Everybody loves QUeBeC - except maybe the educated HENRY AUBIN - Everyone knows that a serious brain drain is weakening Quebec’s anglophone community. But a sobering new study shows that this exodus is more serious than widely understood.
Among adults born in Quebec whose mother tongue is English, an astonishing 61 per cent of those whose top university degree was a bachelor’s had moved to other parts of Canada as of 2001, the latest census year for which this mobility data are available. (See table.)
Among those with a master’s degree, 66 per cent had left, according to this study by William Floch, a federal civil servant specializing in the official languages, and Joanne Pocock, a PhD candidate in sociology at Carleton University. And, finally, among those in the small, elite category of holders of PhDs, a staggering 73 per cent had departed.
The category most likely to remain in Quebec ? High-school dropouts. Only 40 per cent went.
As a rule of thumb, then, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to leave.
Please note that these are not foreign students who study at Montreal universities at considerable expense to provincial taxpayers before returning home - that is, the sort of students whom Quebec nationalists regularly complain about (particularly in the context of McGill’s faculty of medicine). No, these are Quebecers, born and bred.
Note, too, that the census can track only people who still reside in Canada. (If you move to another country, you don’t get a census form.) So, if anything, the study actually underestimates the outflow of talent. It doesn’t count all those Quebec-born doctors, nurses, scientists, musicians, computer whizzes and others who are now making careers in the U.S. or elsewhere.
It goes without saying that this exodus has a huge impact on Quebec’s economy