The birds of misfortune don’t have their tongues in their pockets when it comes to French.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Obviously, French in North America will always be in a fragile position that will have to be defended. And the data released by Statistics Canada this week proves that more needs to be done.
But, please, let’s not start in fear!
Rest assured, French is not “collapse” as some have written. Quebec will not become Louisiana, where there are not even 5% of Francophones left. This catastrophic scenario does not hold water, if we rely on demolinguistics experts.
If we are truly witnessing a decline in French in the rest of Canada, we cannot say that there is a “tumble” of French in Quebec.
On the contrary, the number of people who speak French at home has increased from 6.4 million in 2016 to 6.5 million in 2021, even if it is true that their proportion has dropped from 79% to 77.5%.
In short, it is not Francophones who are disappearing, but rather immigrants who are more numerous, which is necessarily reflected in the growing proportion of Quebecers whose mother tongue and language spoken at home are not of the two official languages.
But the important thing is not the language spoken in the kitchen, but the one spoken in the public space.
And here, the data remains reassuring. Before the adoption of Bill 101, 88% of Quebecers could carry on a conversation in French. In 2021, we are at 93.7%. In other words, mastery of French is almost universal in Quebec, even if it is worrying to see that this percentage has dropped slightly since the last census (94.5%).
But instead of turning people on by erecting barricades between the two languages, we need to build bridges over the gap created by linguistic duality.
We must also rethink immigration, which remains the lifeline of a Quebec whose active population is declining.
Forget the revenge of the cradles! Despite generous social tax programs that make Quebec a paradise for families, the fertility rate is around 1.6 children per woman, whereas 2.1 would be needed to ensure population stability.
We can’t get out of it, Quebec’s growth depends on immigration. Otherwise, Quebec’s weight will continue to decline within Canada. With the current threshold of 50,000 immigrants per year, immigration to Quebec represents only 11% of Canada’s objective, a far cry from our demographic weight within the country (23%).
So we need immigrants. But they still have to speak French.
Between 2001 and 2016, almost three-quarters of them (73%) adopted French, which is much better than 27% before, in the early 1970s.
Is this level of linguistic transfer sufficient? Nope ! It would be necessary to reach 87% to ensure linguistic stability, according to the calculations of sociolinguist Calvin Veltman, retired from UQAM.
Quebec will not achieve this objective by imposing unreasonable coercive measures, such as the obligation to receive public services in French six months after the arrival of immigrants in Quebec.
Instead, Quebec should put the pedal to the bottom on francization, he who does not spend all the generous envelope that Ottawa gives him under the Canada-Quebec agreement on the sharing of powers in immigration.
In other words, the carrot should be used instead of the stick.
But it would be even simpler to select more immigrants from the French-speaking world, rather than favoring Asians who arrive, because of their colonial past, with English in their suitcases.
And beware: we are deluding ourselves if we believe that we will get there by attracting only the French, Belgians or Swiss. The growth of the Francophonie comes from Africa. That’s where you have to recruit… whether it’s with permanent immigration supervised by Quebec or with non-permanent immigration (temporary workers, foreign students) which has exploded in recent years, in response to the labor shortage. work, under programs controlled by Ottawa.
Unfortunately, Ottawa is making life difficult for students from French-speaking Africa who are disproportionately denied visas. We must remove the administrative obstacles that prevent them from coming to study in Quebec or elsewhere in Canada. We must review the criteria that block the files of African students.
Strongly a great cleaning!
But when it comes to Francophone immigration, Ottawa has been dragging its feet miserably for 20 years, not even reaching halfway to its target of 4.4% Francophone immigration outside Quebec.
Come on, a little effort! We have to make Canada more attractive to francophone immigrants. Offer more services to Francophones outside Quebec, such as daycare centers and schools. Catching up is urgently needed, because French is showing a worrying decline in all the provinces other than Quebec.
The planet has 321 million French speakers. It’s unbelievable that we can’t attract a few to our home.