The situation is serious. François Legault points an accusing finger at a government which, by its unfathomable negligence, calls into question the “survival of the nation”.
The numbers are indisputable. In three years, the culprit rolled out the red carpet to 90,000 unilingual Anglophones, massively gathered in Montreal, and 30,000 others who know nothing about the language of Vigneault. It is high time to name the person responsible: the government of François Legault.
No matter how hard we look in the mandates of Philippe Couillard, Jean Charest, Robert Bourassa, we will not find anywhere, before the CAQ, a government that has done the same, with immigration, to weaken French and anglicize Montreal. If there is a Louisianizer in Quebec, it is François Legault. And again: we don’t yet have the figures for 2022 and, without the pandemic, it would have been even worse.
We could speak of an arsonist firefighter if François Legault tried today to put out this linguistic forest fire. It is not so. While the sinister, major, is in the influx of temporary immigrants whose presence is constant and growing, Legault agitates his gut only towards the small brushfire of family reunification. Once minors and retirees are subtracted, there are only 3,000 non-French-speaking adults per year.
The issue of immigration is complicated. Should indulgence lead us to excuse the Prime Minister’s incompetence in this area? During the 2018 campaign, unable to answer simple questions about immigration, which he had made his main theme, he admitted that he was not “a budding genius”. He had four years to get up to speed. He did not do it.
Especially since before his declarations last Sunday, he had at his disposal the most up-to-date documents one could hope for: the reports that the economist Pierre Fortin and the demographer Marc Termote produced for his government and which point the spotlight on the linguistic slippage caused by the influx of non-French-speaking temporary workers.
They don’t mince their words. The dazzling acceleration, desired by Ottawa and permitted by Quebec, is causing us to “lose control of its permanent immigration policy”, says Fortin, and “the risk of a significant decline in the francization of its immigrant population”. . Termote adds: “So that temporary immigration does not contribute to weakening the presence of French, both in the public space and in the private space, the percentage of French speakers among these immigrants should be at least equal to the percentage Francophones in the host population”. Such a finding, he concludes, “should be enough to justify increasing intervention by Quebec in the management of this immigration”.
But Fortin describes an immigration department “overwhelmed by a tsunami of temporary immigrants” — 177,000 last year — over whom “the department exercises only timid control.” Like Termote, he notes that the Quebec government currently has the power to limit their number or to require that they have prior knowledge of French. A power that exists in the Quebec-Canada agreement, confirm to the To have to the Quebec negotiator of the agreement, Louis Bernard, and the former head of planning at the Department of Immigration, Anne Michèle Meggs.
Why doesn’t he? Fortin attempts an explanation: “The government, he writes, doubtless fears accusations of unrealism and cruelty” from English-speaking CEGEPs and universities and employers who use these programs as open bars. Strange, because the motherland of Anglophony, the United Kingdom, does not hesitate to require a prior knowledge of English to its future immigrants, including temporary ones. Cruel Albion!
Not only has this management been non-existent since the CAQ came to power, but its first planning document, from 2019, set itself the objective of increasing the number of these temporary workers by 15%. What Ottawa did, and more, with pleasure.
This reality, far more serious than the issue of family reunification, forces us to ask a serious question. If someone in power wanted the arrival of all these temporary workers who anglicize Montreal to continue uninterrupted, what would they do? First, he would govern for four years without ever regulating this flow. Then, he would fixate on a secondary objective, without much impact – the reunification of families – for which he cannot act alone. Above all, he would pretend to be unable to do anything without obtaining powers that, it is certain, he will never obtain within the Canadian framework. All this while pretending to be very concerned about the linguistic survival of his people.
I suppose that if François Legault reads these lines, he will be indignant that I make him such a trial of intention. It is because the distance that separates his speeches from his actions on immigration imposes the greatest severity, at a time when he is asking Quebecers for a one-way ticket to a dead end.
Basically, where are we going? “In the Montreal region, we observe, and we will continue to observe, a growing separation between a French that is less and less used at home and the French that remains more or less in the majority in the public space, writes Termote. Can we conceive of a society permanently subject to such quasi-schizophrenic behavior? How will immigrants, and Anglophones, react when they realize that French is in the minority, which is about to happen on the island of Montreal and which will be in one or two generations throughout the region metropolitan? »
How will they react? Simply by making English the common language. And thanking the one who made it possible: François Legault.
[email protected] / blog: jflisee.org