44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 14, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Official Languages told La Presse that the provisions in Bill C‑13 regarding federally regulated businesses are exactly the same as those found in Quebec's Bill 96. It would be a serious mistake to believe that.
Bill 96 would require that all businesses in Quebec comply with the Charter of the French Language. Bill C‑13, however, allows businesses to choose whether to comply with the Charter of the French Language. The minister knows that there is a difference between being required to use French at work and being able to choose between English or French.
Why is she misleading Quebeckers?
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Mr. Speaker, the minister is trying to pull a fast one. She was right yesterday when she said that the only minority language in Canada is French. Those are her words. She said it was French, end of story.
Why then does her Bill C‑13 protect the majority language, English? Why is she giving the Air Canadas of this world the choice to operate in English in Quebec? Why is she giving these companies the choice to circumvent the Charter of the French Language?
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Mr. Speaker, the Bloc Québécois welcomes Senator Mobina Jaffer's Bill S-214, entitled an act to establish international mother language day.
In November 1999, the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization proclaimed International Mother Language Day. The United Nations General Assembly called on its member states to encourage the preservation and protection of the languages spoken by the peoples of the world.
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said, and I quote:
A language is a monument that is just as important as a stone monument, if not more so. Each culture represents a repository of considerable human wealth. Each people has its own repository of beliefs and institutions that represent an irreplaceable experience for humanity as a whole.
This is in keeping with the Bloc Québécois' historic commitment to defending and promoting the French language in Quebec, Canada and America, which in turn is in keeping with the fight for cultural and linguistic diversity in the world and people's right to self-determination.
We know that the right of peoples to ensure the survival and vitality of their language and culture is part of their fundamental right to self-determination. Under the United Nations charter, every people has the right to self-determination, whether they are Scottish, Catalan, Palestinian, Kabyle or Québécois.
With neo-liberal globalization, the entire world is experiencing the commodification and anglicization of culture. U.S. mass culture is steamrolling national cultures.
It is therefore important that we ask ourselves whether we want globalization in a form that makes all national cultures and languages uniform, or one that ensures mutual respect among peoples. I believe that the latter path is the only one that can result in a peaceful and progressive solution that fosters world peace.
It is estimated that half of the 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today will disappear by the end of the century. Biodiversity loss does not just affect nature and wildlife. It also affects the world's linguistic heritage, which is in serious jeopardy.
We are seeing it here. Indigenous languages are at serious risk of disappearing, and the status of French in Canada shows that it is in decline. For example, only 2.4% of francophones outside Quebec speak French at home. French is critically endangered.
Language laws exist all over the world. In the study of various language planning models, they are grouped into two broad categories: models based on the principle of territoriality of collective rights and models based on the principle of personality, of individual choice of languages in a given territory.
Wherever personality models are used, the result is the assimilation of minority languages, because the free choice of languages always favours the majority languages. Moreover, virtually all scholars around the world agree that territoriality is the only approach that allows for the protection of minority languages.
Bill 101 is based on territoriality. We know that the Quebec model, with its Charter of the French Language, aims to make French the only official and common language on Quebec territory.
This is one of the Quebec government's main demands. We are discussing it here in the context of modernizing the Official Languages Act. We want Quebec to be the master of language policy on its territory, while respecting the historical English-speaking minority and recognizing the right of first nations to maintain and develop their original languages and cultures.
In 1977, Camille Laurin made the following statement:
By proclaiming French as Quebec's official language and by recognizing the right of all Quebeckers to use French in all facets of their lives, we are making our language a national public asset, an asset belonging to all Quebeckers, the best way to unite us all and promote dialogue among Quebeckers of different origins. We are giving Quebeckers a way to express their identity to the world.
People who champion French in Quebec have always sought to include newcomers. It comes down to math. If we do not help newcomers learn French, we cannot ensure the survival of the language. Helping newcomers learn French and including them in Quebec society is how we achieve social cohesion. If we want to understand one another, we have to be able to speak the same language.
This is a highly relevant issue right now. Canada's Official Languages Act was, in a way, a response to the 1867 Constitution, which gave rise to language laws that prohibited people from teaching French and banned French schools and the use of French in the governments of nearly every province that now has an anglophone majority.
Then there was an uprising. The Estates General of French Canada were held, and André Laurendeau came along demanding collective rights for Quebec. In the end, the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission fell well short of that goal. It gave us an Official Languages Act that only sought to apply the personality principle, an institutional bilingualism that tried to promote the free choice of French or English in federal institutions where numbers warranted. Outside Quebec, numbers often did not warrant it. The way this was applied has meant that in every census since 1969, the year the Official Languages Act came into force, there has been an increase in the assimilation of francophones outside Quebec.
In Quebec itself, French is now in steep decline. As we know, the proportion of Quebeckers with French as their mother tongue is decreasing. In 1996, 81.5% of the Quebec population had French as their mother tongue. In 2016, it was 78%. Statistics Canada predicts that by 2036, which is only 15 years from now, that figure will be between 70% and 75%. As for the language used at home, it is the same thing: It will drop to around 75% or 76%. The common language, the public language, is an indicator that depends on the language used at home, the mother tongue.
We know that language transfers largely happen towards English, even in Quebec. That is why the Government of Quebec has asked for French to be recognized as the only minority official language. We need the federal government to stop always promoting English as an official language in Quebec, because it leads to the anglicization of newcomers.
Allow me to quote Pierre Bourgault, a great defender of the French language and one of the founders of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale, or RIN: “To fight for French in Quebec is to fight for all the languages of the world against the hegemony of one.”
I think it is vital to fight for French if we want to maintain linguistic diversity in North America.
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