English is mainly used by 14% of Quebec workers in their professional environment, a proportion that reaches 21% in the Montreal metropolitan area.
These data from the 2021 census were released Wednesday morning by Statistics Canada.
“French-English bilingualism at work was frequent in Quebec, with 27.8% of workers declaring that they used both languages on a regular basis at work,” notes the federal agency on its website.
The fact remains that four out of five workers in the Belle Province, or 79.9%, indicated to Statistics Canada that they spoke mainly French at work.
Nationally, 19.9% of members of the labor force reported that they used mainly French at work, compared to 77.1% for English. A little less than 2% “used French and English equally”, specifies Statistics Canada.
If we take into account all the provinces and territories without Quebec and New Brunswick, the data published on Wednesday allows us to conclude that “92.6% of workers use (have) only English at work (in 2021) and 98.7% use it (have) at least on a regular basis”.
In New Brunswick, the only bilingual province in Canada, just over 20% of workers spoke mainly the language of Molière in a professional context and 75.9% mainly English.
3.9% of respondents “used French and English equally” in this Atlantic province. In the Moncton metropolitan area, presented as “an important contact region between the French-speaking and English-speaking populations in the province”, 28% of workers used both official languages on a regular basis.