Cohabitation and the pace of the second demographic transition in Quebec. The evolution of beliefs and opinions on matters related to marriage and sexual behaviour of French-speaking Catholic Quebecers and English-speaking Protestant Ontarians

Benoît Laplante, Institut national de la Recherche Scientifique
Caia Miller, Université du Québec à Montréal
Paskall Malherbe, Université Marc Bloch

In a related paper, we develop the hypothesis that the pace of Quebec on the path of the second demographic transition can be explained by the fact that almost all of its French speaking population was Catholic, and that the refusal by the Church to change its doctrine on marriage and sexuality and to allow laity to play a decisional role in the definition of doctrine gave a motive to Quebec Catholics to abandon the Christian tradition, while the retrieval, by the local Catholic authorities, from the institutions that framed the life of the people “from cradle to grave” made it possible to really abandon it. In this paper, we show, using data from Gallup polls realized from 1953 to now, that the evolution of the opinions and beliefs on moral matters related to marriage and sexual behaviour of French-speaking Catholic Quebecers and English-speaking Protestant Ontarians fits with our hypothesis.