Talk:List of designated places in Quebec

problems with "designated places" in Quebec

There are two kinds of designated places in Quebec: dissolved municipalities (municipalité dissoute) and unconstituted locality (localité non constituée). Re: the translation for the latter, I think "unconstituted" is right, rather than "non constituted", by analogy with "unorganized territory" for territoire non organisé.

I already created Category:Unconstituted localities in Quebec and List of unconstituted localities in Quebec a few weeks ago. However, when it comes to dissolved municipalities, it's problematic.

There is a long history of municipal mergers in Quebec, see Municipal history of Quebec. For instance, we have: 16 January 1991: Creation of the City of Amqui by the merger of the City of Amqui and the Parish of Saint-Benoît-Joseph-Labre. So you might think that perhaps the "designated place" and "dissolved municipality" of Amqui is just the former pre-merger city?

But when you look at the map of the designated place of Amqui, it's just three non-contiguous parcels of land with a very small population (258, compared to 6322 for the census subdivision, ie, the modern city, of Amqui, Quebec). So it seems very unlikely indeed that this corresponds to the pre-1991 city; it would probably take original research to figure out just what the heck this designated place is for and why they chose its territory the way they did. Many of the other cases are similar.

In any case, most of the "dissolved muncipality" items in the list really shouldn't have wikilinks at all, because it's misleading. These designated places are something very different from the municipalities, they are some bizarrely-chosen subset of territory and population of the municipalities whose names are used to designate them.

I don't know to what extent this same problem may affect the designated places of other provinces. -- P.T. Aufrette (talk) 19:23, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I'll reply in greater detail this evening. Until then, please review a previous discussion about a list of designated places here, particularly Bearcat's comments. This previous and somewhat similar discussion is worthwhile reviewing in advance of digging deeper here. Hwy43 (talk) 20:00, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

This is just a guess, but judging by the map and the way the parcels correspond to the actual primary area of settlement, I wonder if maybe the designated place constitutes areas that were outside a much earlier set of city boundaries, but then annexed into Amqui sometime before the big merger that created today's boundaries. I can't really say for sure without additional research, however.

Nailed it! If you switch to the extended "GeoSearch" tool, click on the boundaries tab and add "population centres" as a secondary view, the three "designated place" parcels and the "population centre" become one single, completely contiguous unit. What this means, then, is that the complete unit is the pre-1991 boundaries of Amqui itself, and the three "designated place" parcels are the parts of pre-merger Amqui that are not densely populated enough to be counted as part of the "population centre".

The thing is, though, that the list certainly needs to link somewhere for each place that's listed. Probably the most appropriate solution would be for the municipality's article to actually contain a specific clarification of the fact that the DPL of Amqui doesn't correspond to the primary settlement. For an example of what I mean, take a look at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, Quebec — with the municipality's article being such a short and barely referenced stub as it is, we can't really justify having a separate article about the community of the same name within the municipal boundaries. Accordingly, I've removed the disambiguation from the links here and on the list of unconstituted localities, and instead I've added a note to the municipal article which explains the difference between the two things. I've just added a similar clarification to Amqui's article as well.

And if there are other examples where the DPL looks illogical or arbitrary, then follow the same process of adding population centres to the map to see if that clarifies things. Bearcat (talk) 20:44, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

By the way, I'm not convinced that Category:Designated places in Quebec (or other provinces) is a useful category. For comparison, we have a List of population centres in Quebec but no Category:Population centres in Quebec. Would we really create such a category, and tag all the various cities and municipalities with it? If not, then why do it for designated places?

If Stat Can had a table of "downtowns", and listed Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, etc., and gave population statistics and maps of defined territories for them, would we add Category:Downtowns to the article for Montreal, etc.? We wouldn't, because Montreal is not a downtown; it contains a downtown. Only a separate Downtown Montreal article would warrant a Category:Downtowns label. Similarly, Amqui, Quebec is not a "designated place"; it contains a "designated place" within it. The category isn't applicable unless the designated place warranted its own article.

Some specific types of designated places are useful though (see StatCan's Table 4.7 for the various types for each province). For instance the "unorganized localities" in Quebec, like Radisson, Quebec... all of Radisson is the locality, not some subset. -- P.T. Aufrette (talk) 04:01, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

P.T., thanks for fixing the translation. DPLs can be problematic as you've suggested, but can be addressed as Bearcat has suggested. I've observed the same initial problems for DPLs in Alberta. For example, Alberta provincial legislation enables certain municipalities to designate unincorporated hamlets within their boundaries. These hamlets must have defined boundaries and a name. Approximately half of Alberta's hamlets are also designated DPLs by StatCan at the direction of a provincial ministry. Of those communities that are both hamlets and DPLs, most DPL boundaries are not contiguous with corresponding hamlet boundaries. Some are larger, some are smaller, and a few are contiguous with hamlet boundaries. Further some hamlets have an adjacent population centre and DPL within their hamlet boundaries, but when their geographies are combined they are still smaller than their overall hamlet boundaries. StatCan even assigns names to some DPLs that differ their corresponding hamlet names.

What I have done thus far for Alberta's DPLs is, in their corresponding hamlet articles under their Demographics sections, I've indicated that their 2011 census information is of the designated place, similar to what Bearcat just did at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, Quebec. Hwy43 (talk) 05:01, 9 May 2012 (UTC)