In a conversation, an interlocutor tells you: “In any case, we can make the numbers say anything! » My advice is to politely change the subject. This person doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It is extremely rare, in public debate, for a false figure to be used. It happens that a statistic is held up as the only valid one, while others offer a different, and also legitimate, perspective on the same reality. The figure is not in question. He is honest. He says what he has to say. The statistics losers are those who don’t know what the number means, or who disdain reading the methodologies.
The figures released last week by the Office québécois de la langue française say something very interesting, and I will reveal it to you a little further down. But there is one thing that they absolutely do not do, which is to tell us what the “language of public space in Quebec in 2022” is. Yet that is the title of the study. Note, the OQLF does not claim that its data reflects the reality of 2024, when the increase in the number of temporary immigrants has increased in two years from some 290,000 to more than 560,000.
We are also not told why a study whose fieldwork took place at the beginning of 2022 is only published in March 2024, while the demographic situation in Quebec is changing at a pace never recorded since, say, the Conquest. The problem is not the sample size of this poll. With 7,171 respondents, we are very serious.
I’m going to divulge what isn’t really a polling secret. Once the data has been collected, and since it is impossible, despite all efforts, to obtain among the respondents a correct distribution of men and women, young and old, Anglos and Francos, etc., we “ straightens » the sample using the available grid closest to reality: the census. The survey took place at the beginning of 2022. The results of the last census (of 2021) were not available until the end of 2022. Despite two years having passed for publication, the OQLF chose to use as a demographic standard the grid of the 2016 census. However, between 2016 and 2021, the proportions have moved against French.
The Office’s study was therefore adjusted to eliminate this decline. Poof! More importantly, between 2016 and the time of the study’s publication, approximately 800,000 more people came to change the “language of public space in Quebec.” In other words, the 10% increase in the Quebec population that occurred in the interval does not appear anywhere in the study. It’s not a blind spot, it’s a black hole.
It is all the more unfortunate since these 10% of newcomers do not offer the same linguistic behavior as the others. The French Language Commissioner recently told us that, among temporary workers, a third do not know French and that, of these, 86% speak English. In total, their presence has increased the number of Quebecers who use English as their working language by 50% since 2011. How can this spectacular increase in the number of people working in English have no influence on the language used with public services?
Simple: we pretend they’re not there!
Result: the Office makes public a study which it knows or must know does not represent the reality of 2024, the time of its publication, nor of 2022, the time of its completion. He is legally required to report on linguistic developments in Quebec every five years, which could explain why he felt obliged to publish the study. If so, he should have done so by specifying that his inadequacies were such that no conclusions should be drawn about the present. This would have prevented commentators little versed in methodology from brandishing these figures to assert that the situation is “stable”, or even that more English speakers than before were adopting the language of Felix in the city. The opposite is undoubtedly true.
But I told you above that these figures do not mean anything. Indeed. They say something. They reveal to us that in the absence of an increase in immigration and the number of Anglo-Quebecers since 2016, the place of French in the public space would be stable. Damn, we would even have recorded a slight improvement among English speakers and allophones.
Unless you present your study like this, a theoretical exercise only applying to a universe without an immigration surge and otherwise frozen in 2016, the booklet published last month amounts to linguistic disinformation. Is this deliberate?
There is room for doubt: the Office presents an evolution over time, displaying similar studies from 2007 and 2016 to draw the conclusion of apparent stability. But why didn’t he also integrate his earlier study from 1997? The decline would have been obvious, with French, the language of public use, having fallen from 87% in 1997 to 79% in 2022. The entire work demonstrates that the Office created by Camille Laurin to defend French and measure progress and setbacks have just spectacularly failed in their task.