Official Languages committee  Having said that, you're not making French regress. From the census, I can find out that among those who have Spanish as a mother tongue, how many speak French most often at home. But I agree with you. In the survey on the vitality of minorities, a question was asked that does

Official Languages committee  I fully agree with your viewpoint. There's a gap between the analyses we conduct using census data and the terminology we use to categorize people. I agree with you.

Official Languages committee  It depends whether you look at the Island of Montreal or Greater Montreal.

Official Languages committee  What we know is that historically, people whose mother tongue is English and people whose mother tongue is other than French or English settle mainly in Montreal. The longer they stay, the more they tend to migrate to the suburbs. Francophones do the same thing. Of course, given

Official Languages committee  I could answer very quickly.

Official Languages committee  Let me answer you very quickly. As I mentioned earlier, it's quite clear that if we simply place emphasis on mother tongue, there is of course a reduction. That's normal since there is a high rise in non-francophone and non-anglophone immigration. However, in Montreal, if you exa

Official Languages committee  In fact, there was an increase in the number of—I'm almost afraid to use the terms "anglophone", "francophone", "allophone"—people whose mother tongue is French in Quebec. That's clear. However, given that there was a high increase in immigration over the past five years, it's qu

Official Languages committee  Absolutely. You're perfectly right. We know that outside Quebec, the longer people stay here, immigrants whose mother tongue is neither English or French will mainly use English, whereas in Quebec, we've observed the fact that French tends to be adopted more and more by allophone

Official Languages committee  That's a good question.

Official Languages committee  If I took your case, if I managed to use census data and if I had Mr. Rodriguez's information, I could see that your mother tongue is Spanish. For the question on the language that you use most often at home, you might indicate both English and French or just French.

Official Languages committee  Perhaps you'd tell me that at work, you mainly use French. I don't know. I would therefore say that you belong to the group whose mother tongue is the third language or that you're an allophone. If we use another criterion, we might also say that you're francophone.

Official Languages committee  Yes. I'll give you a very specific example. In December 2008, Statistics Canada will be disseminating a CD-ROM which will contain the profile of all census data in the 6,000 municipalities of Canada. There are two profiles: the mother-tongue profile and the first-official-languag

Official Languages committee  You can understand that I am not able to make that kind of prognosis. All that I can say is that there are clearly people right now who are counting on certain factors, including immigration, to try to reverse the trend. As has already been mentioned, if more children attend mino

Official Languages committee  The issue of the Island of Montreal is a major one for many people. We've seen that recently, in the media among other places. It's quite clear that, for example, the rate of bilingualism among Quebec anglophones has been constantly increasing since at least 1971. We know that in

Official Languages committee  That said, that is one aspect. I have to admit that the task of Statistics Canada or any agency that collects this kind of information is to create a sort of societal map and put people into categories. When this kind of categorization takes place, people clearly do not accept be