On the Track of Ethnocultural Minorities in Databases in Quebec
In Quebec, ethnocultural communities are often apprehended as though they were one monolithic group, despite the habitual pluralization of the term. Heterogeneity, although implied, remains blurred and varies according to the definitions and the compilation and data collection approaches adopted by the sources which provide information on the presence, traits and even behaviors of minority groups (gathered through administrative data and through census and other surveys undertaken by Statistics Canada). Any measurement of the presence of minorities within a population is tributary to how populations are conceptualized or defined, but this is all the more true for how the presence of minorities is actually tracked in different data bases. In effect, regardless of definitions, it is data that sustains (or not) conceptual and theoretical aspirations and which can eventually come to replace these. This text retraces inductively the existence of different variables which can in one way or another help to infer the presence of ethnocultural diversity within Quebec’s population, working with the hypothesis that data not only relies more often than not of an implicit definition, but that this same data ends up substituting these definitions.