The scene is all too familiar. Statistics Canada releases a new census. There is a decline in French. The news is making headlines. Politicians say they are “concerned”. Then we move on. Rinse and repeat.
The situation is already very regrettable, of course, but misfortune never happens alone. Because now the public square is transformed, once again, into yet another debate around the same measures. We are talking about strengthening the Charter of the French language… We are talking about increasing Francophone immigration… Are we wasting our time?
Let’s take a step back. Sufficient or not, Quebec language legislation is already relatively robust, even from an international point of view. And allophone immigration, for its part, is clearly not part of the problem. On the contrary. Linguistic diversity, in addition to being an asset, should only reinforce the need to have a common language (French). Logical, right? So why is French backing down?
Is it because of the “attractiveness” of English? Come on, get serious. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t learn English in high school because I dreamed of an exotic vacation in London or Toronto. No, I learned English, like many other Quebecers, because it’s “in English that it happens”. It is the choice that must be made. And French in the Rest of Canada (ROC)? It is the choice that does not impose itself.
This is why Statistics Canada tells us that nearly 60% of bilingual Canadians come from Quebec. This is why Quebec bilingualism continues to grow and is approaching a rate of 50%, while bilingualism in the ROC drops to 9.5%, including among Francophones outside Quebec.
This last detail is important because, according to 2016 statistics, only 6.8% of Anglophones in the ROC have learned French (compared to 41.5% of Francophones in Quebec who have learned English). Francophones in the ROC were 89% bilingual. Conversely, more than one Quebec Anglophone in three (33.8%) lived in Quebec without speaking French.
This demographic situation betrays a fact that we have all tacitly accepted: English is necessary, French is not essential. It is not by using a little Latin in the Vatican that we will make the inhabitants of Rome learn a dead language. Similarly, exhibiting the language of Molière in a few buildings in Ottawa will not transform Canada into a truly bilingual country.
There are many who, without admitting it, have understood this reality very well. Starting with the federal government. In this regard, the appointment of Mary Simon as Governor General comes immediately to mind. Don’t get me wrong: the fact that she doesn’t speak French is not the real crux of the problem. Since she speaks English and Inuktitut, Ms.me Simon is somewhat “bilingual”, and of course the native languages are just as important as French.
Moreover, as former NDP MP Romeo Saganash pertinently remarks, it would be rather colonialist to impose French-English bilingualism as the only acceptable bilingualism when hiring. Moreover, many Aboriginal people speak only one or the other of the official languages, and forcing them to learn both languages represents a profoundly discriminatory obstacle.
Like I said, that’s not the problem. Here is the real problem: Mary Simon would never have been chosen if she had only spoken French and Inuktitut. Because in Canada, English is necessary, but not French. And unfortunately, Quebec will never stop the decline of French if it ignores its own country’s contempt for its language.