Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attends a bilateral meeting with Quebec Premier François Legault in Montreal on March 15.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
More than half a century of official bilingualism has not made Canada a safe space for francophones. In 1971, slightly more than 6 per cent of Canadians outside Quebec counted French as their first language. By 2021, their share had dropped to 3.5 per cent, as successive generations of francophones in the rest of Canada abandoned their parents’ mother tongue for English.
French-speaking communities in Ontario, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have seen their populations age and shrink at an astonishing rate. Beyond a few pockets of resistance, French appears destined to effectively disappear outside Quebec within a few decades, wiping out hundreds of years of history.
This is the opposite of what the father of official bilingualism had hoped would happen when he tabled the Official Languages Act in 1969. “We want to live in a country,” Pierre Trudeau said at the time, “in which French Canadians can choose to live among English Canadians and English Canadians can choose to live among French Canadians without abandoning their cultural heritage.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now taken up his father’s cause – sort of. The Liberals already dominate most majority-francophone ridings outside Quebec. But Mr. Trudeau can ill afford to take even Grit strongholds for granted these days.
Under Ottawa’s new policy on francophone immigration, the federal government plans to increase the proportion of new permanent residents outside Quebec who speak French from 4 per cent in 2022, to 6 per cent this year, 7 per cent in 2025 and 8 per cent in 2026. To reach its targets, it is fast-tracking francophone immigrants who might not otherwise qualify for permanent residency status based on their education or work experience alone.
The official aim of the new policy is to restore the demographic weight of French-speaking communities outside Quebec to the 1971 level. The unstated objective is to counter newly confident Quebec separatists who insist French is doomed in Canada and that, without independence, the same fate awaits la belle province.
“If we don’t move, what has happened to francophones in every other Canadian province will happen to us,” Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon recently warned. The PQ has surged to the top of the polls as Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government wages a jurisdictional war with Ottawa over immigration – by all appearances, unsuccessfully.
For more than five decades until recently, the federal government selected applicants for permanent residency based on a points system that aimed to ensure the most highly qualified applicants moved to the front of the queue. But under changes adopted last year, Ottawa created a special category under its Express Entry system that enables applicants with fewer overall points to become permanent residents as long as they can speak French.
Some labour economists have been critical of this shift. They argue Canada should choose newcomers (outside its family reunification and refugee programs) based on their future earnings potential. And the best predictors of a new immigrant’s future earnings are his or her prior education and work experience.
Even so, there are valid economic reasons for setting aside a proportion of new permanent residency slots for francophones outside Quebec. French-speaking communities in the rest of Canada face some of the country’s most severe labour shortages. They need francophone personal support workers to care for their elderly family members and French-speaking entrepreneurs to take over local businesses when their current owners retire.
Most French-speaking immigrants to Canada come from Africa and the Middle East, where education and skill levels are such that their scores are lower than the average among permanent resident applicants under the points system. Yet their role in ensuring the economic sustainability of francophone communities outside Quebec is undeniable.
Still, it is far from clear Ottawa’s francophone immigration policy can achieve its ambitious goals. For starters, it pits Quebec and the federal government against each other in seeking to attract newcomers from the same (and rather limited) pool of French-speaking immigrants. Quebec chooses its own economic immigrants and puts a premium on French skills.
What’s more, many francophones who immigrate to another Canadian province may end up moving to Quebec soon after they arrive here. Many may find that their image of a bilingual country where francophones can thrive in any province is shattered upon arrival, and opt to relocate to Quebec.
More to the point, given Canada’s rising overall immigration numbers, Ottawa would need to adopt even more aggressive targets to stabilize the francophone population outside Quebec. Indeed, the House of Commons official languages committee last week recommended a 12-per-cent target for French-speaking immigrants outside Quebec this year, rising to 20 per cent by 2036, “to rebalance the demographic weight of francophones in Canada.”
Alas, Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon is not likely to run out of ammunition any time soon.