Good afternoon.
First of all, I would like to thank the members of the committee for inviting me. It is truly a great honour, but you're also taking a risk because it's always dangerous to invite a demographer. They always bring bad news and bore you with numbers.
I'll get straight to the point. While it's hard to dispute the fact that French is declining in Quebec, a distinction must be drawn between two aspects: the use of languages in the private space and the use of languages in the public space. As demographers, we prefer to study the use of languages in the private space because the language spoken in the home becomes the language of children, a crucially important factor from a long-term perspective.
The second distinction that must be made is between Montreal and the rest of Quebec. The Montreal metropolitan area represents half of the population of Quebec. If you merely consider Quebec as a whole, as is too often the case, you confuse matters because the figures for Quebec as a whole don't reflect what happens either in Montreal or outside Montreal, where the decline of French is basically not a problem. The problem is in Montreal, but that's where half of Quebec's population lives. So, briefly, here are a few figures.
The demographic weight of Quebeckers for whom French is the language commonly used in the home has declined with every census since 1971 and today stands at 53%. That decline is also observed in the rest of the metropolitan area off Montreal Island. While the percentage fell constantly from 1971, there has been a change since 2001: French as the language commonly used in the home is now declining in all sub-regions of Quebec. Statistics Canada published its most recent demolinguistic projections in 2017 based on the 2011 census. Those projections confirm the decline, and even an acceleration of that decline, on and off Montreal Island, in the rest of the metropolitan area and the rest of Quebec. The phenomenon is actually spreading.
The major problem in the public space is that, by definition, there are now more than two languages. The fact that we don't have just anglophones and francophones causes serious interpretation problems. The second issue with respect to the public space is that there are so many possible measures and variables that we can always make some sort of finding. The key problem is that the indicator we most often use, which is language of work, is very hard to interpret, first of all, because not everyone works. Consequently, what's happening in the workplace doesn't reflect how languages are being used in the public space as a whole.
What's more, people often can't choose their language of work. My language of work as a demographer has often been English or Italian. Consequently, we have to be very cautious when we interpret language-of-work data. Whatever the case may be, all censuses and investigations conducted since 2001 reveal a decline in the use of French in the workplace.