Hey there,

Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.

If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!

As the Mod said, there's usually no answer about why something DIDN'T happen, but in this case, we can pick out some important factors to answer your first question, then trace trends through to explain those 2011 Stats Canada findings that you cite.

Firstly, after the Seven Years War, the British did not attempt to impose Protestantism and French Canadians didn't want to convert. Secondly, later immigration also grew the numbers of Catholics in Canada, as well as the number of Protestants. Thirdly, although Protestant churches flourished in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, they have experienced a downturn in numbers.

The British explicitly gave rights to practice the Catholic faith to the population of New France via the Quebec Act of 1774. In New France before the Seven Years' War, the culture was strongly Catholic. Priests, bishops, and the church were key leadership within the community. The British decided strategically to accept this fact, and made Quebec an exceptional colony amongst the British Empire because it allowed Quebec to continue using French civil law, using French as a government language, and practicing Catholicism. The first governor of Quebec after the Conquest, Guy Carleton, recommended this course of action because he thought that the French population was "peaceful" and "industrious" and that allowing them to continue their traditional way of life would make the colony productive. It would also be really hard for a very small cadre of governing English speakers to change the culture of Quebec; the colony was about 70,000 people at the time of the conquest, a very significant number that couldn't quickly be offset by immigration (you can't make 70,000 Anglophones appear quickly!). It was much easier for the British to govern their new acquisition by making deals with leaders from the Catholic Church, which helped the government promulgate its laws, encouraged Quebecers to "submit to legitimate authority" of the British, and to be grateful for the privilege of keeping their religion and language.

Because of this tolerance, when English-speaking, Protestant immigration to Canada surged in numbers later, at the time of the American Revolution, they mostly settled in the Protestant English-speaking colonies of the Maritimes and Upper Canada, where the Protestant religion and the English language were entrenched in law to the point that Catholics couldn't be part of the legislatures. By 1851, 23% of people in modern-day Ontario and Quebec were either Anglican or Methodist [1]. Given the choice between living in those colonies, where they were a linguistic and religious majority, or living in Quebec, where a lot of the fertile land was already occupied and they would have to live under different laws with people of a different religion and language, they opted to go to the English-speaking colonies. (Thus only a few parts of Quebec, like the Eastern Townships, became sites of eventual Anglophone settlement.) They also had a certain cultural hostility to Catholicism: for example, "the Orange Lodge" - an anti-Catholic, pro-Protestant group - flourished. This entrenchment and regionalism discouraged conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, because who wants to convert to a religion that seems hostile to their existing family and friends? It also discouraged intermarriage and discouraged Quebec French Catholics from moving from Quebec to the other colonies. Thus, Franco-Ontarians, Acadians, and other French-Catholic Canadians became minoritized in a way that Quebecers never were.

In the 19th century waves of immigration that drew from Ireland (circa 1840) and from Italy and Eastern Europe (circa 1900) brought other Catholic communities to Canada. Some marriage records regarding Northern Ontario that I've worked on show a bunch of intermarriage between Catholic and Protestant people, but that doesn't necessarily extrapolate across the whole country - and we also know that Catholic immigrants in cities especially tended to keep to themselves and keep their Catholic faith rather than religiously "assimilating". Thus Catholicism became a permanent element in Canada's culture throughout all the regions, not just Quebec.

There's one final element to explain the modern stat that you bring up: as mentioned before, there was a very pronounced Protestant (namely Methodist and Anglican) trend in Canada, so much so that in 1901 those two religions alone made up 29% of the population, with large numbers of Presbyterians and others too. [2] (The censuses back then didn't have a "total Protestants" category, and I wasn't comfortable making calls about whether many of the smaller churches it listed are "Protestant" per se; I use the method of describing religious groups the way that they would want to describe themselves.) Anglicans and Presbyterians only made up 19.6% of Canadians in 1991. Contrast that to Catholic numbers: 41% in 1901, 45% in 1991. These numbers suggest that the mainstream Protestant churches lost members, whereas Catholic ones didn't, throughout the latter half of the 20th century. The "emphasis" of the 24% of Protestants in Canada has shifted to various smaller churches rather than the "mainstream" Anglicans and Methodists. There is a large historiographical and intra-Church argument about why this happened, with much blame being assigned to either "liberal" theological developments, the advancement of individualism, or the "irrelevance" of Protestantism in the face of social change. [3] As early as 1890, Anglicans were fretting over numbers and the disinterest of the young. This is important to note before looking at 19th-20th century Canada, because during that period the Catholic-Protestant ratio was closer to even and the set of denominations that made up Canadian Protestantism were different!

[1] Two largest Protestant denominations because "other Protestant" category was not used in this census; census of Upper and Lower Canada, 1851, on archive.org.

[2] Fourth Census of Canada, 1901, on archive.org.

[3] For example, David Marshall's "Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Faith" is part of this debate, falling a bit on the "liberal theology and social gospel made churches less unique and discouraged people from attending" angle. Wouldn't read it as a starting point but it's an example of this dispute. Other historians have argued that church attendance was a big part of leisure, community, respectability etc. and that more individualist or competitive preoccupations ended the "associational life" that churches thrived in, making people stop spending time with church groups or in the pews - this Protestant associational life is described in works like "Revivals and Roller Rinks" by Lynne Marks.