Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, committee members.
I want to thank you for inviting me to appear before you. In my presentation, I will give an overview of the evolving linguistic portrait in Canada. My presentation is based on statistics taken from various censuses, in particular the 2006 census. Then, I will present various results taken from a report entitled "Survey on the Vitality of Official Language Minorities", which was published on December 11.
First I want to talk about the changing number and relative weight of the major linguistic groups in Canada. I invite you to follow along with the information that I have distributed. On page 2 you will find the first slide which deals with trends observed over the past 25 years. In fact those trends increased between 2001 and 2006. In the 2006 census, there are approximately 18 million Canadians with English as their mother tongue, an increase of 3% since 2001, and there were approximately 6.9 million Canadians having French as their mother tongue, an increase of 1.6%.
Anglophones still represent the majority of the population, obviously. While their numbers continue to grow, their percentage of the Canadian population dropped from 59.1% in 2001 to 57.8% in 2006. The same is true of those with French as a mother tongue. The relative weight of that population dropped from 22.9% in 2001 to 22.1% five years later in 2006.
Obviously given the significant increase in immigration since the middle of the 1980s, essentially comprising individuals whose mother tongue is neither French nor English, the weight of the population known as allophones increased rapidly. It went from 13% in 1986 to 17% in 1996 and 20% in 2006.
Still on page 2, on the second slide, we can see that, in Canada, the use of languages—