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QUEBEC — Jack Jedwab has been surveying 450 out-of-province university students from McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s as part of a research project on retention, and early results suggest they want to stay in Quebec after they graduate.

It is encouraging news for Jedwab, who has witnessed first-hand Quebec’s consistent demographic loss to the benefit of other provinces since the 1970s.

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“My wedding was in 1990, the five ushers at my wedding, four of them live in Toronto,” said Jedwab, president of the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, a non-profit organization that promotes research, teaching and publications on Canada.

That tough reality was highlighted Tuesday in a study by the Fraser Institute, which concluded Quebec has the highest cumulative out-migration of any province in Canada, having lost nearly 600,000 of its citizens to other provinces between 1971 and 2015.

Quebec also experienced the lowest average level of in-migration during this time period.

The study — Interprovincial Migration in Canada: Quebecers vote with their feet — shows 1.652 million Quebecers moved out of the province while 1.069 million moved in over the 45-year period.

“What surprised us was that very few Canadians were willing to relocate to Quebec and live in Quebec,” economist and study co-author Yanick Labrie said.