Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My presentation is entitled “Canada's Language Policy: Stubbornly Going the Wrong Way”.
The 2021 census confirmed that the French character of Quebec is now under threat. In the meantime, the current Canadian policy to promote francophone immigration outside Quebec seems quite irresponsible. In 2021, the percentage of Canadians who speak French as a language of use at home dropped below 20%. In Quebec, the francophone majority has fallen to record lows, reaching 76% for native speakers and 79% for the language used at home. On the other hand, the weight of English in Quebec is increasing on both fronts. Assimilation to English drives these trends. Assimilation of French-speaking Canadians now using English at home is steadily increasing, from 280,000 in 1971 to 460,000 in 2021.
Since 2001, a similar trend has emerged in Quebec. Between 2001 and 2021, the anglicization of Quebeckers whose mother tongue is French has seen their number increase from 8,000 to 40,000. The anglicization of native francophones is now progressing as fast in Quebec as outside Quebec. As for Canadians whose mother tongue is not one of the two official languages, 2.9 million now use English, while the number who now use French, almost all of whom live in Quebec, is only 290,000, or exactly ten times less. Across Canada, English gains more than 3.3 million speakers through assimilation while French has a net loss of 170,000.
The 2021 census also tells us something new about francophone immigration. For the most part, they are immigrants whose mother tongue is French or immigrants whose mother tongue is not one of the two official languages and who are more comfortable in French than in English. Previous censuses have shown that, outside of Quebec and New Brunswick, the majority of immigrants whose mother tongue is French become English-speaking, and most of them do so in the first generation. On the contrary, the vast majority of those who settle in Quebec do not become anglicized.
Logically, these immigrants should be encouraged to settle in Quebec or New Brunswick rather than elsewhere. In 2021, Quebec, in particular, had 87% of the Canadian population whose mother tongue was French, but only 77% of immigrants whose mother tongue was French. In other words, Quebec is already not receiving its fair share of these immigrants. On the other hand, since the 2006 census, a growing majority of Quebeckers with mother tongue other than French or English have assimilated to French rather than to English, proof that there is good news sometimes. On the contrary, outside Quebec, Canadians whose mother tongue is neither French nor English did not show any tendency towards higher francization. In 2006, more than 2.2 million had become anglicized, compared to a minuscule 10,700 who had become French-speaking.
In 2021, whether or not these immigrants were, at some point in their lives, more comfortable in French than in English, nearly 2.7 million of them, or 400,000 more, had assimilated to English, compared to 12,500, a microscopic 1,800 more, to French. Clearly, for French to flourish properly in Canada, immigrants whose mother tongue is not French nor English but who are more comfortable in French than in English must be encouraged to settle in Quebec. The same must be done for immigrants whose mother tongue is French.