Demographics of Montreal
[11][14][13][15] Visible minorities are defined by the Canadian Employment Equity Act as "persons, other than Aboriginals, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.
The city is a hub for French language television productions, radio, theatre, circuses, performing arts, film, multimedia and print publishing.
The best talents from French Canada and even the French-speaking areas of the United States converge in Montreal and often perceive the city as their cultural capital.
Reflecting their deep-seated colonial roots, the Solitudes were historically strongly entrenched in Montreal, splitting the city geographically at Saint Laurent Boulevard.
Arriving in waves from the United Kingdom and eventually the entire British Commonwealth, the historical English-speaking community in Montreal includes Quebecers of English, Scottish, and Irish origin (as reflected in the city's flag) as well as Loyalists, escaped slaves, and immigrants from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent.
[34] With the advent of mass migration from beyond the confines of the British Empire, the English-speaking community in Montreal expanded to include a huge array of different cultures and ethnic groups.
This trend was boosted by the Catholic Church's policy, called la Revanche des berceaux or the "Revenge of the Cradle", of encouraging French-Canadians to maintain a very high birth-rate in order to bolster the community's demographic weight in Canada.
This policy, along with the Church's traditional mistrust of entrepreneurship and the business world, caused French-Canadians in Quebec to remain largely poor and rural while shunning immigration in an attempt to resist assimilation.
[35][36] During the Quiet Revolution, French Quebecers left the Church en masse and birth rates fell drastically as they began to question the Duplessis-era establishment's legitimacy.
[37] This awakening coincided with the arrival of a massive wave of Italian immigrants who, despite being Catholic, demanded English-language training and bilingual schools for their children.
With birth-rates declining dramatically, French Quebecers wished to tap into immigration to maintain their share of the population and the government set its sights on the Italian community, leading to the Saint-Leonard Conflict in which the Italian community sought to maintain freedom of choice in education in the face of the government's demands that they send their children to French-language schools.
Because of these developments, Montreal's English-speaking community today includes people of English and Commonwealth ancestry, as well as specific groups who arrived in waves before the advent of Bill 101.
It is a highly diverse community, with many members having a complex and multi-layered sense of identity that does not easily conform to the Government's definitions of "anglophone", "allophone", and "francophone".
The most-watched television news channel is CTV Montreal, formerly CFCF 12, and the community is also served by local desks at the CBC, Global, Citytv, and MaTV.
With the advent of Bill 101, which made French the sole language of work, these institutions came to play a key role in maintaining the vitality and viability of the English-speaking community.
In effect, this allowed English speakers to maintain access to the workforce by giving them non-client-facing jobs, so long as the organization could still provide services in French.
The working-class Irish community was associated with the rough neighborhoods of Pointe-Saint-Charles, Verdun and Saint-Henri, which continue to host successive waves of immigrant groups as they arrive and eventually spread throughout the city.
Along its length, St. Laurent (also known as "The Main") has hosted a wide variety of groups that eventually came to form the city's English-speaking community, from Chinatown in the South, through Little Portugal, where Leonard Cohen had his house, and into the Mile End, which housed the Jewish community upon its first arrival and also contained numerous factories in the Schmata Industry, as described by Mordecai Richler in his work, St. Urbain's Horseman.
All of these groups have English as their first language of use and may partake in the English-language or other minority school systems, but they also maintain separate cultural traditions and institutions and often operate in French at work, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly where the boundaries of Montreal's English-speaking community lie.
The Greek community remains vibrant: several neighbourhoods contain a number of Greek-owned businesses and local festivals and churches add to the multicultural character of the city.
The majority of Latin American Canadians are recent immigrants arriving in the late 20th century who have come from El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Chile and Guatemala with relatively smaller communities from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador.
[52] The term Indo-Canadian is typically used in Canada to refer to people from the many ethnic groups of the Republic of India, and other South Asian countries including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
[66] The remaining 22.5% of Montreal-area residents are allophones, speaking languages including Italian (3.5%), Arabic (3.1%), Spanish (2.6%), Haitian Creole (1.3%), Chinese (1.2%), Greek (1.2%), Portuguese (0.8%), Romanian (0.7%), Vietnamese (0.7%), and Russian (0.5%).
[66] In terms of additional languages spoken, a unique feature of Montreal among Canadian cities, noted by Statistics Canada, is the working knowledge of both French and English possessed by most of its residents.
[75] Historically Montreal has been a centre of Catholicism in North America with its numerous seminaries and churches, including the Notre-Dame Basilica, the Cathédrale Marie-Reine-du-Monde, and Saint Joseph's Oratory.
Protestants which include Anglican, United Church, Lutheran, owing to British and German immigration, and other denominations number 5.90%, with a further 3.7% consisting mostly of Orthodox Christians, fuelled by a large Greek population.
