Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he has “great concern” about the decline of French in Quebec which is reflected in data recently released by Statistics Canada, but maintains that he has reservations about “Bill 96” modernizing the Quebec Charter of the French language.
“Quebec takes its responsibility very seriously to protect the French language in Quebec, but it is not just in Quebec that people speak French across the country and we should ensure that the protection of the language French in Quebec does not harm the protection of the French language in a minority situation across the country, ”he argued Friday during a press briefing in the Magdalen Islands.
“The protection of French-speaking minorities across the country, there are direct parallels with the protection of English-speaking minorities in Quebec which are very different […] in the threats they face, but the principles of protection […] hold and we will always be there for that,” added Mr. Trudeau.
Statistics Canada unveiled new data on the use of French, English and third languages on Wednesday from the 2021 census.
These new data confirm that the demographic weight of Francophones continues to decline in Quebec, as well as elsewhere in Canada, while English is gaining ground.
The percentage of Quebecers speaking mainly French at home has fallen from 79% to 77.5% since the previous census in 2016.
The share of Quebecers who only have French as their first official language spoken has decreased by 1.5 percentage points, from 83.7% to 82.2% from 2016 to 2021.
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