In his speech to mark his victory Monday evening, the leader of the Coalition avenir Québec, François Legault, wanted to dispel the deplorable impression that his remarks on immigration and those of his minister Jean Boulet left during the election campaign. It is a salutary change of discourse which must lead to a real change of perspective.
For once, his words were well chosen. Quite rightly, François Legault recalled that, contrary to what is happening elsewhere, “all parties consider that immigration is wealth”. And integration, “it’s a mutual gift that we give to each other”.
Quebec is not fertile ground for the rise of far-right anti-immigration parties like there are in Europe, such as those that have just taken power in Sweden and Italy. Moreover, Jean Boulet’s false and vexatious remarks on immigrants harmed the CAQ by reducing its electoral potential on the island of Montreal. They gave a boost to Liberal leader Dominique Anglade, who was able to save the day by rallying her voters who otherwise might have stayed home on election day.
As he has done in the past, the Prime Minister made an agreed commitment to be the Prime Minister of all Quebecers, but insisting that he was talking about Quebecers, “from all regions, all ages, of all backgrounds. His manifest will is to bring the population together.
But his greatest duty as Premier of Quebec, he continued, “is to ensure that the French language retains its full place, all its vigor.” And for him, the future of French, “it depends a lot on our ability to integrate newcomers in French”. He plans to hold the Estates General, a summit, a commission — the formula is yet to be defined — on the issue of the sustainability of the Quebec nation, an event to which allophones and anglophones would also be invited, because they too value our “ distinct society,” he said.
However, if Quebec were a normal country, like Portugal or Denmark, for example, or even a Canadian province like the others, that is to say English-speaking, integrating immigrants into the national language would not be an issue. . It is because there are two opposing linguistic regimes in the Montreal region and in western Quebec, two national legitimacies, that the problem arises. And also because English has taken over. In a bilingual country like Belgium or trilingual like Switzerland, the protection of each of the languages is territorial. Not in Canada.
According to a study published in 2021 by the Office québécois de la langue française, even if all of the so-called economic immigrants, that is to say those that Quebec selects, mastered French, this would have little influence on the decline of French. .
It must be said: it is not the immigrants’ fault if French is declining in Quebec. It’s a collective bias made up of indifference, passivity and submission, linked to this belief, which is much more widespread here than elsewhere, that you have to think and work in English in order to be fulfilled. It is a sociolinguistic context favorable to English, and therefore unfavorable to French, which pushes immigrants towards English in too large numbers and which causes more and more young Francophones to assimilate to English Canada, here in Quebec.