Mr. Léon Dion often said that through Canada's bilingualism policy, there had been a diversion away from the recommendations that were made by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, also known as the B & B Commission, during the 1960s.
This commission took great care in making a number of recommendations to enhance the use and development of the French language in Canada, so that it would become more dynamic. In the opinion of the commission, French is the language of one of the two national communities, also known then, and sometimes even now, as one of the two founding peoples, but it had a minority status. For the elder Dion, there was only one minority language in Canada, that is to say, the French language, and it was occurring even in Quebec. French was the minority language in all of Canada.
Instead of adopting a policy to affirm the status of French throughout Canada, the country's linguistic framework, after the B & B Commission, opted for a series of laws recognizing language equality, official bilingualism and, de facto, the recognition that there were two linguistic minorities: francophones in Canada outside Quebec and anglophones in Quebec.
This led to what one might call an initial perverse effect, namely, confrontation between two language regimes in Canada: official language bilingualism from coast to coast and, in Quebec, the affirmation of the French language, the will to make French the commonly spoken language in the province.
For the elder Dion, Quebec's policy to promote French as a minority language in Canada and North America was clearly the intention of the B & B Commission. Therefore, the policy to limit it or to constrain it through bilingualism went against what the B & B Commission had brought forward.
How is all of this related to the census? I would start by saying, as Wilfrid Denis stated, that we learn very little from a census in one go. Demographic trends are slow-moving. Modulations take generations before becoming new trends. The 2006 census tells us very little that is new about the evolution of language in Canada, other than to confirm the overwhelming and sometimes century-old trends.
For example, one central dimension in the evolution of language in Canada relates to the fact that languages are territorial, and have been for quite some time. Quebec is becoming more and more French. That has been the case since the 1930s; the trend did slow slightly in the 1960s, with less francization in Quebec because of the arrival of immigrants after the war. But things stabilized with the language laws in the 1970s. I will come back to that.
Quebec is becoming more and more French and, in the past 50 years, Canada has become more and more English. This trend has been confirmed through the 2006 census data as well as in the post-census review published last December by Statistics Canada. Canada continues to become more English.
This territorialization occurs on a smaller scale over a longer period of time. The northern and eastern part of New Brunswick are becoming more francophone. Moreover, it is the only place outside Quebec where territorialization is advantageous to the French language. Here is a brief statistic. Francophones in New Brunswick represented 17% of the population in 1867 and in 1960 they represented 35%. Within one century, they went from 17% to 35%. That demonstrates the effect of the territorialization of languages in northern and eastern New Brunswick.
How did these two language frameworks, the one in Quebec and the one in Canada, change the way in which these languages have developed?
It would appear that in Quebec, the policy to assert language has stabilized its evolution, particularly as it relates to the teaching of French to immigrant children. This has allowed the territorialization of the French language to continue after it was stopped because of immigration to the anglophone community.
Outside Quebec, the last 40 years of bilingualism have not changed the evolution of the language. It is only in New Brunswick that French has become stronger. Elsewhere, and this has to be said, the situation is much more serious. Numbers are dropping throughout the rest of the country. The francophonie is surviving thanks to the constant stream of immigrants from Quebec and Acadia. Fort McMurray is one example. Alberta is the province that has seen an increase in the number of francophones over the past 10 years, because of the economic downturn in the Atlantic provinces and in rural Quebec.
There is a constant stream of new arrivals to this region, but this new population—and this is also a sign of failure—is having a hard time reproducing beyond the first generation. Something is not working. West of the Ottawa River, francophones are assimilating at the same rate, if not faster than allophone immigrants or the Franco-Americans south of the border. This is happening even though they live in a country where French is an official language, the language of one of the two linguistic communities.
Of course, the major trends to which I referred are occurring, but the language policy examples from Quebec prove that we can in some way affect these trends with a language planning policy.
I have two suggestions for Canada's language policies, something to which we should aspire in order to better reflect the linguistic reality of our country, with a view to influencing the trend to develop the French language, the language with a sociological minority status.