Which province has the second-largest population in Canada?

Quebec is the second-most populous Canadian province, with about 8.9 million people in 2025 according to Statistics Canada. The province's largest city is Montreal (population about 1.78 million in the city, 4.4 million in the Census Metropolitan Area), the second-largest city in Canada and the second-largest French-speaking city in the world after Paris. Quebec is the only Canadian province where French is the sole official language under provincial law (the Charter of the French Language, Bill 101, 1977).

Quebec joined Canadian Confederation on July 1, 1867 as one of the four founding provinces along with Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The province covers 1,542,056 square kilometres, making it Canada's largest province by area. It extends from the United States border in the south to Hudson Strait in the north, and from the Ottawa River and James Bay in the west to Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the east. Quebec City, the provincial capital, has a population of about 547,000 and is the only walled city north of Mexico, with city walls listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.

Quebec is unique within Canada for its civil-law tradition, French-language majority, distinctive immigration agreement (the Canada-Quebec Accord on Immigration of 1991), and Quebec Pension Plan (separate from the federal Canada Pension Plan since 1966). The Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms (1975) provides parallel and broader rights protections than the federal Charter. Two referendums on Quebec sovereignty (1980 and 1995) both resulted in No votes, with the 1995 result a 50.58 to 49.42 per cent margin.

The Quebec economy is anchored by the Greater Montreal aerospace cluster (the world's third-largest after Seattle and Toulouse), Hydro-Quebec's hydroelectric system (one of the largest in the world), the pulp and paper industry, agriculture (especially dairy and maple syrup, with Quebec producing about 72 per cent of the world's maple syrup), and the artificial-intelligence cluster around the Mila institute and Universite de Montreal. Quebec's distinctive cultural identity is supported by the Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des telecommunications canadiennes (CRTC) Canadian-content rules, Telefilm Canada funding, the Office quebecois de la langue francaise, and the Bibliotheque et Archives nationales du Quebec.