Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Honourable members of the committee, I'll start by taking a few moments to tell you about my professional experience since 2009, which has allowed me to gain expertise on the anglicization of Quebec. Then, I will explain why Canada's Official Languages Act is a genocidal law when it comes to the French language, since it's based on the fallacious premise that anglophones in Quebec constitute a minority.
Between 2009 and 2012, I worked as a political staffer for MNA Pierre Curzi, for whom I wrote a study on Quebec's language situation at the time; the document was entitled Le grand Montréal s'anglicise. I also wrote a study on the need to apply the Charter of the French Language to college-level education. I then coordinated a study on the correlation between the anglicization of Montreal and the overfunding of anglophone universities in Quebec. Finally, I drafted Bill 593, which sought to improve the Charter of the French language and which Pierre Curzi introduced in 2012. Next, I was the chief executive officer of the Mouvement Québec français from 2013 to 2017. From 2017 to 2021, I took a break from the language file to sit on the City of Laval's executive committee and, for the past year, I have been drafting a paper on how the Canadian-English colonial regime assimilates francophones in an organized fashion via the Official Languages Act. According to my thesis, the notion of an anglophone minority in Quebec is a fallacious social construct that serves to develop tools to linguistically colonize the only region in which anglophones do not numerically outnumber francophones.
Let me give you the facts. On May 5, 1993, the United Nations Human Rights Committee rejected the request to recognize anglophones in Quebec as a minority. Referring to francophones in Quebec, the report indicated that “a group may constitute a majority in a province but still be a minority in a State”. The report adds “English speaking citizens of Canada cannot be considered a linguistic minority.” I will say it again, the UN stated that English-speaking Canadians cannot be considered a minority. Not only do the anglophones living in Quebec not belong to a minority requiring protection, but they are an integral part of the Canadian and continental majority. Furthermore, they speak the most powerful language in the history of humanity and which has dominated for over a century in all spheres of human activity.
In Quebec, there are nine francophones for every anglophone. Yet, this so-called minority absorbs half of all assimilation cases. That's high for a minority. In Quebec, there are more francophones assimilating to English than anglophones assimilating to French. If anglophones are a minority, how do they manage to assimilate speakers from what Canada calls the francophone majority? In Quebec and in Montreal, the percentage of language-of-use and mother-tongue francophones is declining while the percentages for anglophones are rising. In short, no linguistic minority on Earth has the assimilation power that anglophones in Quebec do. This unique situation exists nowhere else on Earth. If we speak frankly and truthfully, the anglophone minority only exists, then, as a concept to allow the development and deployment of the tools of assimilation by the Canadian-English colonial regime.
As for the education continuum of the Canadian English-speaking majority in Quebec, 8.8% of Quebec's population is anglophone with 8.8% of students in English-language elementary and secondary schools. However, once Bill 101 no longer applied, the percentage of students attending English-language institutions rose to 22%. How can minority institutions be so appealing? It's because Canada's Official Languages Act creates anglonormativity in Quebec. This contributes to the appeal of post-secondary education in English and, consequently, to the anglicization of the workplace, which has led to changing the language used at home in favour of English. In contrast, the francophone university network in Canada is so poor that 55% of francophones attend anglophone universities. The $100 million per year that the Canadian Parliament votes to anglicize Quebec should be entirely allocated to francophone institutions outside Quebec.
Finally, as Canadian parliamentarians now recognize that francophone minorities outside Quebec cannot be treated the same way as the Canadian-English speaking majority in Quebec, and since the anglicization of Quebec has been recognized, investing $100 million per year in anglicizing Quebec is an act of genocide on the French language.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.