While the CAQ government plans to organize a vast summit on the demographic and linguistic issues facing Quebec, Premier François Legault has managed to get embroiled in notions relating to immigration. It promises.
While plunging into the Louisiana bayous at the national convention of the Coalition avenir Québec, François Legault demanded that the Trudeau government manage the family unification program, which accounts for 14,000 of the 50,000 newcomers obtaining permanent residency in the year. These are people who come to join Quebec members of their family, whether or not they are immigrants. They are their spouses, their children, their parents or their grandparents. However, half of these immigrants do not speak French, deplored the Prime Minister.
Some of the 7,000 people who do not speak French are children who will learn it at school. Others are too old to have this burden imposed on them, something François Legault himself has acknowledged. We do not have precise data, but if there are 3,000 spouses and adult children who do not know French, that is fine. Nothing to disturb the linguistic portrait of Quebec. And again: many of these people come to join a Francophone loved one.
In addition, François Legault expressed concern about the drop in the percentage of Quebecers whose main language spoken at home is French. In 1996, this percentage was 82%; it rose to 79% in 2006 and it is expected to rise to 76% in 2036. This data is secondary, although the demographer Marc Termote, who campaigns for a revenge of the cradles, sees it as an indicator that he does not should not be neglected.
This trend stems simply from the fact that the mother tongue of a large proportion of immigrants is not French. As for language transfers among immigrants, there are hardly any, contrary to what the new Minister of the French Language, Simon Jolin-Barrette, seems to think. Once in Quebec, the Arab, the Portuguese or the Colombian, like the mother of the Liberal MP Saul Polo, continue to speak their mother tongue at home and often want to pass it on to their offspring. It’s normal. What counts more is the first official language spoken (FOLS), to use the concept developed by Statistics Canada. What counts even more is the language and culture to which the children of Bill 101 rally. The selection of immigrants by Quebec plays an important role: immigration from French-speaking or Francotropic (Latin) countries obviously favors the vitality of French.
It is true that François Legault is on the wrong target, but the fact remains that the situation of French in Quebec and, above all, the projections that demographers have in store for us are worrying.
In a study submitted to the Ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI), the economist Pierre Fortin lucidly observes that Quebec has lost control of its immigration policy because of the explosion the number of temporary immigrants, whether workers or students, under programs for which the federal government alone is responsible. This loss of control risks harming the francization of immigrants whom Quebec, in practice, no longer selects itself. What’s more, Canada, with a threshold of 451,000 new immigrants in 2024, is pursuing an expansive immigration policy that will lead to an acceleration of the “demographic minorization” of Quebec within the federation.
While the number of so-called economic and other immigrants selected by the MIFI was only 29,000 in 2021, there were 177,000 temporary immigrants on Quebec territory. Signed in 1991, the Canada-Quebec agreement on immigration was to allow Quebec to choose 65% of immigrants; it is now obsolete. Ottawa no longer respects it, nor does the Quebec government, which can no longer keep pace. In the meantime, the delays to obtain permanent residence in Quebec are getting longer and reaching 31 months, while the pool of foreign workers who want to emigrate is growing. The pressure for Quebec to increase its targets is growing. Ottawa would like the CAQ government to be forced to do so.
The real issue is indeed this Canada-Quebec agreement as a whole. But as Lucien Bouchard reminded journalists after the unveiling of the statue of Jacques Parizeau, there are not many Quebec premiers who have succeeded in recovering powers from Ottawa; rather the reverse has happened. So there would only remain sovereignty to ensure the sustainability of our French-speaking nation.