Tom Blackwell - For years, scientists have tended to avoid the “touchy” issues of differences in the well-being of Quebec’s anglophone minority versus its francophone majority. But a group of University of Montreal researchers has tackled the linguistic health divide — and discovered that English-speaking Quebecers live significantly longer than their French compatriots.
Higher rates of smoking and related lung-cancer deaths, as well as different drinking patterns among francophones, seem to explain much of the difference, researchers concluded in the study, just published in the European Journal of Epidemiology.
Lead author Dr. Nathalie Auger said scientists have rarely investigated any aspect of health inequality between Quebec’s linguistic solitudes, possibly because “it’s been a touchy subject.” She argued, however, that the comparison is important.
“Language is just a bunch of words; (but) there’s something that comes with the culture around that language that we’re trying to capture,” said Dr. Auger, a physician and epidemiologist at the university’s National Institute of Public Health. “There’s something in the community’s environment, in the individual’s environment, that shortens their life.”
Related
Quebec’s health site is French-only, despite bilingual mandate
Immigrants arrive in good shape but health declines the longer they stay: study
The study’s analysis recalls a 1988 Health Canada report that suggested francophone Quebecers are “merrymakers and sensualists” who smoke more because they are both less inhibited and “less rational” than anglophones.
The paper recommends that public-health officials target more anti-smoking advocacy campaigns at francophone women, in particular, since tobacco-related illness is increasing among them.
Still, there is good news in the study for French-speaking Quebecers. The life-expectancy gap has been narrowing over the last few years, the researchers found, perhaps because the francophone majority has become wealthier and more powerful, and socio-economic status is closely linked to health outcomes.
For a long time, though, Quebec was the “smoking section of Canada” and reluctant to change, said François Damphouse of the Non-Smokers Rights Association. Evidence suggests francophones were more hooked than others.
“People had that belief: ‘Don’t come and bug us about our personal behaviour,’ ” he said. “The tobacco industry must have known as well that the French-speaking population was much more receptive to their messages.”
The University of Montreal team analyzed data on 523,000 people who died during two five-year periods: 1989-1993 and 2002-2006.
In the earlier period, men who reported speaking English at home lived 4.4 years longer, reaching 77 years on average. By the mid-2000s, both groups died later, but the gap had shrunk to 2.3 years. For women, the anglophone edge in life-expectancy narrowed from three years in the early 1990s to 1.4 years in the mid-2000s, when English-speaking females lasted on average to 83.2 years, the study concluded.
Deaths from tobacco-related illness like lung and throat cancer accounted for most of the differences in longevity, the study found.
Data comparing smoking habits in Quebec are hard to come by, but a 1995 Statistics Canada survey found that 35% of francophones across the country smoked, compared to 26% of anglophones. Within the province, a 1994 survey suggested that almost twice as many francophones as anglophones consumed over 25 cigarettes a day.
A colourfully written 1988 report for Health Canada argued that French Quebecers had a “carefree” attitude toward their health that led to more smoking.
“Francophones seem to turn to unhealthy means of attaining a state of well-being more frequently than anglophones,” wrote Georges Létourneau, the late University of Montreal anthropologist. “Francophones are reputed to be jovial, romantic, good company, merrymakers and sensualists who are less inhibited but also less rational than anglophones.”
With two of the three big cigarette companies headquartered in the province, cigarettes were also entrenched in the culture, said Jarrett Rudy, a historian at McGill University and author of The Freedom to Smoke, a social history of tobacco. Manufacturers even appealed to Quebec nationalism in their marketing, he said, using French-Canadian folk songs as jingles and calling one cigarette simply La Québecoise.
Though Quebec had one of the steepest smoking rates in Canada for years, the numbers fell through the 2000s to close to the national average. For the deaths studied by Dr. Auger and her colleagues, though, it was cigarette use 20-40 years ago that would have spawned the cancers and other tobacco-linked diseases that killed them.
Alcohol-related causes – like road crashes and liver disease – were next in accounting for the life-expectancy divide, the study found. Francophones do not necessarily imbibe larger volumes of alcohol, but may be engaging in more binge drinking, which can lead to accidents and health problems, said Dr. Auger.
Suicide was another factor in the longevity gap, possibly because it was once seen as a “solution to oppressive life conditions” among francophones and has remained a cultural norm, the authors speculate.
National Post
• Email: tblackwell@nationalpost.com