. Census data have shown that the completed fertility of Francophones was 80% higher than that of Anglophones for women born at the turn of the century, but this gap narrowed rapidly over the years and disappeared for women born between 1931-36.
These differences also affected Francophone populations outside of Québec, as the same source notes, with Francophone TFRs outside of Québec falling not only below the levels of non-Francophone TFRs ("[i]n Ontario [in 1986], the total fertility rate for Francophones was 1.54, compared to 1.61 for Anglophones and 1.75 for the other groups"). The fertility of Québec--perhaps a reasonably good proxy for Francophone Canada as a whole--is not the lowest-low fertility of Italy, and it might well have only anticipated trends in English Canada. Even so, the province of Québec is going to have to deal with relatively low if not negative population growth and relatively rapid aging, further complicated by issues with immigration, as evidenced by the loud debate on the topic of how best to integrate immigrants. (The old endogamy of the pre-1960s period is most certainly gone, even if the problem of dealing with Others remains, as with other peoples and cultures.)
Survival will be an unsurmountable challenge for most Francophone minorities outside of Québec. In most of the rest of Canada, Francophones form significant minorities (and, occasionally, majorities) only in the "bilingual belt" stretching more-or-less along the Québec border. Can this be changed? It's questionable. Francophones outside of Québec once exhibited higher TFRs than Francophones inside Québec, but this situation has reversed itself. In the 1996-2001 period, there was a significant amount of Francophone out-migration to Ontario, New Brunswick, and Alberta, suggesting a certain potential for the revitalization of those communities, but again Francophones in Ontario and Alberta form only a small portion of the population, while the stable Francophone community of New Brunswick has often been a net exporter of population to Québec. Without any remarkable demographic event--a Francophone baby boom,. mass immigrations from Francophone Europe and Africa, et cetera--non-Francophones won't have any particular reason to view French as particularly relevant to their lives. Journalist Chantal Hébert was right to point out in a December 2007 article for The Toronto Star that "French still an abstraction in much of Canada": "[O]utside Quebec, Francophones make up only 4 per cent of the population. With French an abstraction in so many parts of Canada, the motivation to learn it as a second language is decreasing. Because most Anglophones learn French at school, the peak bilingualism rate for Anglophones outside Quebec occurs in the 15 to 19 age range. Over the past decade, it has slipped from 16.3 per cent to 13 per cent. The census also shows the retention rate of Anglophones who have learned the language is slipping." Even in 2001, Statistics Canada discovered that overall, "43.4% of Francophones reported that they were bilingual, compared with 9.0% of Anglophones." For those Francophones living outside of Québec, living in an overwhelmingly non-Francophone society with few if any barriers to intermarriage, these pressures create a perfect environment for language shift. It's not surprising that there was an overall decline in the numbers of Francophones outside of Québec. As Gilles Grenier put it in his paper "Linguistic and Economic Characteristics of Francophone Minorities in Canada: A Comparison of Ontario and New Brunswick" (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (18.8): 1997), in mixed environments
A lot still needs to be learned about what exactly determines assimilation, but it is clear that the fact that Anglophones and Francophones are more mixed together than they used to, mainly because the Canadian society has become more urbanised and communication systems more developed, leads to a more widespread use of the common majority language. If Francophones in Quebec and in New Brunswick have been able to maintain their language, it is because there is a geographical separation between them and the other communities. This does not mean that those Francophones do not use English for some of their economic activities, but at least French is still the dominant language in their own communities. One major reason of the assimilation in Ontario is that there are less and less towns and villages where the majority of the population is French.(299).
This last sentence is critical, since mass language shift from French to English is not unique in the history of North American Francophones. Starting in the late 19th century, relative economic underdevelopment propelled a tremendous migration of Francophones out from their traditional settlement areas along the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence to adjacent parts of the continent. Large and thriving communities of Franco-Americans (concentrated in New England, particularly in that region's industrial cities) and Franco-Ontarians (concentrated in northern and eastern areas adjacent to Québec) formed at this time, encouraging some to believe in the idea of a greater Québec encompassing those communities. That vision failed, as the Franco-American community was whittled away through immigration restrictions and acculturation to the Anglophone culture surrounding them. Franco-Ontarians, who with few exceptions like in Anglophone-majority communities relatively isolated from Québec, may be about to follow. And no, the Francophones who are tourists in Maine or long-term residents in Florida don't make up the same sorts of communities. What the long-term effects of a Québec isolated in its language from most of the rest of Canada and attached to a wider Francophone world and (through a traditional Ameriphilia) to the United States will be on a Canada faced with its own regional challenges, I leave to my readers to speculate.
Why is all this particularly relevant to readers of Demography Matters? Shifting population balances are central to our work here. The shrinkage of working-age populations as aging proceeds is something that we've looked at, just as we have taken a look at the effects of emigration on the long-term futures of different countries, just as we have taken a look at unbalanced sex ratios. The transformation of populations via cultural or linguistic shifts is just as surely an issue of note. How's Catalan faring in the Generalitat and the Balearics and Valencia, in the context of Spain's recent immigration boom, and if badly, could this lead to anti-immigration sentiment or legislation? Is the proportion of first-language Russophones in Latvia shrinking significantly, and if so could this lead to a cautious liberalization of immigration legislation? Will Russia try to make good on its promises to the Russophones of the former Soviet Union? Just what is going on with Spanish in the United States and what does this suggest about Hispanics? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Demography matters, and so do the underlying cultural issues that not only help define demographics but influence the ways in which we think of those shifts. In Canada, English Canadians and French Canadians have dealt with each other substantially in relation to their demographics ("Are the French having too many children?" "Are the English trying to overwhelm us with immigrants?"), managing to stifle until relatively recently serious discussion about what's actually going on. If you think that this was about Eurabia, well, yes, it is in part about that, but it is more importantly about the need to come up with examples from the past and the present of underdiscussed and often misdiscussed issues sine, after all, Demography Matters.
What happened to Flemish France, what's going on with the Tibetans, and what's happening to the ethnic Poles in the former Soviet Union? Come back here to find out.
What happened? It's important to note that the belief in a French Canadian revanche des berceaux, of a nationalism-driven birth rate under British occupation that saw every family produce large numbers of children, is a legend. The disparity between Ontarian and Québec (and fertility fertility rates emerged after 1870, when Ontario moved in the direction of a demographic regime characterized by sharply falling death and infant mortality rates in tandem with falling birth rates, while Québec--more conservative, more rural--lagged behind. For a long while, this was enough to keep the Francophone proportion of Canada's population stable at roughly 30%. But then the 1960s hit.
Between 1850 and 1950, owing to a high fertility rate among French Canadian women, the proportion of Francophones in the Canadian population held at 30%. The fertility of the Francophones then dropped below the Canadian average toward the mid-1960s, contributing to a decrease in the proportion of the total Canadian population speaking French as a mother tongue -- from 29% in 1951 to 25% in 1986. Between 1926 and 1960, the fertility rate of women in Quebec moved closer to that of other Canadian women. In effect, the ratio of the fertility rate of Quebec women to other Canadian women dropped from 1.45 in 1926 to 1.30 around 1940 and 1.15 around 1950. Between 1960 and 1970, fertility declined very rapidly. The total fertility rate of women in Quebec dropped from 3.9 to 2.1; the fertility of other Canadian women declined but not so markedly, from 4.0 to 2.5. By 1974, fertility in Quebec had declined to 1.8 children/woman, and by 1986 the fertility rate had fallen still further to 1.4, while that of other Canadian women held at between 1.7 and 1.8. The fertility rate was 20% lower in Quebec in 1986 than in the other provinces. These differences in fertility between Québec and the rest of Canada have significantly affected the demographic situation. Census data have shown that the completed fertility of Francophones was 80% higher than that of Anglophones for women born at the turn of the century, but this gap narrowed rapidly over the years and disappeared for women born between 1931-36.
These differences also affected Francophone populations outside of Québec, as the same source notes, with Francophone TFRs outside of Québec falling not only below the levels of non-Francophone TFRs ("[i]n Ontario [in 1986], the total fertility rate for Francophones was 1.54, compared to 1.61 for Anglophones and 1.75 for the other groups"). The fertility of Québec--perhaps a reasonably good proxy for Francophone Canada as a whole--is not the lowest-low fertility of Italy, and it might well have only anticipated trends in English Canada. Even so, the province of Québec is going to have to deal with relatively low if not negative population growth and relatively rapid aging, further complicated by issues with immigration, as evidenced by the loud debate on the topic of how best to integrate immigrants. (The old endogamy of the pre-1960s period is most certainly gone, even if the problem of dealing with Others remains, as with other peoples and cultures.)
Survival will be an unsurmountable challenge for most Francophone minorities outside of Québec. In most of the rest of Canada, Francophones form significant minorities (and, occasionally, majorities) only in the "bilingual belt" stretching more-or-less along the Québec border. Can this be changed? It's questionable. Francophones outside of Québec once exhibited higher TFRs than Francophones inside Québec, but this situation has reversed itself. In the 1996-2001 period, there was a significant amount of Francophone out-migration to Ontario, New Brunswick, and Alberta, suggesting a certain potential for the revitalization of those communities, but again Francophones in Ontario and Alberta form only a small portion of the population, while the stable Francophone community of New Brunswick has often been a net exporter of population to Québec. Without any remarkable demographic event--a Francophone baby boom,. mass immigrations from Francophone Europe and Africa, et cetera--non-Francophones won't have any particular reason to view French as particularly relevant to their lives. Journalist Chantal Hébert was right to point out in a December 2007 article for The Toronto Star that "French still an abstraction in much of Canada": "[O]utside Quebec, Francophones make up only 4 per cent of the population. With French an abstraction in so many parts of Canada, the motivation to learn it as a second language is decreasing. Because most Anglophones learn French at school, the peak bilingualism rate for Anglophones outside Quebec occurs in the 15 to 19 age range. Over the past decade, it has slipped from 16.3 per cent to 13 per cent. The census also shows the retention rate of Anglophones who have learned the language is slipping." Even in 2001, Statistics Canada discovered that overall, "43.4% of Francophones reported that they were bilingual, compared with 9.0% of Anglophones." For those Francophones living outside of Québec, living in an overwhelmingly non-Francophone society with few if any barriers to intermarriage, these pressures create a perfect environment for language shift. It's not surprising that there was an overall decline in the numbers of Francophones outside of Québec. As Gilles Grenier put it in his paper "Linguistic and Economic Characteristics of Francophone Minorities in Canada: A Comparison of Ontario and New Brunswick" (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (18.8): 1997), in mixed environments
A lot still needs to be learned about what exactly determines assimilation, but it is clear that the fact that Anglophones and Francophones are more mixed together than they used to, mainly because the Canadian society has become more urbanised and communication systems more developed, leads to a more widespread use of the common majority language. If Francophones in Quebec and in New Brunswick have been able to maintain their language, it is because there is a geographical separation between them and the other communities. This does not mean that those Francophones do not use English for some of their economic activities, but at least French is still the dominant language in their own communities. One major reason of the assimilation in Ontario is that there are less and less towns and villages where the majority of the population is French.(299).
This last sentence is critical, since mass language shift from French to English is not unique in the history of North American Francophones. Starting in the late 19th century, relative economic underdevelopment propelled a tremendous migration of Francophones out from their traditional settlement areas along the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence to adjacent parts of the continent. Large and thriving communities of Franco-Americans (concentrated in New England, particularly in that region's industrial cities) and Franco-Ontarians (concentrated in northern and eastern areas adjacent to Québec) formed at this time, encouraging some to believe in the idea of a greater Québec encompassing those communities. That vision failed, as the Franco-American community was whittled away through immigration restrictions and acculturation to the Anglophone culture surrounding them. Franco-Ontarians, who with few exceptions like in Anglophone-majority communities relatively isolated from Québec, may be about to follow. And no, the Francophones who are tourists in Maine or long-term residents in Florida don't make up the same sorts of communities. What the long-term effects of a Québec isolated in its language from most of the rest of Canada and attached to a wider Francophone world and (through a traditional Ameriphilia) to the United States will be on a Canada faced with its own regional challenges, I leave to my readers to speculate.
Why is all this particularly relevant to readers of Demography Matters? Shifting population balances are central to our work here. The shrinkage of working-age populations as aging proceeds is something that we've looked at, just as we have taken a look at the effects of emigration on the long-term futures of different countries, just as we have taken a look at unbalanced sex ratios. The transformation of populations via cultural or linguistic shifts is just as surely an issue of note. How's Catalan faring in the Generalitat and the Balearics and Valencia, in the context of Spain's recent immigration boom, and if badly, could this lead to anti-immigration sentiment or legislation? Is the proportion of first-language Russophones in Latvia shrinking significantly, and if so could this lead to a cautious liberalization of immigration legislation? Will Russia try to make good on its promises to the Russophones of the former Soviet Union? Just what is going on with Spanish in the United States and what does this suggest about Hispanics? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Demography matters, and so do the underlying cultural issues that not only help define demographics but influence the ways in which we think of those shifts. In Canada, English Canadians and French Canadians have dealt with each other substantially in relation to their demographics ("Are the French having too many children?" "Are the English trying to overwhelm us with immigrants?"), managing to stifle until relatively recently serious discussion about what's actually going on. If you think that this was about Eurabia, well, yes, it is in part about that, but it is more importantly about the need to come up with examples from the past and the present of underdiscussed and often misdiscussed issues sine, after all, Demography Matters.
What happened to Flemish France, what's going on with the Tibetans, and what's happening to the ethnic Poles in the former Soviet Union? Come back here to find out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
