The Minister of the French Language, Jean-François Roberge, describes as “absurd” the “huge amounts” granted by the federal government in support of English in Quebec, but is convinced that “times are changing”.
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“There is something absurd in financing English in Quebec with such high amounts, when everyone knows that the language that is threatened in Quebec is French,” he declared in interview with the QMI Agency on Monday.
Since 1995, more than $2 billion from the federal Treasury has been used to support Quebec’s English-speaking institutions under the Official Languages Act, because English is an “official minority language” there, just like French elsewhere in the country, according to a Bloc Québécois study published Monday.
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Despite the reform of the Official Languages Act earlier this year – which now recognizes that French and English do not experience the same realities – Ottawa still plans to provide more than $800 million for English-speaking institutions over the next five years. coming years.
This sum is included in the Action Plan for Official Languages, unveiled in May, which provides for the establishment of 137 “new projects” to support the English-speaking community in Quebec.
The vast majority of the sums invested so far have gone to educational establishments, such as McGill and Concordia universities, “institutions which are well financed, which are not threatened”, underlines Minister Roberge.
“The Quebec English-speaking community has always enjoyed strong institutions. To think that they need hundreds of millions, even billions from the federal government to help them, is to have a biased vision,” he expresses.
Minister Roberge is nevertheless of the opinion that the Trudeau government “realizes that French, although in the majority, is threatened in Quebec” and that the new Minister of Official Languages, Randy Boissonnault, “recognizes that now, we must do things differently”.
In an interview between the two counterparts, Mr. Boissonnault assured his counterpart that a significant part of the money paid to Quebec would go to francization. Mr. Boissonnault indicated that the figure could reach 40% during a visit to the Official Languages Committee last month.
“In terms of helping Quebec protect French and reverse the decline in the demographic weight of Francophones, our government is very open to the idea of holding discussions with Quebec,” he told members of the committee.
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Minister Roberge, for his part, mentioned discussions concerning a new bilateral agreement which would see a good part of these sums go to francization, a wish shared by the Bloc Mario Beaulieu, author of the study published Monday.
“That’s what we want. That’s what we put on the table,” says Jean-François Roberge.
Minister Boissonnault’s office refused to react to the figures put forward by the Bloc Québécois.
Questioned on this subject in the House, Liberal Minister Soraya Martinez Ferrada mentioned “very tendentious” figures in the Bloc Québécois study, while her colleague Pablo Rodriguez accused the party of seeking to “create a division between Quebecers” .
In Quebec, the leader of the Parti Québécois (PQ), Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, affirmed that it was “as inconceivable as it is unacceptable that our taxes are used to finance our own assimilation so openly and clearly.”
“In this federal system, our own taxes turn against our interests, they work against the specificity of the Quebec nation,” wrote the PQ leader on X.