Quebec - The Final Word

The time has come to say au revoir to Quebec and it's been an amazing learning journey - as well as physically travelling to the place I've been blogging about, I've also had fun on my journey through Quebecois music, literature and cinema. I've seen Le Vent du Nord live in concert in Bury (near Manchester) and the Institut Francais in London is showing a retrospective of Xavier Dolan's movies - although I've now seen all of his movies, I'll looking forward to finishing my Quebecois experience with a few trips to the cinema in February and March.

I learned quite a bit about Canada, as well as Quebec and I learned about memory and Quebec's motto, Je me souviens. I learned about the other Titanic, The Empress of Ireland and about religious beliefs in Canada.  I learned how to make the traditional Quebecois dish, La Poutine and I learned about the significance of winter in Quebec and how it's become so unpopular, especially in a busy city like Montreal.  Finally, I learned about Quebec in other words, like joual, bougeotte, pure laine and tabernac.

The Canadian flag turned 50 this month

As usual, there were many areas of research I didn't have time to go into, so if you're interested in learning even more about Quebec, I would recommend the following topics:

The North American number plan for dialling codes
The Huron people and the origin of the country name, Canada
British-French relations
The French in North America
Hydroelectric power
Pepsi v Coke and the 'rock and roller cola wars'
US invasions of Canada
Nunavik
The snowy owl and the white lily, Quebec's symbols
Ann Coreo and Lily St Cyr, the exotic dancers of Montreal
The Jews of Montreal
Marc Lepine and the Montreal massacre

Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67 in Montreal

Mattieu de Costa, the freed African slave who was fluent in Mi'kmaq
The architecture of Moshe Safdie
Failed attempts at gaining independence from Canada
Quebecois soap operas
The Americanisation of Quebec
French-Canadian media and newspapers
The Desjardins group of artists
Ice-hockey
The Mohawks of Brooklyn
The Cirque du Soleil
The 1885 smallpox epidemic, which resulted in 3,000 deaths

Final word on the Mohawk nation

Flag of the Iroquois confederacy

I only managed to scratch the surface in terms of my learning about First Nations people who live in Quebec and I'd like to return to the First Nations some day and do more research on native American culture.  Around 1% of Quebec's population is native American and I'm quite interested in the First Nations people, who are distinct from the Inuits or Metis peoples.  First Nations in Quebec include people from the Algonquian and Iroquoian groups.

Contact with Europeans has rarely worked out in favour of the First Nation peoples and there is a still a lot of tension between First Nation communities and neighbouring 'white' communities.  I watched a really interesting documentary on YouTube called Acts of Defiance which documents events around the Oka Crisis, which began in July 1990, and the impact that this conflict had on the Mohawk people of Kahnawake.

Watching the documentary gives you a real understanding of the cultural gap that exists between First Nations people in Quebec and the dominant French/European culture.  Mohawk people belong to the Iroquois league or Haudenosaunee, which stretches from the St Lawrence River in Quebec, to southern Ontario and northern New York state.  Haudenosaunee has issued its own passports since the 1920's and attempted to send a delegation to the League of Nations, post World War 1.

As well as Mohawk reservations, Quebec has also granted a certain amount of sovereignty to the Cree people in Eeyou Istchee/Baie James and these communities are represented by the Grand Council of the Crees, which has embassies in Montreal and Quebec City.

Although I've called this my final word on the Mohawk nation, what I really mean is that my final word is that I would like to do some more research on the Mohawk nation and the other First Nations of Canada.  

Quebec - Putting the God in Gaspé

It surprised me to learn that Canada is a predominantly Catholic country.  According to the 2001 census, approximately 44% of Canada's population is Catholic, whereas only 30% of the population is Protestant.  As with Germany, when I was researching religion in Nordrhein-Westfalen for my blog post earlier this year, I've grown up assuming that Canada was a predominantly Protestant country, because of its role in the British Empire and strong place Protestantism holds in the country's political sphere.

As with the research I did into religion in Germany, the figures are skewed somewhat by those whose parents (or grandparents) would have professed the protestant faith, but who now have no religious belief. The situation in Canada confirms my belief that the development of Protestantism over previous centuries has, in many ways, led to 21st-century secularism.

Religion in Quebec

Cathedral Christ-Roi in Gaspe

Much less surprising, due to its French and Irish heritage, is the fact that Quebec is predominantly Catholic, in fact, according to the 2001 census, Quebec is 83% Catholic and only 5% Protestant, having the lowest percentage of Protestants in any province or territory of Canada. With around 24% of Canada's population, Quebec certainly influences the statistics in favour of Catholicism and around 46% of Canada's Catholics live in Quebec.

Canadian Protestants

If you take Quebec out of the equation, then the overall stats for Canada would look slightly different, with Canada-minus-Quebec being 37% Protestant and 31% Catholic.  Of course, the ratio of Catholic to Protestants varies from one Canadian province/territory to the next. The other predominantly Catholic provinces/territories are New Brunswick (which also has a large French Catholic population), Northwest Territories and Prince Edward Island (although only marginally so).

Ontario is split 50/50 with around 35% of people professing each faith - the provinces/territories with the highest number of Protestants are Nunavut and Newfoundland/Labrador. Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and Yukon all have predominantly Protestant populations.

The Jews of Montreal

Moe Wilensky's in Mile End, Montreal by Patrick Donovan

As I've been researching about Quebec and, particularly as I've been reading Mordecai Richler's novel Barney's Version, I've become very aware of Montreal's prominent Jewish population and the place Montreal has had in the history of Jewish emigration to North America.

Montreal has several predominantly Jewish suburbs, like Cote-St-Luc and Hampstead. Richler would argue that the oppressive nationalism of French-Canadians in Quebec in the 1990's has convinced many Jewish people to leave the province and move, either to the United States, Israel or neighbouring Ontario.

The 2001 stats would seem to bear this out, as it showed that 58% of Canada's Jews live in Ontario, compared to the 27% of Canadian Jews who call Quebec home. Interestingly, British Columbia has the highest percentage of Jewish people, with 5.5% of people in British Columbia professing the Jewish faith.  British Columbia seems to be the most religiously diverse part of Canada, as it also has the nation's highest percentages of Buddhists, Sikhs and people professing no religious beliefs (around 36% of British Columbians fall into this latter category).

Religious diversity in Canada

Detail of Montreal's Basilique Notre-Dame

I was surprised to learn that Alberta has the highest percentage of Muslims (16.7%) in Canada, although it's hard to compare Alberta's population with Ontario's, which is four times bigger and this doesn't change the fact that 60% of Canada's Muslims live in Ontario.  Ontario is also home to 55% of Canada's Orthodox Christians and 73% of Canadian Hindus.

Newfoundland/Labrador and Nunavut seem to be the places with the least religious diversity and Newfoundland/Labrador has the most religious/Christian population with 97% of people professing either Protestant or Catholic faith.

The home of Raëlism

One of the most unusual 'religions' I've come across whilst I've been researching Quebec is Raëlism, a quasi-religious belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials that was founded in 1974 by a Frenchman called Claude Vorilhon, aka Raël. Raël now lives in Quebec, although his movement has around 90,000 followers in 90 countries world-wide. Raëlians use the swastika as a symbol of peace and believe in sexual liberation, cloning, intelligent design and the idea that aliens (the Alohim) will one day return to Earth, which they created.  They're due to arrive in Jerusalem in 2025!

Quebec has one of the highest concentrations of Raëlians in the world and it was interesting to read about Taras Grascoe's encounter with the Raëlian movement, which he recounts in his book, Sacre Blues: An Unsentimental Journey through Quebec.

Image credits:

The image of Moe Wilensky's in Mile End, Montreal was taken by Flickr member Patrick Donovan, who is from Quebec City.  You can see more of Patrick's photos on his flickr account. Thanks Patrick for sharing this image using the Creative Commons license.

The images of the cathedrals in Gaspe and Montreal were taken by me - feel free to re-use these images with the Creative Commons license: Attribution, Share-alike, non-commercial.  

Quebec - La belle province

I generally decide the places I'm going to blog about months in advance and, with Quebec, I was hoping that it would be the first time I would actually visit the place whilst I was blogging about it.  I visited Quebec in early October this year but, as you can see from today's date, my armchair travelling took a lot longer than my real-life travelling and I was busy reading and blogging about Palestine, when I was physically travelling across Canada!

Nevertheless, it was great to visit Quebec before approaching it as a blogging topic and I did a lot of reading about Quebec and Canada when I was there in October.  I've also come back with lots of photos (like the ones illustrating this post) that I can use for my blog but, more importantly, I have context for Quebec, which is really important to me.  When I see Montreal or Canada on the news or depicted in movies, I now have a sense of what it's like there and that puts everything into context for me.

Montreal skyline

I'd been to North America once before, on a visit to Cuba in 2010, but this was my first time to set foot on the mainland of North America and, in many ways, Quebec was a fantastic starting point, as some of the first European settlements were in New France - Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec. It was also great to start my North American adventures in a French-speaking environment and in a city like Montreal which, to me, just looked like the New York I've seen in the movies.

I was fascinated by the steps leading up to the front doors above street level, the weird hydrant pipes sticking out of buildings and the dull brown brickwork of Montreal - I arrived in the midst of a heavy rain storm and the city looked quite grim in the dark afternoon, with an occasional glint of glass or steel from one of Montreal's many high-rise buildings.  I really loved Montreal though - the city has a certain edgy feel to it and it's incredibly vibrant and pulsating with an artistic energy that appealed to me.

Quebec city rooftops

As I only had a week in Canada, I decided to limit myself to Quebec and visit the two main cities, Montreal and Quebec city, as well as somewhere more off the beaten track.  Quebec city was gorgeous, very touristy, pretty cobblestone streets and the autumnal sun was beating down on me, as I set off on a walk around the city walls.  It's in a fantastic location, overlooking the St Lawrence river and it reminded me of Edinburgh, with its Chateau Frontenac perched on top of a hill in the ville haute.

My 'off the beaten track' experience was a very long bus journey to La Gaspesie - one of Quebec's most interesting sub-regions, a peninsula extending eastwards towards the Atlantic ocean and Europe. I saw some of the places where the explorer Jacques Cartier landed during his first voyage to Canada, which he claimed for the French crown.  La Gaspesie is a wonderful place and a world unto itself in many ways - all three experiences; multicultural Montreal, quintessential Quebec city and faraway Gaspesie, gave me a sense of Quebec's variety, as well as its rich history and fascinating cultures.

La Gaspesie

I'm really looking forward to blogging about Quebec over the coming weeks - I've already started reading, listening to music and watching movies.  I hope you'll join me, so we can learn about Quebec together!

Image credits:

All of the photos used on this blog post where taken by me and you are free to re-use them using the Creative Commons license:

- Attribution (particularly to this blog)
- Share alike
- Non-commercial

I've created a set of photos for Quebec which you can see on my Flickr account.