While it is legitimate to demand that the federal government take Quebec’s language demands into account, there is no legitimacy in restricting it, as Mario Beaulieu does in a text recently published in these pages (co-signed by eleven people), the status of Francophone only to speakers of French as their mother tongue. According to him, we should expect a “collapse in the weight of Francophones in Quebec, from 81.6% in 2011 to 73.6% in 2036”. We must put an end to this linguistic “racism” once and for all. (The word “racism” is here in quotation marks to retain only the notion of hierarchy.)
It is completely ridiculous to believe that a francophone is a person who said “môman” before the age of two. A Francophone is also a plurilingual whose mother tongue is not French. We are not born francophone, we become one.
In Quebec, 85% of the population increase comes from immigration. You don’t need to be a Fields Medal winner to understand that the proportion of the non-immigrant group (and of non-immigrant origin) will decrease over time. This is not the case for Francophones, if by Francophone we mean anyone who has learned French at home, on school benches or in the workplace (here or elsewhere). The objective of Bill 101 was to make French as a mother tongue a fraternal language, so that we could pool our plural memories, our paths and our dreams in order to draw from them the resources and the audacity to make Quebec a prosperous, pluralistic and egalitarian society, and not a society where there are two classes of citizens.
Quebec has welcomed immigrants for generations. Many of them learned French before Law 101. Since 1977, this law has forced tens of thousands of young immigrants to attend French schools for eleven years. In addition, many of our immigrants come from former French colonies. They also number in the tens of thousands. As very few of them declare French as their mother tongue, they are for the most part disqualified as Francophones, even if among them there are French teachers, professionals who work in French, writers and many other citizens who have come moreover, deeply attached to Quebec, for whom the term “French Quebec” is a pleonasm.
The hierarchy thus created, between French as a mother tongue and French as a second language, should not be taken lightly. It creates categories of citizens who do not have the same value in society, a situation conducive to racism. We know how, in other places, but still today, the hierarchization of cultures has replaced that based on race – when the latter has become a scientific heresy – with harmful consequences on the political level. and social. In Quebec, where language and culture are often interchangeable, it is time to put this aberration aside before minds less harmless than decliners and accountants take hold of it.
The Quebec State has sufficient powers and resources to ensure the survival and development of French culture and language. Let it use them effectively and wisely without blaming or penalizing immigrants. Between 1971 and 2016, the use of French in schools (kindergarten, primary and secondary) increased from 64% to 90%, while the proportion of French-speaking immigrants exceeds 60%, and could easily increase if, as the says demographer Richard Marcoux, we are going to tap into the enormous French-speaking African basin.
French is not about to disappear. In Quebec, only 6% of the population has no knowledge of French. The complexity of the linguistic situation requires those who analyze it to take multiple criteria into account and, above all, to finally de-ethnicize the notion of Francophone. It would be shameful if the “thieves of jobs of the post-war period are now becoming “language thieves”.
According to Machiavelli, “he who controls people’s fear becomes the master of their souls”. Throughout the West, populists and demagogues have managed to make immigrant minorities believe that they pose a threat to the lifestyles and identity of the majority in order to seize power. Quebec is unfortunately no exception.