Asylum seekers who arrive in Quebec knowing only English should be sent to the rest of Canada, according to the French language commissioner, Benoît Dubreuil.
“The increase in the non-permanent population observed in recent years is unprecedented,” wrote the independent watchdog of French in Quebec in a report of more than 100 pages tabled in the National Assembly on Wednesday. “From 2016 to 2023, Quebec would have gone from 86,065 temporary immigrants to 528,034.”
The growing number of asylum seekers contributes to this trend, the document says. This “has increased 20-fold since 2015”. However, in 2021, around a quarter of asylum seekers used only English at work. According to calculations by the French Language Commissioner, almost 32,000 of them only mastered the language of Shakespeare.
In his report, the commissioner therefore proposes to distribute people waiting for asylum according to their knowledge of French. Under this scenario, asylum seekers who only know English would be routed to the rest of Canada. Those who know neither French nor English would be redirected to the “provinces [s] receiving a proportion of asylum seekers lower than [leur] demographic weight.
This proposal aims to “reduce the costs of linguistic integration by taking into account the particular situation of Quebec, where French and English are in competition,” indicates the report.
Further details will follow.
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