Rather than having only French as its official language, Quebec should become bilingual, argued Quebec federal MP Angelo Iacono during a meeting of the official languages committee in Ottawa.
“I believe that Quebec, and I believe that Canada, should be a bilingual country, to be stronger and not just be a unilingual French-speaking province, because there you will exclude others who want to learn French,” said he said Thursday.
Mr. Iacono, who is the MP for Alfred-Pellan, a riding located west of Laval, is one of the Liberals who took turns in an apparent attempt at parliamentary obstruction to prevent a vote from taking place aimed at the committee requests the expulsion of Franco-Ontarian MP Francis Drouin for having insulted two witnesses by calling them “full of crap”.
There is only one officially bilingual province in the country: New Brunswick. Quebec’s only official language is French. Conversely, English is the only official language in the eight other provinces of the Canadian federation: British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Island -Prince Edward and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Although Canada has two official languages, the constitution provides that the two levels of government – the federal and the provinces – have the power to legislate on linguistic matters in the areas of jurisdiction assigned to them.
To support his argument, MP Iacono said he began his school career in English “because French speakers, […] the Quebecois, the ethnic French, did not want to have the Italians because they felt threatened,” even though “he was due to go to a French school.”
At university, after his studies in political science at McGill, he chose to continue his law studies at “the most French-speaking, the most Quebecois, we will say the most “French”” of universities: UQAM.
“And I fit in well,” Mr. Iacono said. And I was well respected. And look: I speak the French language today. There are sometimes words that I don’t understand, there are sometimes words that I say with a bit of an Italian accent, but I am a product of Quebec, I was born in Quebec, and I learned French. »
In fact, Statistics Canada data reveal that the rate of English-French bilingualism is increasing in Quebec and decreasing outside this province, so much so that it is stagnating across the country.
Quebec is by far the province where the proportion of the population capable of carrying on a conversation in French and English is the highest. It went from 40.8% in the 2001 census to 46.4% in the 2021 census.