Bilingualism appears to stall outside province’s borders
‘SHAMEFUL’ Prof says stats should raise alarms
OTTAWA- Official bilingualism is losing a bit of steam across Canada but gaining ground slightly in Quebec, according to data made public Wednesday by Statistics Canada.
The new data from the 2011 census show that Quebec was the only province to increase its rate of French-English bilingualism since the last census in 2006.
Overall, the national rate of bilingualism in English and French rose from 17.4 to 17.5 per cent of the population from 2006 to 2011, according to the census. This is equivalent to an increase of 350,000 people, for a total of 5.8 million Canadians among a country population of 33.1 million.
But the increase was largely driven by Quebec, where 42.6 per cent of the population said they had knowledge of both English and French in 2011, up from 40.6 per cent in 2006.
Statistics Canada estimated that Quebec was responsible for 90 per cent of the increase across the country.
Outside of Quebec, knowledge of French grew. But with the total population growing at a faster rate, the bilingualism rates dropped by about 0.5 per cent in provinces such as Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia.
Canada’s only officially bilingual province, New Brunswick, also saw its rate of bilingualism in English and French drop, from 33.4 to 33.2 per cent since 2006.
Francois Charbonneau, a political studies professor from the University of Ottawa who specializes in identity politics, says the numbers should raise alarms about the assimilation of French-speaking populations outside Quebec.
“The question we should ask ourselves is whether the spirit of the Official Languages Act of 1969 is still with us,” Charbonneau said. “Are people making bilingualism a priority for their children? By simply looking at the numbers, we can see that it remains a priority for francophones, but not for anglophones.”
Charbonneau suggested that federal immigration policies are knocking the wind out of efforts to promote bilingualism since they fail to protect or encourage French among new Canadians outside of Quebec.
“It is accentuating the differences between Canada and Quebec,” he said, suggesting Canada’s demographic trends and immigration growth have made the problem more noticeable since 2000.
“I don’t look at it that way,” said NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, commenting on whether the data show a divide between French speakers and the rest of Canada. “I look at it as a simple, objective fact. We only have one province that’s majority French and even there, as we’ve seen with the figures from the island of Montreal, French is under a lot of pressure right now.
“So what we have to do is maintain the critical mass in Quebec so that that can have a positive effect spinoff with regard to the other provinces.”
Mulcair cited as an example the NDP government in Manitoba, which actively recruits French-speaking immigrants. “I think that’s a good, positive model.”
“One of the big challenges that we’re having is because of the artificially high Canadian dollar, we’re seeing all export sectors being hurt and a lot of the communities, especially in Atlantic Canada, are being emptied out as people have to go seek work elsewhere. … A lot of those
“We have to maintain the critical mass in Quebec.” NDP LEADER TOM MULCAIR
communities are emptying out, unfortunately, and a lot of those were French-speaking.”
Some francophone communities say their local governments are failing to protect their right to live in French, simply because most French-Canadians have learned to speak English.
“This is a problem when we have ministers in British Columbia who tell us that the French language is not an official language here,” said Real Roy, who teaches biology in English at the University of Victoria. “I don’t know what country they live in. I live in Canada and in Canada there are two official languages.”
Roy, who is president of a provincial federation of francophones, said it also bothers him to see the British Columbiag overnment spending public money to translate official documents in Asian languages, while suggesting there isn’t enough demand to do the same in French.
“This is shameful, and this doesn’t help promote French,” said Roy, a Quebecer, who has also lived in Germany and China.
In Alberta, the provincial government, with some funding from the federal government, has subsidized an employment services centre that helps French speakers learn English and find jobs.
Suzanne Corneau, who has directed the centre for 10 years, said it has expanded its staff to serve about 5,000 clients per year, up from about 1,000 in 2002.
In that time, she said the clientele has also changed dramatically, from about 15 per cent immigrants 10 years ago to about 55 per cent today, mostly from Africa.
“They don’t always find a job in their field because the biggest barrier is English,” Corneau said.
In some cases, she said, businesses in the construction or oil and gas industry have become more stringent in searching for qualified candidates who speak English, because of accidents on the job.
But while the total number of Albertans speaking French grew 18 per cent to 81,000 from 68,000 since 2006, the province’s bilingualism rate in the official languages dropped to 6.5 per cent from 6.8 per cent.
Parliament’s language monitor noted last week that existing l aws were never designed to make all Canadians bilingual, but rather to ensure that the national government takes steps to protect the rights of minority English and French communities.
“In fact, the nature of Canada’s language policy has, in effect, been a guarantee of the right of citizens to be unilingual and it has imposed obligations on the state to be bilingual so that citizens don’t have to be,” said Graham Fraser, the commissioner of official languages, at a news conference after releasing his latest annual report.