In Quebec, Counting Anglophones is an Art Form

Institut de recherche sur le français en Amérique

Many, many years ago, my son was a grade one student having bit of trouble with spelling. Back then, spelling was considered an important element of a proper education and as such, students were treated to spelling bees, spelling drills and spelling tests on an ongoing basis.
Today spelling has joined home economics, shop and history in the trash heap of the education system, but I digress.

My son's teacher asked that as parents we help out at home by honing his spelling skills before the next test, a task which my wife dutifully undertook.
After the results of the next test were announced, she asked him how he did;
"Eight"
"Eight out of what?" she asked suspiciously.
"Ten"
"Hmm....Not bad....not bad at all!"

A few weeks later at a school conference, the teacher once again implored my wife to work on spelling.
"Whatever for? He got eight out ten on the last test"
"EIGHT OUT OF TEN??? He got eight out of ten wrong!!!"

And so as parents we suffered from statistical manipulation, by our six year-old!
That's how easy it is to be fooled by numbers, when you trust the deliverer.

So it isn't any surprise that when studies and statistics are prepared and served up by someone or some organization with a political agenda to promote, what we are provided with is statistical trash.

Such is the case of the insufferable Institut de recherche sur le français en Amérique (IRFA) an organization that uses the word "Institute" to give itself a false and bloated appearance of something which it is not. Aside from its minuscule size, it mimics the work of the SSJB, Mouvement Quebec Francais and Imperatif Francais in promoting the French language and the cause of sovereignty.

THE IFRA is a tiny French language lobby group, run by a university student consisting of a website, post-office box and a personal cellular telephone number.
The website shows a couple of academic separatists forming a 'scientific committee' which includes Marc Termote, a demographer and renowned language militant, and employee of the OQLF.

 "The decline of French in Quebec is so relentless that demographer Marc Termote says the government will have no choice but to consider taking drastic measures if it wants to turn the tide: a halt to immigration or the imposition of unilingual French throughout its territory." Link{FR}

Mr. Termotte is joined on the committee with Claude Castonguay, a retired professor of mathematics from the University of Ottawa and OQLF veteran.

The IFRA commissioned and recently published a study by another like-minded 'Institute" the 'Institut de recherche en économie contemporaine (IREC) which concluded, not surprisingly that English is over-represented in the Public Service in Quebec.
Checking the IREC's website I was not surprised to find that Jacques Parizeau, is the honorary President of the Board of Directors so you can imagine its political bent. 

The impartiality of these types of organizations and their ability to deliver non-biased statistically  based reports is more than questionable and when newspapers reprint their conclusions as fact, it breaks the very tenants of what good journalism should be.
You wouldn't expect a newspaper to reprint as fact, the conclusion that there is no link between cancer and smoking, based on a report prepared by the tobacco industry, nor would you expect a newspaper to reprint as fact, a positive link between prayer and good health, based on a report prepared by the Church.
But when a group of militant French-language separatists, offers a study on the dire situation of the French language in Quebec, it is printed in our newspapers as gospel.  Shame!

The impartiality of those preparing reports and studies on any publicly debated issue has recently become a hot issue in relation to climate change. Competing groups of scientists have muddied up the issue by allowing personal or group bias affect how they collected, prepared and interpreted data. It has had a devastating effect on the debate with the public unsure of who to believe.

Last year, here in Quebec, we were treated to a lively public debate between anglo rights defender Jack Jedwab and French language militant Claude Castonguay over which group, anglophones or Francophones enjoy a higher income, with both claiming that statistics supported their opposite positions. What nonsense!

And so, before ever putting stock in a study, one has to consider the bias and impartiality of those who prepared the report or study.
Readers, they don't come much more biased than the IRFA.

I've  previously written on the skewed conclusions of another report prepared by the IRFA and its contention that English cegeps (junior colleges) are a danger to the French language.

Read: English Cegep Study - A Case of Weird Science

And so when the IRFA recently published a report that describes Quebec's public sector as overly friendly to anglophones, I almost fell out of my chair laughing, not only because its conclusions were so skewed, but because the media lapped up the report without question.
Download the PDF in French

The report concludes that with 8.7% of the population 13.9% of the jobs in the public service are English.
Both of these numbers are false and misleading.

I didn't have to go deep into the report to realize that we were to be treated to a statistical sleight-of-hand leading to dubious and unsupportable conclusions.

There in the Resume;

And there it is..... 'historical anglophones,' a term used by ultra-separatists to magically reduce the real number of anglophones that they count.
I thought it was only zealots like Louis Prefontaine that use terms like that, but its seems to have crept into the language debate as something legitimate.

There really is no definitive way to describe who is an Anglo and so separatists use critera that suits them, where numbers are reduced.

Through voodoo statistical analysis, language extremists like Prefontaine can claim that 'historical' anglophones' represent just 5.6% of the Quebec population, while the author of this report can claim that the number of 'historical' anglophones is about 8.7%.

I much prefer the numbers of Statistics Canada, an organization which is arguably just about as unbiased as you can get.

So the English minority is actually 13.4%!
The explanation for the higher number is clearly spelled out.

Now before defenders of the report start attacking the integrity of Statisitcs Canada, I'd point out that much of the study itself is based on StatsCan data.

If one accepts this 13.4% figure, the conclusion of the report that English at 13.9% is vastly over-represented is proven false.

But wait, there's more! (as they say in the infomercials!)

I've gone through the whole report and cannot fathom how the author arrived at his conclusion that 13.9% of public jobs are English.

He claims that there are 31,000 jobs where public employees use English exclusively or English majorly while working. I'd love to see a list.

Now these jobs are not in Education and Health and Social services fields, which are treated separately in the report.
Here directly from the study;

"In Quebec 31,334 of the 237,209 public administration jobs are unilingually English or bilingual English/French, representing 13%"

I'd like to know where these unilingual English jobs exist in Quebec's public Administration.

Perhaps there's a couple of thousand of employees working in English at the Ministère des Transports or the Sûreté du Québec? Maybe there's a few more thousand stashed at Revenue Québec or  Environment Quebec.
Or maybe these employees toil tirelessly in Télé-Québec or the Ministère de l'Agriculture where they speak English all day and write and file English reports to their superiors who reply in English.

Really?? Are you kidding me?

Anglophones make up less than 2% of the civil service and I bet they speak French almost all of the time.

Even if this fanciful idea was true (which it certainly is not) working the majority of the time in English, means working some of the time in French and so the effective rate of English services offered by the 13.9% is reduced in consequence.

I shall be bringing you more statistical nonsense from the IRFA in the near future but until then, rest assured that as they say on the French language version of Mythbusters, this report is 'bidon!'