The Minister of the French Language, Jean-François Roberge, seemed surprised and sincerely sorry when the colleague Anne-Marie Dussault, of the emission 24/60told him that in New Brunswick, we had seen the advertising of the falcon chill like a condemnation of Acadian chiac, which mixes French and English.
Mr. Roberge denied having had such a thought, but this misunderstanding nonetheless reflects the unease that sometimes surrounds the relationship between Quebec and Francophones in the rest of the country, whose interests do not necessarily coincide. .
We will celebrate the first Quebec Day of the Canadian Francophonie on Wednesday, as if we felt the need to reaffirm that the family remains united. If Quebec still feels that it has an obligation to support the francophone and Acadian communities in their fight to defend their rights, it must be recognized that there has been an estrangement.
Under the title For a strong, united and committed Francophonie, the Legault government published its policy on the Canadian Francophonie last year, which essentially repeated that of previous Liberal governments, in which Quebec was presented as “the main focus of the Francophonie in Canada”.
This way of seeing things undeniably corresponds to a historical reality, but Quebec is thus invested with a kind of responsibility towards communities outside Quebec, while it has no control over the factors that condition their existence: access to services in French, language of work, immigration, etc. The valorization of language and culture has its limits.
Quebeckers would certainly benefit from drawing inspiration from the pugnacity of francophones outside Quebec, who had to learn to deal with governments that were indifferent to their fate, when they were not frankly hostile to them. From Regulation 17 in Ontario (1912) to the Francophobic policies of Blaine Higgs in New Brunswick, the continuity is remarkable.
We can deplore that Bill 96 does not go far enough, but there has developed in Quebec a tendency to rely entirely on the government to ensure the protection of French, as if it were not the business of all. Elsewhere in the country, we have to fight for a daycare, a school, a hospital.
For a long time, the fight may have seemed to be the same for all Francophones from coast to coast. This is no longer the case. In Quebec, it is a question of ensuring that French is the common language, the mastery of which would be essential to life in society. In the rest of Canada, no one expects to have access to all services in French everywhere. Not to mention working in French.
These divergent destinies caused a conflict in 1989, when the Bourassa government opposed the demands of Franco-Albertans, who demanded the right to manage their own schools, fearing to create a precedent that the Anglo-Quebec community could have invoke. They finally prevailed, but something snapped.
Francophones outside Quebec can hardly escape the harsh law of numbers. For the first time since it was set in 2003, the target of 4,4% French-speaking immigrants across Canada outside Quebec, but there is no guarantee that it will be over the next few years.
The Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities (FCFA) estimates that we should rather wait for the figure of 12% by 2024 and 20% in 2036 for the Francophone population to return to its 2001 level. This seems very optimistic, especially if Canada decides to subscribe to the “initiative of the century”, which aims to reach 100 million inhabitants by 2100.
In the meantime, the decline in the demographic weight of Quebec within the Canadian federation is accelerating, and it could soon try to attract the immigrants that the French-speaking communities sorely need. Despite the great sympathy their fight arouses, he cannot tie his future to theirs.
English Canada has always allowed the threat of reprisals to hover if it considers the policies adopted by Quebec to protect French to be excessive. Just recently, the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, Marc Miller, declared that his insistence on demanding the application of the provisions of Bill 101 to businesses under federal jurisdiction could lead the other provinces to impose the exclusivity of English.
In 1995, it was clearly implied that the secession of Quebec would have catastrophic consequences for francophones outside Quebec, who had been taken hostage. After choosing to stay in Canada, should we still temper our desire to live in French so as not to get them in trouble?