A group of employees from Lachine launched an assault on the multinational Amazon. They want to make the local warehouse the second unionized Amazon octopus establishment on the continent. We applaud with both hands their determination and their courage, knowing the relentlessness with which Jeff Bezos and his henchmen fight against attempts at labor organization.
The struggle of the Lachine unionists is all the more exemplary in that it was initiated by a dozen recent immigrants, supported by the CSN. Warehouse workers are overwhelmingly from immigrant and cultural backgrounds. A person involved in this movement tells us that the linguistic dynamic is particular there: “When the bosses want to talk to each other and not be understood by the employees, they speak French. »
Oh good ? “Yes, the executives are 28-year-old French-speaking whites who have just finished their administration courses, but the working language on the floor is English, because, sociologically, a lot of employees do not master French”, describes this source to us, stunned by this reversal of the linguistic situation. Quebecor journalist Dominique Cambron-Goulet, who worked in the company in 2020, tells us that English is even the language of communication for recent Latin American immigrants, who are Francotropes.
Nearly half a century after the adoption of the Charter of the French language, people never cease to be surprised at the difficulty of making French the common language in Quebec. Not a week goes by without an anecdote bringing an unpleasant truth to the public sphere: a more or less assumed, more or less militant refusal of French.
The message comes from above — from the president of Air Canada, from the board of directors of CN, from the choice of the governor general of Canada —; it also comes from below — from the Tim Hortons waitresses in front of the TNM who refuse Serge Denoncourt a coffee in his own language, from the health care staff at the Montreal Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital who only offer services in English to someone close to the member for Rosemont.
The militant association MEDAC tried to convince the shareholders’ meetings of large Quebec companies to indicate in their statutes and regulations that French was their official and common language. At National Bank and Laurentian, Metro and CGI, all CAs recommended voting against the proposal. In each case, the Caisse de depot et placement has put its weight in the No camp.
Even the director general of the First Nations Education Council, Denis Gros-Louis, who denounces in News Quebec’s “colonial approach” to young Aboriginals who have English as a second language by sending them “the message that they must assimilate if they want to succeed”. Why ? Because like their classmates, they will have to pass French lessons. In Quebec. In 2022. A shame!
What does the government do ? We know what the man who sits in Ottawa is doing: he is massively increasing the number of temporary immigration permits, which are beyond Quebec’s control, and the selection is done with software that, strangely, blocks 80% of visa applications from French-speaking African students. The combination of Quebec’s linguistic inaction and Ottawa’s linguistic action in immigration brought 63,000 unilingual Anglophones to Montreal before the pandemic.
Before becoming Prime Minister, François Legault complained that too much emphasis was placed on knowledge of French in the selection of immigrants. Has he finally seen the light? Its minister Jean Boulet waited until the end of his mandate to open up to this reality: “If we want to protect French, ensure its survival, it is fundamental that we have Francophone immigration. He ordered a report.
Ensuring that newcomers and members of linguistic minorities know French would certainly be a good start. We recently learned that we had all erred in believing that the education offered to Anglophones made them bilingual at the end of high school. Nuance, they are legally “deemed” bilingual. An overrated reputation, because 35% of the best of them, who have become CEGEP students, fail to take a course in French. Also note that once you have passed the secondary diploma, no one asks an English-speaking health professional to prove that he can treat someone in French. A gap that Bill 96 claims to fill.
I asked Statistics Canada to tell me the rate of non-bilingualism among young Franco-Ontarians in Toronto, aged 20 to 34. Only 5% of them do not speak the majority language. Ditto for young Francophones in Moncton. So why can’t 20% of young Anglo-Montrealers of the same age speak French? Mystery.
But even among those who hear French, there is evidence that they use it so sparingly that the principle of the common language resembles a Gruyère whose holes are bigger than cheese. The latest data from the Office québécois de la langue française, which dates from 2014, tells us that among the Anglo-Quebec population, 74% do not read French-language daily newspapers, 82% do not tune into French-language radio stations, 86% don’t listen to French songs and don’t read French books or magazines. In addition, 90% do not watch our TV and 93% do not watch our films.
It is better among Quebecers of immigrant origin. Two-thirds of them claim to speak French. Among these, we still find a third of them who read neither books nor magazines in French, 40% who shun French-language television and cinema, 50% who do not read daily newspapers and 53% who do not listen to French songs.
There are ways to truly make French the common language and to share more widely the richness of Quebec culture. They pass neither by the incantations of the CAQ in terms of immigration and education nor by the linguistic jovialism of which we see signs in the gazettes. Time is not on our side. Neither does Ottawa.
[email protected]; blog: jflisee.org