Donald Stewart, 73, is a retired miner who looks after the cemetery at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Maple Grove, a former English-speaking hamlet in Irlande. Photograph by: Francis Vachon, The Gazette
By Marion Scott - - Back in 1989, a National Film Board documentary titled Disparaître warned that Quebec’s French culture could disappear within a couple of decades.
That doomsday scenario has not come true.
But there is a group whose presence is fading in some parts of the province. Anglophones.
Quietly, without fanfare, English-speakers are disappearing from regions where the roots of both language communities run deep.
For rural anglophones, the prospect of Disparaître poses a vexing question: Who will remember them after they are gone?
That is a constant preoccupation for Donald Stewart, the last anglophone in Irlande, a community of 950 near Thetford Mines whose name betrays the origins of its first settlers.
Stewart, 73, is a retired miner who looks after the cemetery at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Maple Grove, a former English-speaking hamlet in Irlande that now survives only in memory.
History weighs heavily on his shoulders.
“I’m not eternal,” says Stewart, who lives on a farm granted to his great-great-grandfather, William Stewart of County Cavan, Ireland, as a reward for serving in the War of 1812.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen after me,” he worries. “Better not to think, I guess.”
After decades of decline, English is holding its own in Quebec, especially in Montreal – whose multicultural vibrancy earned praise from rock superstars Arcade Fire at Sunday’s Grammy Awards. But it’s another story in outlying areas where exodus and aging are sapping the vitality of anglophone communities.
“I don’t want to be a doomsayer,” says Hugh Maynard, a consultant on rural development and founder of Qu’anglo Communications & Consulting.
“But in places where there has been no immigration, it’s very difficult to maintain the critical mass. The numbers start to get down to the point where keeping schools open and maintaining services in English in a largely francophone population become quite difficult.”
When the community group representing anglophones in the Saguenay-Lac St. Jean region closed down five years ago, it went unnoticed, Maynard says.
“It just disappeared off the landscape. So when you look at a community like that, where the English-speaking community about a hundred years ago was very instrumental in the development in the aluminum industry, the forestry industry and other areas, it’s virtually disappeared off the map. That is true in a number of different areas,” he says.
Four out of five English-speaking Quebecers live in Montreal, where they represent 22.3 per cent of the regional population by first official language spoken, according to the 2006 Census.
Anglo-Quebecers’ geographic concentration lessens their sense of being a minority, according to a study last year by Statistics Canada. It found that more than 70 per cent of anglophones live in municipalities where at least 30 per cent of the population is English-speaking.
But glance at a map of Quebec, and you will see sprinklings of English place-names – often combined with saints’ names, as in St.-Malachie-de-Frampton or St.-Jacques-de-Leeds – that reveal the sweep of former anglophone communities.
In fact, 150 years ago, the Eastern Townships had more English-speaking residents than Montreal, points out Ronald Rudin, a history professor at Concordia University who spoke at a conference there last week on the inclusion of anglophones in Quebec history. In 1861, anglophones formed one-quarter of the population in the Gaspé, 39 per cent in Quebec City and 64 per cent in the Ottawa Valley, Rudin noted in his 1985 book The Forgotten Quebecers (Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture).
Yet rural anglophones rate barely a mention in most histories of Quebec, says Jack Little, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby.
For example, the settlement of the Eastern Townships by American pioneers from 1792 onward gets less attention than it deserves, Little says.
“I was struck in 1992, the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Eastern Townships, that most places would have had a celebration. It would have been marked. It would have been written about. It was completely ignored,” he says.
Dwane Wilkin, executive director of the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network in Sherbrooke, has spent a career bringing the untold stories of English-speaking communities across Quebec to light on the Quebec Heritage Web (www.quebecheritageweb.com).
“The thing we’re fighting against is the idea that anglophones don’t actually have a history or heritage in this province. It’s maddening,” says Wilkin.
A native of Asbestos, Wilkin says the anglophone experience in company towns like Shawinigan, Port Cartier and Baie Comeau is another neglected chapter of Quebec history.
“Everybody has a memory of growing up in these towns that’s just as valid as anybody else’s memory of growing up in a French community. But it’s like we’re not allowed to have that. It’s not valid,” he says.
The perception of anglophones as a privileged minority dates back to the era when foreign-owned companies employed English-speaking managers in single-industry towns across the province.
Aline Visser, 74, a school commissioner in Thetford Mines, remembers arriving there in 1957 as a newly graduated teacher.
“The salaries for teachers were low: $2,500 a year,” she recalls. “Here in Thetford, being a mining town, they paid $2,700.”
Enrolment at the local Protestant school was booming because of the arrival of English-speaking engineers, recruited to drain Black Lake to make way for an asbestos mine, she recalled.
Today, Thetford’s anglophone community has dropped to 340 out of a total population of 25,000.
In a reversal from the 1960s, rural anglophones now lag behind francophones according to most economic indicators, according to a 2008 study by the Centre d’études ethniques des universités montréalaises (CEETUM) and the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities (CIRLM).
Unemployment is higher among English-speakers than francophones in most regions of Quebec, including the Gaspé, Lower St. Lawrence, North Shore, Saguenay, Eastern Townships, Laurentians and Outaouais, the study found.
Ominously, the unemployment gap is greatest for young anglophones, it reported. Among anglophones age 15-24, the unemployment rate in 2001 was 35.9 per cent in the Gaspé, 40.9 per cent in the North Shore and 29.2 per cent in the Abitibi.
Anglophones age 25-44 were also 38-per-cent more likely than francophones in that age group to be out of the labour force, particularly in Central Quebec, the Saguenay, Northern Quebec, Lower St. Lawrence, Eastern Townships and Gaspé.
Despite those challenges, the myth of the wealthy anglophone persists, says Suzanne Aubre, executive director of Megantic English-Speaking Community Development Corporation.
As a francophone who has lived in Vancouver, Aubre empathizes with the plight of the anglophone minority and is familiar with negative stereotypes of them.
“Anglophones are all rich. They’re all têtes carrées. I know these myths, so I’m able to address them,” she says.
A native of nearby Plessisville, Aubre confesses she didn’t know there were any anglophones in the region when she was hired to lead the non-profit organization a decade ago.
“I’ve come to realize how liberal, how open-minded they are. We laugh at the same things. These are the ones who chose to stay here. They did not leave,” she says.
Nearly one-third of the area’s 900 English-speakers – who represent one per cent of the population in the regional municipalities of L’Érable, L’Amiante, and Lotbinière – were age 65 or over in 2006.
With a longstanding tradition of community involvement, anglophone seniors are proudly self-sufficient, Aubre says.
“They have a lot of difficulty asking for help when they need it,” she says.
Health and social services are the most pressing need for the aging community, Aubre says. Older, rural women are most likely to have difficulty functioning entirely in French, she says. When health or elder-care issues arise, the organization arranges for a friend, relative, or member of the organization to accompany them to appointments, Aubre says.
The younger generations are well integrated with the francophone majority, she adds.
Donald Stewart’s daughter, Annie, 26, the youngest of four, is a social worker in Thetford Mines.
“I don’t consider myself francophone or anglophone. I consider myself bilingual,” says Annie, whose French-speaking mother died when she was six.
She moved back to the region after earning her degree at McGill University to be close to her father and friends.
Even though she is perfectly comfortable in French, her English heritage is equally important, Annie says.
“It’s who I am. It wouldn’t feel right to push one or the other aside.”
Like fishers in the Gaspé and Lower North Shore and forestry workers in the Outaouais, the English-speaking farmers of Megantic County and Eastern Townships were never part of the powerful anglo elite, says historian Little.
“Behind the scenes in places like Montreal, the big industrialists and entrepreneurs obviously were pulling some strings but in the rural areas where there was a francophone majority they did not have representatives,” he says.
Little, 64, originally hails from Inverness, a farming village of 838 adjoining Irlande that was settled by Scottish and Irish immigrants in the early 1800s.
With no roads in winter, highlights of life were the annual Orangemen’s picnic and the Inverness fair, he recalls. The farmhouse had no indoor toilet and not a lot of insulation from the howling wind.
Family talk often revolved around extended kin networks.
“You knew who your third or fourth cousin was. And you heard the same stories over and over again,” he says.
The exodus of English-speaking farmers in search of better opportunities on the western frontier began in the mid-1800s.
“People had started leaving long before. The farms where I grew up and all our neighbours grew up were all abandoned in the ’60s. You drive there now and there are no buildings left. Maybe a barn or two here and there,” Little remembers.
He moved away in 1968 to do his master’s degree at the University of New Brunswick and never returned.
“I’ve always felt quite uprooted. My roots are so strong there. But everybody kind of left,” said Little, for whom the Lennoxville area became a second home after his parents – along with many other anglophones from Megantic County – migrated there.
“When I go there, I get this really strange, nostalgic feeling but it’s like ancient history, really,” he adds.
As the older generation passes on, the emphasis for those who remain will increasingly be on preserving history, says Aubre.
“There’s no doubt the needs will change. The young people are losing their connection with their anglophone roots. In our long-term plan, there is an accent on heritage, which could become more important than the health aspect,” she says.
mascot@montrealgazette.com