Okay. Thank you.
No school programs in Canada produce better bilingualism among children than French-language schools. However, that seems to be a well-kept secret. In the 1990s and early 2000s, our research showed that, according to many parent rights-holders—up to 64% in Nova Scotia—the ideal program for fostering their child's bilingualism would be split 50-50 between French and English. Mathematically speaking, that is a balanced equation. People thought it should lead to a higher level of bilingualism, but we call that social naivety. People are forgetting that a society is taking care of the English. In reality, the best program would be provided solely in French, with the exception of English courses. In Nova Scotia, for instance, it is well known that children attending French school speak English better than anglophones.
Another point I think it is important to highlight is the fact that exogamy is not the causal factor of children's linguistic development. The key factor is the language dynamic chosen by the parents. When the parents are well informed, they can do it.
Only two very simple principles must be applied to achieve what we call additive bilingualism, a concept that originated in the 1970s and is still in use. There are two types of bilingualism: additive bilingualism and subtractive bilingualism. When the second language is learned without the first language being lost, we are talking about additive bilingualism, and subtractive bilingualism occurs when the first language is lost. So the idea here is to strive for additive bilingualism.
The following two principles are simple, but they are of course a bit more difficult to apply. That said, applying them is feasible, and many parents do it. In the first case, each parent speaks to the child in their own language. In the second case, it is a matter of increasing as much as possible the use of the minority language in the family. For example, we may be talking about lecturing your children in French, sending them to a francophone kindergarten and then to a minority school. Some of our research focuses on the cases where the parents respect what is referred to as Frenchness in the home and at school, meaning the optimal use of French and English in the family and at school.
When a parent in an exogamous family often speaks to their child in French and the child attends a French-language school, his or her French-language proficiency and francophone identity are equivalent to those of children whose both parents are francophone. In addition, they maintain a strong anglophone identity, as is appropriate, since they have an anglophone parent and English-language proficiency similar to that of anglophones. As I said earlier regarding Nova Scotia, they sometimes do better in English than anglophones. That is surprising, but there are theories to explain this phenomenon.
My fourth point is that the current census does not make a full enumeration of rights-holders and their children possible. It underestimates the number of parents whose mother tongue is French. This has to do with the fact that multiple answers are treated as more of a problem than as a Canadian reality.
I have read Statistics Canada's methodology documents. However, I found that they were more interested in solving the puzzle of determining whether individuals can indeed have two mother tongues. In the latest census, for instance, you can see that the question on the mother tongue comes after the question on knowledge of official languages. Next is the question on language use at home. Multiple answers have a deterrent effect. Answering the questions yourselves could help you see that. Answer options are in the singular. They include French and English, but “other language” is in the singular.
Moreover, the two other questions can have multiple answers, but that's not the case for the mother tongue. I could talk about this for a long time, but the fact remains that, according to the statistics, there are more multiple answers if the question is isolated than if it follows those two questions. I believe that the instructions are flawed. Here is what Statistics Canada says regarding this question:
For a person who learned two languages at the same time in early childhood, report the language this person spoke most often at home before starting school.
Anyone who has studied exogamy knows that the language of the majority dominates.
However, the child can still talk to one parent in French and to the other parent in English. I could give you examples of several children in my family who do that. Often, in the home, English dominates, but people opt for French school and manage very well. Rights-holders are being lost simply because speaking the second language equally often is a very restrictive criterion, as worded in the census:
Report more than one language if all languages are spoken equally often.
That's another very restrictive instruction. As a researcher who has examined this question, I find that it makes no sense on a socio-linguistic level. I had never really noticed it before, but I find it restrictive.
The census goes in a similar direction by stating the following:
For a child who has not yet learned to speak, report the language spoken most often to this child at home.
Once again, if the mother is anglophone and she is the parent staying at home, it is clear that the child will learn English, but that does not mean they will not learn the other language.
I will not go over the three other points, since you have discussed them already.
The current census does not enumerate anglophone and allophone parents who received a significant part of their primary level education in the language of the minority. It also does not enumerate anglophone and allophone parents with at least one child whose education has been provided in the language of the minority. Those are the two other criteria set out in section 23. You know as well as I do that the two criteria in section 23 that are not measured by the Statistics Canada census are the only ones that apply in Quebec.
I will now move on to my fifth point.
A post-censal survey on official language minorities is very useful—and I don't want to take anything away from its usefulness—but it cannot replace the census in enumerating rights-holders and their children.
As Mr. Corbeil himself said, it is a survey. It was completed by 20% of individuals who had filled out the long-form census. That 20% is rarely a good representation of language minorities when the figures are low. To use a scientific term, I would say that the sample was not stratified for official languages. There are already all kinds of problems.
I chaired Statistics Canada's advisory committee for the 2006 post-censal survey. In that survey, only the provinces of Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick had samples for the regions. They are indeed very large regions, as Mr. Corbeil himself said. For the other provinces, the results were only reliable at the provincial level, and the three territories were treated as a single unit. We could not even tell what the situation was for each individual territory.
What Mr. Corbeil has not said is that anglophones outside of Quebec and Quebec francophones, who are rights-holders under paragraph 23(1)(b) or subsection 23(2) of the charter, as well as francophones who were not among the 20% used for the sample, cannot be enumerated by the post-censal survey because they were not surveyed. Therefore, only persons with French as their first official language and allophones were part of that survey.
Given that fact, such a survey cannot enumerate rights-holders and does not make it possible to reliably estimate their numbers in a small region such as an RDC—a regional development corporation—or a school zone.
I will now move on to the sixth point.
The enumeration of rights-holders is very important owing to the critical role schools play in the vitality of linguistic minorities. It would help school boards and governments plan better with respect to many aspects of education in the minority's schools.
I will list some of those aspects: identification of potential clients; awareness-raising and recruitment campaigns; calculation of the enrolment rate in minority schools; number and percentage of the school population in English-language programs and French immersion programs; planning of real property requirements in terms of establishments, physical facilities and renovations; planning of human resources requirements, such as the number of teachers for educational training; interventions related to minorities' rights to obtain new schools. This last point is important and has been tackled in many trials related to language rights.
As for the last aspect, I will focus on the importance of funding research on rights-holders owing to recent situations I have experienced. I would like to point out that no one has analyzed census data related to francophones outside Quebec since the 2006 census. At the time, I was the executive director of the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities, CIRLM, and we analyzed the 2001 and 2006 censuses at the request of the Commission nationale des parents francophones, which had obtained financial support from Canadian Heritage.
CIRLM recently proposed, in partnership with the Commission nationale des parents francophones and the Fédération nationale des conseils scolaires francophones, to analyze the results of the 2011 and 2016 censuses—with the latter soon to be published—but Canadian Heritage refused to fund such a project. The department says that its policy is not to fund research. I think that sort of a policy is problematic because if Canadian Heritage cannot fund these kinds of analyses, who will do it?
I will stop here.