OTTAWA – Statistics Canada says the number of English speakers in Quebec recorded in last year’s census is lower than it originally reported.
The national statistics office says some 57,000 people recorded in last year’s census as English speakers really had French as their mother tongue, but were incorrectly classified because of a computer error.
READ MORE: Skepticism, ‘shock’ surrounds 2016 census language findings in Quebec
The embarrassing mistake for the internationally renowned agency means that the proportion of Quebec’s population reporting French as their mother tongue has declined less than Statistics Canada originally believed.
The agency is also revising downward the nation’s bilingualism rate to 17.9 per cent from 18 per cent, which the agency had touted as an all-time high for the country.
FULL COVERAGE: 2016 census
Census officials are standing by the new numbers that have been verified by an outside panel of experts and stress that the revisions do little to change the overarching story line about Canada’s linguistic makeup revealed earlier this month.
Statistics Canada officials are reviewing what went wrong and implementing new processes to prevent similar mistakes in future census releases.