The silence is deafening, both in Quebec and in Ottawa, on what will happen to Quebec’s political weight within Canada if the two governments maintain their current immigration targets. However, the question calls into question some of the fundamental balances of the federation.
According to Statistics Canada projections compiled at the request of The Press, Quebec’s weight within Canada will drop to 18% within 25 years. This, if we continue with targets of 500,000 immigrants per year for Canada as of 2025 and 50,000, no more, for Quebec.
This will upset the fragile linguistic balances that are essential components of the Canadian federation. Because pressures will inevitably be felt to question the status of French as an official language.
This linguistic balance is due to three essential components. First, that French be the official language spoken by a significant part of the population. Until the beginning of this century, it was about a quarter.
But between the 1961 and 2021 censuses, the proportion of “Canadians for whom French was the first official language spoken” fell from 27.2% to 21.4%. We should logically fall below the 20% mark in a few years.
The weight of Quebec within Canada is essentially decreasing at the same rate. According to Statistics Canada, with the current immigration thresholds, Quebec will account for less than 20% of Canada as a whole around 2036.
This calls into question another essential balance of the Canadian federation: that Ontario and Quebec have a fairly comparable size. Historically and politically, this was an important balance for the federation.
However, according to Statistics Canada projections, Ontario should have double the population of Quebec within 20 years at most. This balance will only be a view of the mind.
Finally, the last element of balance, Quebec is the political anchor of the Canadian Francophonie. It makes sense that if Quebec loses its political weight within Canada, that is bad news for all Francophones in the country.
All these elements make it incomprehensible that neither the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, nor his Quebec counterpart, François Legault, seems to see a reason to take a new look at their immigration policies.
It is more surprising in the case of Mr. Trudeau. Defending the interests of francophones outside Quebec is part of the DNA of the Liberal Party of Canada.
However, it is obvious that welcoming half a million immigrants a year will have a very negative effect on these francophone communities, which will be even more of a minority and, therefore, will have even fewer representatives in their legislatures.
One only has to look at what is currently happening in New Brunswick – yet the only officially bilingual province – to understand what could happen to the rights of Francophones outside Quebec if their political weight were to diminish further.
It should be noted here that the federal government has never succeeded in reaching its Francophone immigration targets in the rest of the country. And when we see the attitude of federal civil servants regarding the issuance of visas to French-speaking students from Africa, we understand that this is not a very big concern in the federal apparatus.
But, one thing is certain, never has a decision presented as being of a purely administrative nature had as much effect on the future of Canada as of Quebec.
On the Quebec side, the silence is just as disturbing. The Legault government does not seem to want to modify its ceiling of 50,000 newcomers per year, which it considers an absolute ceiling, without which Quebec would be threatened with becoming a “Louisiana of the North”.
Even if many groups in Quebec society, including but not exclusively employers, are asking to raise this threshold, Mr. Legault does not budge and his ministers have only mentioned very small openings.
However, one of the responsibilities of the premier of Quebec is to preserve the political weight of the province within Canada. Robert Bourassa, in his time, made it a real obsession. For Mr. Legault, it would rather be to make immigrants responsible for the decline of French, as he did during the entire last election campaign.
However, if Quebec maintains its immigration targets, it will only receive 10% of all immigrants to Canada. In 2012-2013, it was just under 20%. In 2018-2019, it was already only 13%. And the Legault government now says it must be even less.
Mr. Legault says he wants to obtain more powers for Quebec in immigration – essentially authority over temporary workers and family reunification. But that will not be very useful in the face of such a major upheaval in the portrait of immigration in Canada.