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Has the anglophone population of Rivière-du-Loup more than quadrupled in five years?

Are there almost five times as many English-speakers in Dolbeau-Mistassini, in the Lac-St-Jean region?

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Has Quebec City gained 6,000 residents whose mother tongue is English since 2011?

So say the results released last week from the 2016 census.

But some researchers who study Quebec’s anglophone minority aren’t buying it.

“It defies logic,” said Jack Jedwab, the executive vice-president of the Association for Canadian Studies. On Wednesday, Jedwab wrote to Statistics Canada questioning the accuracy of the findings on language in Quebec.

“It is imperative to move quickly to explain the shifts,” he wrote in a letter to chief statistician Anil Arora, requesting that the federal agency hold a formal inquiry into the findings. “Until such time, I have serious reservations about the capacity to use the data outside the Montreal Metro region for policy or any other purpose.”