Hello Mr. Paradis, Mr. Clarke, Mr. Choquette and committee members.
The Quebec English-Speaking Communities Research Network, QUESCREN, was founded in 2008 as a joint initiative of Concordia University, the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities and Canadian Heritage. Today, the Quebec government’s secretariat for relations with English-speaking Quebecers also provides support.
QUESCREN is a collaborative network of institutions, researchers and stakeholders. It promotes understanding and vitality of Quebec’s English-language minority communities through research, training, knowledge mobilization, networking and outreach.
Thank you for inviting me to represent QUESCREN here today. I understand that your committee is studying the modernization of the Official Languages Act with a focus on part VII, as well as compliance and the impacts of the act on Canadians. My comments are on the first and third of these topics.
Part VII commits the Canadian government to enhancing the vitality of the English and French linguistic minority communities in Canada and supporting and assisting their development.
Regarding community vitality, Dr. Richard Bourhis, a QUESCREN researcher and member, helped develop the concept. He writes that “the more vitality a group is assessed to have, the more likely it is expected to survive collectively as a distinctive linguistic community.”
Using a vitality framework, researchers look at factors such as demography and institutional support. Studies show that Quebec’s English-speaking communities lack vitality in these areas and have issues of high outmigration, underemployment and poverty. In my view, vitality is a useful concept and should be maintained in the renewed act. However, I suggest a few changes.
First, the act does not define “vitality” or detail how the government would enhance it. It would be beneficial for the modernized act to clarify these.
Second, the act does not refer to concepts used in other research that provide additional insights into official language minority communities. For instance, critical sociolinguistics and ethnology researchers such as Dr. Diane Gérin-Lajoie, another QUESCREN researcher-member, show that minority language community identity evolves and relates to other identities such as bilingual or multilingual identities.
Other researchers use intersectional and multiple minorities concepts to clarify that one can be a member of a linguistic minority and also of racial or immigrant groups, and that minority language communities have their own hierarchies of race and immigrant status. For instance, University of Alberta’s Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Claude Couture argue that referring to what they call “French/English” is binary thinking, and that it is helpful for analysis but minimizes the “complexity and nuance” needed to fully understand linguistic minorities.
It would be beneficial for the modernized act to acknowledge that official language communities are complex and diverse. Their populations have multiple identities and may belong to multiple minorities. In my view, the act’s policies and programs need to take such factors into account.
Still with regard to part VII, while Quebec’s official language community shares characteristics with francophone ones, it is also different. Its population is composed of unique and diverse regional and ethnocultural groups.
A modernized act should, in my view, continue to support official language minority community development while also explicitly acknowledging the distinctiveness and equal importance of both official language minority communities, and addressing the distinct needs and profiles of both. For the English-speaking communities, this may mean addressing vitality issues and challenges faced by vulnerable multiple minorities while also supporting the communities' unique strengths, such as their heritage of welcoming immigrant initiatives.
I do not want to leave the impression that English-speaking Quebec is unique in its heterogeneity, or that the act should be worded in any way that treats linguistic minority communities differently. Each of Canada’s official language minority communities faces unique challenges, which is why consultation is so critical to designing positive measures that enhance their individual vitality.
My brief comments will now turn from part VII to impacts the act has on Canadians. Quebec, as you know, has a second language law, the Charter of the French Language. To my knowledge, in English-speaking Quebec, it is much better known than the Official Languages Act. QUESCREN researcher-member Dr. Paul Zanazanian has studied our community’s common historical memory about Quebec. He identifies the charter’s passage, but not the act’s, as a key event in this shared memory. Moreover, research on English-speaking Quebec has paid much more attention to the charter. A keyword search of online bibliography calls up over 450 publications on the charter and only around five on the federal act.
I wonder how well known the act is among other Quebeckers as well. In modernizing the act, it may be useful for the government to determine how well known the act is among English-speaking Quebeckers, and indeed all Quebeckers, and if, as I think, it is not very well known, to consider how this might affect promotion and policy implementation.
Another aspect of the act’s impact on Canadians is perceptions of inclusion and exclusion. Prominent Canadians have addressed this issue. For instance, Drs. Abu-Laban and Couture, whom I already quoted, write that “[f]rom the stand-point of Aboriginal peoples (and postcolonial theory) there is much to question about the discourse of 'two founding peoples'.” Likewise, a political commentator has recently identified indigenous and immigrant Canadians as groups “whose linguistic experiences occur outside” what he calls “these dated frames” of the act. He calls for the government to protect these groups’ languages, not just official languages.
My colleagues at the QUESCREN secretariat and I definitely believe that the act and its identification of official language minority communities continue to be relevant. However, we believe that it is important to be aware of critiques. Could the process of modernizing the act also somehow acknowledge or address concerns of these other populations? For instance, I wonder how the renewed act will relate to the newly tabled indigenous languages act and, in particular, outcomes for Quebec’s many English-speaking indigenous people.
In conclusion, ideally modernizing the act will help keep social cohesion in Canada at a time of social change. Drawing from QUESCREN's own experiences, I believe that the modernization process should involve and promote the following general principles: recognition of diversity, inclusiveness and rapprochement between different linguistic and cultural communities; respectful dialogue; evidence-based decision-making; and the use of research based on different methods to capture nuance and complexity.
I will close my remarks by inviting all committee members to attend a conference that we are co-organizing. It is called “50 Years of the Official Languages Act” and it will take place in Gatineau on May 29 and 30.
Thank you for inviting me here today. Merci.