MONTREAL—Based on the latest Statistics Canada census snapshot, Quebec need not fear that immigration will dilute its distinct character.

If anything, the National Household Survey released on Wednesday suggests that it is making the province more different than the rest of Canada.

How different? Enough that someone totally unfamiliar with the political geography of the northern half of the American continent could be tempted — on the basis of the StatsCan numbers — to conclude that he or she is looking at the immigration streams of two different countries.

It is not just that Quebec is home to a smaller percentage of immigrants than the national average (12.6 per cent versus 20.6 per cent.) That has been the case for a long time and the gap reflects the province’s weaker economy.

What is more striking is that, from one census to the next, the mix of immigrants that do find their way to Quebec is consistently different than those who flock to Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta.

The top three sources of immigrants that Toronto and Vancouver tap into are India, China and the United Kingdom. In Montreal, the same three spots are spoken for by newcomers from Haiti, France and Italy.

Arabic, Spanish and Italian are the non-official languages most spoken by the immigrants who call Montreal home while Cantonese, Punjabi and Mandarin dominate the non-official language landscape of Toronto.

The largest visible minority groups living in Quebec are black, Arab and Latin American while in the rest of Canada South Asian and Chinese top the same list.

Language has always been the marker that has made Quebec unlike any other Canadian region and that continues to be the case. It is the root cause of its strikingly different immigration pattern.

Overall the survey suggests that even as Quebec becomes more diverse and even as the task of maintaining Montreal’s French character becomes more complex, it is becoming more distinct rather than more blended in the Canadian mix.

While the makeup of Toronto and Vancouver are becoming more similar, Montreal’s is going the other way.

These are not just cosmetic developments. In time they will have an impact on the country’s political conversation.

Today’s immigrants to Quebec and Ontario have less in common than in the days when the two provinces drew the bulk of their immigration from the same Western Europe reservoir.

On that basis, the ties between Quebec’s newer cultural communities and the fast-growing ones elsewhere in Canada are unlikely to be close ones — if they exist at all. By the same token the ties that have historically bound the two central Canadian provinces stand to become looser.

In the past, the strong attachment of Quebec’s cultural communities to Canada has been part of the glue that has bonded the province to the federation. But over time, more recent newcomers to Quebec could be more inclined to follow the example of native-born Quebecers and identify more strongly with the province than with the country as a whole.

And then the concept of the welfare state is deeply entrenched in the political psyche of Western Europe and, to a lesser degree, Latin America. A higher proportion of immigrants from those sources could contribute to make the Quebec political outlook increasingly more progressive than the Canadian average.

Wednesday’s survey was the first produced under the (inexplicable) voluntary regime introduced by the Conservatives at the time of the 2011 census. The decision has taken its toll on StatsCan findings, in particular at the micro level.

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Thirty per cent of those who made up the agency’s sample declined to answer the questionnaire. When participation in the long-form census was compulsory, the non-response rate was only 6 per cent. The end result offers more of a bird’s-eye view of the country than a solid data-mining tool.

But even a blurry snapshot cannot fudge the outline of tomorrow’s Canada and the fact that a profoundly different Quebec will continue to be one of its enduring features.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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