Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much for inviting me here today to speak to you. Some of you have English as a first language.
For others, it's French.
Therefore, I will try to strike a balance in both official languages.
Nelson Mandela once said: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
In my capacity as the Commissioner of Official Languages for New Brunswick, I have two main roles: on the one hand, ensure compliance with the Official Languages Act of New Brunswick, and on the other hand, promote the advancement of English and French in the province.
Immigration has a determining influence on the vitality of the two official linguistic communities. Hence we are speaking out on this matter under my promotional mandate.
Our position on immigration can be summarized as follows. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms upholds the equal status of New Brunswick's two official linguistic communities. As a result, the policies, programs, and interventions of the two levels of government on immigration should not weaken the vitality of one linguistic community in comparison with the other. Unfortunately, for a number of years immigration to New Brunswick has benefited the anglophone community much more than the francophone community. Our office has been intervening in this matter to ensure that immigration to New Brunswick maintains the linguistic composition of the province, namely, one-third francophone and two-thirds anglophone. In other words, our actions in this respect are not designed to determine how many immigrants the province should welcome, but rather the distribution of this immigration within each of the two linguistic communities.
I will now summarize our various actions in this matter, and the results obtained to date.
A few months ago, after his appearance before your committee in June, the former premier of New Brunswick, Frank McKenna, wrote an opinion piece in a provincial newspaper in which he explained how central immigration is to the future of the Atlantic provinces. He ended his article with the words, “Demography is destiny.” That means the destiny of the Atlantic region depends on its demography.
That phrase really captures the imagination, and for good reason.
New Brunswick is facing the serious challenges of an aging population and a low birth rate.
On February 8, 2017, Statistics Canada announced that the population declined by 0.5% in New Brunswick, the only province or territory to record a decrease from 2012 to 2016. I want to reiterate that it was the only province.
Our future depends on immigration. Action is urgently needed.
However, we must be careful. Immigration must serve the interests of New Brunswick's two official linguistic communities. In other words, it must not weaken one community in relation to the other.
Immigration is a lengthy and complex process. One has to be very persistent to get through the various stages of a highly regulated framework. This regulatory framework is quite a contrast to the rather lax attitude of previous governments on the impact of immigration on minority language communities. How could this issue have been disregarded for so long?
As always, in terms of language and minority rights, awareness is still and always necessary; awareness to make the needs of the minority communities known, awareness to explain the relationship between the language of the minority and that of the majority, and awareness about the risks of assimilation.
The interventions undertaken by our office have helped make politicians at both provincial and federal levels, as well as public servants, aware of the needs of New Brunswick's francophone community. We never used to hear about targets for francophone immigration to New Brunswick, but now it's quite the opposite.
Awareness is certainly necessary. But that is not all. The two levels of government need to be reminded of their constitutional obligations.
As I mentioned earlier, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms specifies that New Brunswick's two official linguistic communities have equal status. Therefore, with our immigration initiatives, we always remind the two levels of government that they have a constitutional obligation to ensure that their immigration policies, programs and practices respect the principle of equality and do not disadvantage one linguistic community in relation to the other.
To achieve progress in francophone immigration, we gathered and published data. In 2013, we commissioned the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities to prepare a snapshot for us on the language situation in New Brunswick, using data from the 2011 census. A new snapshot will be prepared in the spring of 2018 using the most recent census data.
The first snapshot showed us that the majority of recent immigrants to New Brunswick, 81.1%, had English as their first official language in 2011, whereas only 11.7% had French. Remember the proportion I told you about earlier, that francophones make up one-third and anglophones make up two-thirds. Recent immigration patterns have not kept up with that split.
Furthermore, our office publishes, in each of our annual reports, the distribution by official language spoken of persons chosen under the New Brunswick provincial nominee program. During the 2012-13 fiscal year, the percentage of French-speaking and bilingual English and French nominees selected amounted to only 12.2% of all nominees welcomed to the province. Fortunately, this percentage has increased over the years. I will come back to this in a moment.