Quebec

Château Frontenac, Quebec city

Quebec

Quebec, French Québec, eastern province of Canada. Constituting nearly one-sixth of Canada’s total land area, Quebec is the largest of Canada’s 10 provinces in area and is second only to Ontario in population. Its capital, Quebec city, is the oldest city in Canada. The name Quebec, first bestowed on the city in 1608 and derived from an Algonquian word meaning “where the river narrows,” beckons visitors to the city’s splendid view of the majestic St. Lawrence River and the pastoral Orleans Island. The province’s major metropolis, Montreal (Montréal), encompassing Montreal Island, Jesus Island to the north, and several communities on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, is the second largest city in Canada. Quebec is bounded to the north by Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay, to the east by the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, to the southeast by the Gulf of St. Lawrence, New Brunswick, and the U.S. state of Maine, to the south by the U.S. states of New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, and to the west by Ontario, James Bay, and Hudson Bay.

The boundaries of Quebec were altered many times following the establishment of New France in the early 17th century, when the French colonial empire in North America spread all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and west of the Mississippi River. At that time James Bay, Hudson Bay, and the Ungava region belonged to the British Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1898 Quebec’s boundary was extended north to the Eastmain River and east to Labrador. The district of Ungava was added less than two decades later. Quebec’s present-day boundaries were determined in 1927, when the British Privy Council granted Labrador to Newfoundland (now the province of Newfoundland and Labrador). Today the province of Quebec’s French-speaking political leaders continue to dispute this decision but honour the 1927 boundary.

To understand the concerns and ambitions of the present-day citizens of Quebec, one must appreciate the long and sometimes turbulent history of the province’s Francophone (French-speaking) community since the British acquisition of New France in 1763 and its struggle for survival and recognition as one of Canada’s founding peoples within a predominantly Anglophone (English-speaking) Canadian federation. This has been especially notable since the ‘‘Quiet Revolution’’ of the 1960s, when Quebec’s Francophone community came to perceive itself as a Québécois majority, and its leaders built a modern secular state to enhance their social, cultural, demographic, political, and economic power. This new reality has altered in numerous ways Francophone-Anglophone relations within the province and throughout Canada. Quebec’s Francophone political and intellectual classes, supported by some English-speaking Canadians from the country’s other provinces and territories, are pushing for a further decentralization of the Canadian federal system. Even the names chosen to refer to the language communities in Quebec are loaded with political implications. (See Researchers note: Québécois or Quebecers?) For purposes of convenience in this article, Francophone residents of Quebec are generally referred to as Québécois, while all residents of the province are called Quebecers. English-speaking residents of Quebec are identified as Anglophones if they have British ancestry or as Allophones if they are non-French or non-British immigrants. Area 595,391 square miles (1,542,056 square km). Pop. (2021) 8,501,833.