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The linguistic wage gap in Quebec, 1901 to 1951

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Abstract

For most of Canadian economic history, French-Canadians (who composed more than a quarter of the country’s population) had living standards inferior to those of English-Canadians. This was true even within the province of Quebec, where the French-Canadians constituted a majority. Today, no significant gap remains in Quebec. Surprisingly however, the question of when the gap started to disappeared remains unanswered. Most of the attention has been dedicated to the long-available post-1970 census data, which show rapid convergence. However, it is unknown whether the convergence started before 1970. In this paper, we use more recently uncovered data from the censuses between 1901 and 1951 to provide such an answer. We find that there was convergence from 1901 to 1921, a reversal from 1921 to 1941 and a recovery between 1941 and 1951 that extended to 1971.

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Notes

  1. Moreover, French-Canadians in Quebec also exhibited the same average number of years of schooling as African-Americans in 1961 (Fortin 2011).

  2. It must be noted that the comparison with Black Americans was also very common in Quebec as early as the 1910s. Its use by nationalist figures was meant to highlight the relative poverty of francophones while also invoking an image of a lower political status. This potent imagery was increasingly used to justify greater political autonomy for Quebec.

  3. We also know that labor markets are no longer segmented along linguistic lines (largely because of high rates of bilingualism—see Lepage and Corbeil (2013)). Quebec’s multilingual labor markets today appear to be well integrated (Vaillancourt et al. 2013) in a manner similar to other multilingual societies such as Switzerland (Cattaneo and Winkelmann 2005). We do not know, however, when the segmentation began to erode.

  4. The summary form is explained by the fact that the microdata from the 1961 census have been lost. This is why most economists start with the 1971 census when evaluating the wage gap. The earliest one can go is 1969 by using the Family and Expenditures Survey (Geloso 2017) which has a considerably smaller sample.

  5. The one exception was the work of McKinnon (2000) which found a sizable wage gap in 1901 (however, her sample concerned Montreal only).

  6. The sample for 1901 was digitized by the Canadian Families Project (CFP). The data are available to the public at http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/cfp/data/index.html. The samples for 1911 and 1921 censuses were digitized by the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI). These data are publicly available at https://ccri.library.ualberta.ca/enindex.html.

  7. Starting in 1901, the first census schedule had two columns for “earnings from occupation or trade” and “extra earnings (from other than chief occupation or trade.”

  8. There are no options available to estimate hourly earnings.

  9. The census also asked, if Canada was reported as place of birth, what province the person was born in. This could allow us to exclude individuals not from Quebec, but we will not make this exclusion as we are interested in the linguistic wage gap between French-Canadians and English-Canadians in Quebec regardless of place of birth.

  10. We use this definition because it allows our results to be compared with those obtained elsewhere in the recent literature (Albouy 2008; Nadeau 2010; Gagnon et al. 2020). We converted the nominal wages to real wages using the price index produced by Emery and Levitt (2002).

  11. We use age and five power terms as per the specification proposed by McKinnon (2000). Her justification for using \(age^5\) was drawn from the work of Hatton (1997) whereby late nineteenth century and early twentieth century age earnings profile did not tend to follow the more modern profile approximated by the use of age and its square. Thus, using merely a quadratic term risks misspecification of the model. We followed the specification found by McKinnon (2000) to have some form of external validity to our results when we regress only for Montreal (see more below).

  12. The censuses contained more than 400 occupations. Following the specifications of Edwards (1940); Chiswick (1991); Dilmaghani and Dean (2018), we broke down these occupations into nine categories that form our dummy variables for occupational activity: (1) professional and semi-professional; (2) proprietors, managers, and officials; (3) clerical, sales, and kindred; (4) craftsmen and foreman; (5) operatives; (6) protective service; (7) other service; (8) apprentice and; (9) laborer (which forms the reference category).

  13. Because of the different structure of the census questions with regard to education and the issues associated with the 1911 census (see more below), we eschew the option of pooling the different cross-sections and using an interaction between year and francophone to capture the evolution.

  14. The CFP and CCRI are stratified random samples of individual records by dwelling. See https://ccri.library.ualberta.ca/endatabase/sampling/sampledesign/ for a more detailed discussion.

  15. While André Raynauld’s data apply to the 1950s, Montreal represented 41% of the province’s manufacturing employment. In contrast, Ontario’s largest city, Toronto, represented 21% of that province’s manufacturing employment (Raynauld 1961, 381).

  16. For 1901, the following Census districts were used to identify Montréal: 155, 167, 174-178. Urban areas are defined as all villages, towns, and cities with a population of 1,000 or more. For 1911-1951, Montréal is identified using information on the Census subdivision name. As per the Census Bureau classification, urban areas refer to incorporated cities, towns and villages with other types being classified as rural. However, in 1951, the Census Bureau changed its rural classification to include all persons residing in cities, towns and villages of 1000 and over, whether incorporated or unincorporated.

  17. Foreign-born English or French speakers were not to be marked as English or French.

  18. In fact, to this day, Statistics Canada refuses to report the linguistic data for 1911—see, for example, the study of Lepage and Corbeil (2013).

  19. Available at https://vincentgeloso.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/clioappendix.xlsx.

  20. See Tables 2 to 13 in the online supplement available at https://vincentgeloso.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/clioappendix.xlsx.

  21. The percentage impact of LinguisticStatus (because earnings are logged) is calculated using 100*[exp(\(\beta _1\)) - 1] as proposed by Halvorsen and Palmquist (1980).

  22. The reversal appears to start after the 1911 census. However, we are reluctant to make any inference from this as Gaffield et al. (2014) highlight the numerous limitations that could be biasing our coefficients for 1911. Moreover, our reversal during the Depression is consistent with those of Inwood et al. (2016) regarding immigrants in Canada during the Great Depression. They find that the convergence observed to 1921 was reversed with the Depression. Immigrant workers are more likely to represent the marginal worker and thus be adversely affected by the contraction. French-Canadians, by virtue of their lower levels of human capital, are also probably more representative of the marginal worker. Thus, the Depression appears as a more economically relevant point for a reversal of (relative) fortunes.

  23. This is especially true when we follow her exact model specification that included the foreign-born and their religion. This suggests that the issue of the sample size for Montreal is of minimal concern.

  24. See table 15 in the online supplement.

  25. The specification they use is slightly different from ours. Most notably, they are able to use hourly earnings rather than weekly earnings (the only measure we can use for the pre-1951 period) and they use a measure of potential experience which we cannot use (for lack of an education variable pre-1941—which is why we used different powers of age as controls for experience instead). As such, we have to alter the specification in their paper to be comparable with our data. We thank David Albouy for sharing the data he used in his 2008 article and Maripier Isabelle for sharing the code file for the same data used in her 2020 article.

  26. Vaillancourt (1988) made a similar finding earlier but with fewer data.

  27. See Fallon and Layard (1975) and Duffy et al. (2004) for this complementarity.

  28. Raynauld and Marion (1972) had made a similar proposition in the 1970s but using different theoretical tools and without any econometric testing.

  29. While anglophones in Quebec also lacked compulsory schooling, they did have considerably higher levels of schooling than francophones (Gagnon 1996) and this had started early during the colonial era (Verrette 1849).

  30. This is largely because very few anglophones did not know how to read and write. The small number of observation makes estimation daunting. Moreover, the ability to read and write captures only an elementary aspect of education (i.e., whether a person had some education) but it does not capture the depth of human capital (i.e., how many years of schooling a person achieved).

  31. For the full set of regression results, see tables 15a and 15b in the online supplement.

  32. Additional research using data from the Quebec Department of Education (which have never yet been digitized) could help understand the role of educational policy in the period.

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  1. King’s University College, 266 Epworth Avenue, London, ON, N6A 2M3, Canada

    Jason Dean & Vincent Geloso

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Dean, J., Geloso, V. The linguistic wage gap in Quebec, 1901 to 1951. Cliometrica 16, 615–637 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-021-00236-3

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