It is up to the federal government to assume responsibility for the decline of French in the country, said the Commissioner of Official Languages on Thursday, which the Minister of Official Languages had just refused a few minutes earlier in the same room.
“It is the federal government that is responsible for immigration, decided Commissioner Raymond Théberge during a press scrum. It’s a shared jurisdiction, but it’s the federal government that sets the targets. Since 2003, we have set ourselves a target, we have never achieved it, so that means that we have not put in place the programs necessary to achieve this target. »
Mr. Théberge, who refuses to be “alarmist”, pleads for Ottawa to give itself the means to try to turn the tide. According to him, the federal government must focus on increasing Francophone immigration.
Demography is “like a glacier that suddenly appears”, he illustrated. And the census data is the result of decisions made over two decades.
Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor had just delivered a speech to conclude her pan-Canadian consultation tour aimed at preparing the next Action Plan on Official Languages.
Francophone immigration and “repairing” the demographic weight, “it is an absolute priority”, she insisted before an audience of hundreds of representatives of Canadian Francophonie organizations gathered in Ottawa for the occasion.
And in general, in terms of official languages, “we must do more and we can’t wait any longer,” she summed up.
Does the Trudeau government, in its last seven years in office, recognize that it has not done enough to halt the decline of French in Canada, a journalist asked him.
“The federal government is taking its responsibilities to ensure that we address the troubling situation,” she replied, without failing to praise her “ambitious” Bill C-13 aimed at modernizing the law on languages. official documents and its future Action Plan “with concrete elements to address this situation”.
Bill C-13 mentions that Ottawa will adopt a Francophone immigration policy aimed at fostering the development of this linguistic minority in Canada.
In addition to including “objectives, targets and indicators”, this policy must state that the federal government recognizes that “immigration is one of the factors that contribute to maintaining or increasing the demographic weight” of French-speaking minorities in the country.
However, the Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities (FCFA) criticized the Trudeau government in a brief for not providing a “recovery” mechanism if the targets are not reached, so that there is a catch-up.
Census data released last week by Statistics Canada revealed that French continues to decline in Quebec and the rest of the country. The percentage of Quebecers who mainly speak this language at home rose from 79% to 77.5% between 2016 and 2021.