I find it important to comment on the use of the French word «Québécois» in the English text of most anglophones writing about the Quebec people. This suggests that the Quebec people is composed only of those whose mother tongue or language spoken at home is French. 

The Quebec people would then be just the «French Canadian» majority. Anglophones living in Montreal would then be excluded from being part of the Quebec people.

This reinforces the idea, suggested by Anthony Smith, that Quebec constitutes a «peripheral ethnie». 

Will Kymlicka may have been at the source of the systematic use of the word ‘Québécois’ in English academic books and articles. As a matter of fact, whenever someone now refers to the Quebec people in the anglophone academic world, they do the same and refer to us by using a French word.

If immigrant groups are sometimes racialized, the Quebec people is almost always ethnicised.

I wonder why. When talking about the Catalonian people, no one is using a Catalan expression, meaning to separate them from the Castilians living in Catalonia. Similarly for the Basque people in Spain, we are not referring to them by using a word in the Basque language.  It’s also the same thing for the Flemish people living in Belgium. They are not referred to by using a Flemish word.

So why are so many eager to use the word ‘Québécois’ when it is time to refer to refer to the Quebec people? 

I am afraid that it is in large part because the Quebec minority is mostly anglophone and that people cannot conceptualize or even fathom the possibility that an anglophone minority would be part of a larger group in which the main language used is not English.