Can one of the fundamental balances of the Canadian federation be changed by a simple administrative decision? The Trudeau government thinks so.
The federal government has decided to increase the number of immigrants to the country to reach 500,000 per year by 2025. All without debate or a vote in Parliament, not even a public consultation.
The government claims that this is the best way to counter the aging of the population and the labor shortage. No doubt, but that comes with another aspect: it will necessarily affect the balance of linguistic groups in Canada and the political weight, not only of Quebec, but also of all francophones in the country.
When asked about Quebec’s political weight, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he only had to take in 112,000 immigrants a year. A strictly mathematical answer that has nothing to do with reality.
The reality is that it is not easy to find French-speaking immigrants or those likely to become so. But it is easier to open the doors of other provinces to thousands of immigrants and rely on the attractiveness of English to help them integrate. Finding French-speaking immigrants or seeing to their francization has always been much more complicated.
The federal government should know this since it has never been able to meet the modest Francophone immigration targets in the nine other provinces. In its targets published last month, Ottawa still plans to welcome 4.4% of Francophones among the 500,000 new immigrants. A target that has not been reached for 20 years.
The whole thing happens when we see a backlash against the French fact. Just look at what the Higgs government is doing in New Brunswick, despite the fact that it is the only officially bilingual province in the country. A province where we still do not manage to have francophone immigration that corresponds to the weight of the Acadian community.
But where does this idea of welcoming 500,000 immigrants a year come from? In fact, of two groups that have in common that they were chaired by Dominic Barton, Canada’s former ambassador to China, who founded a group called the Initiative of the Century and chaired an Advisory Council on Economic Growth, created by then finance minister Bill Morneau.
Both groups concluded that Canada should aim to have 100 million inhabitants by 2100, which explains the immediate increase in immigration thresholds. Except that the issue of linguistic duality or the weight of Francophones within Canada was practically not mentioned.
In a document of some 80 pages published by the Initiative of the Century and entitled For a Canada that thinks bigthere is only one mention of Quebec – and none of French-speaking communities outside of Quebec.
Essentially, it indicates that historically, Quebec “has not accepted a number of immigrants proportional to its population”. And the Legault government – newly elected at the time of publication – is criticized for wanting to reduce immigration targets.
A warning follows: “If [le Québec] does not keep pace with population growth in the rest of the country, [il] runs the risk of losing its importance within the Confederation”. Free translation: if you don’t get on the train, too bad for you.
We understand that, for the people of this “Initiative of the Century”, the only thing that matters is the prosperity that a population of 100 million would automatically bring to Canada in 2100.
We can agree or not with the decision of the Legault government to reduce the immigration thresholds to 50,000 per year and it is not unanimous in Quebec. But it is clear that even those who believe that it is not enough are not ready to consider that we should receive more than twice as much.
Politically, what is surprising in this decision by the Trudeau government is that a Liberal Party government was not sensitive to the effect that its immigration targets could have on the major linguistic balances in Canada.
It’s one thing to see a pressure group or any think tank (think tank) make a proposal that forgets the linguistic duality that we thought was one of Canada’s fundamental values. But when the federal government seems to forget it on an issue as important as immigration, there are many questions to ask.
And Prime Minister François Legault should not be afraid to remind Justin Trudeau: such immigration thresholds would call into question the political weight of Quebec within Canada. It is not something that the federal government can decree without being accountable and without worrying about the consequences on the other partners of the federation.