Drawn by a cultural and economic openness they can’t find at home, many young French people have fallen in love with Quebec
. While Canadians in the rest of the country tend to see the province as relatively European – with its bike lanes, walk-up apartments and large state – the French see it as almost Californian, a land of swimming pools, friendliness and jobs.
In an attempt to answer the question that many Montrealers have been asking in recent years – namely, who are all these French people? – University of Sherbrooke researcher David Pavot, a native of Nice, co-wrote a study for the website The Conversation about the demographic makeup of his immigrant community. The upshot is that they are, on average, young urban professionals: aged 44, employed, with left-of-centre politics, mostly living in Montreal.
The current wave of migration began to take shape in the years after the Quiet Revolution, when Quebec became a more self-confident, secular society, and devolved federal powers gave it more control over immigration and more independent diplomatic relationships, particularly with Paris. The result, Prof. Linteau said, was that more French people than ever started coming to Quebec, even as European immigration to the rest of Canada dried up.
Even Quebec’s car culture and approach to public safety – measures by which the province can seem relatively European to its continental neighbours – strike some French immigrants as borderline Texan. Léo Trespeuch, Ms. Robinot’s husband and a professor of management at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, remembers how taken aback he was at seeing cops speeding after a car and pulling their sidearms on a suspect. “That cowboy side was new to us,” he said.
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