44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 12, 2023 10:00AM
- May/12/23 10:21:02 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let me set the record straight: The Bloc Québécois is not saying that this is a good bill. The Bloc is going to support it because we feel that it will move things somewhat forward for now, but there are still a lot of unsatisfactory aspects.
The Government of Quebec asked to be in control of language planning within its territory. It also asked for recognition that French is the only minority official language. It requested a truly differentiated approach and asked that Quebec be the one to take positive measures, whether for French or English. It wants to have a say, it wanted a say in this.
The official languages plan was unveiled about a week and a half ago, and it is expected that $800 million will once again be spent primarily on English. The Quebec government has asked that it be used for French integration instead. Everyone in Quebec wondered why, when French is under threat, almost all the funding is going to English. I am actually pretty happy about that because usually this kind of thing would go unnoticed.
The minister said that part of that amount was for the teaching of French as a second language. That is generally a part of Canada-Quebec agreements, but only a small percentage, maybe 5% to 6%, is earmarked for French second-language teaching. Most of the funding goes to support the English school system. That is what we heard from a public servant who spoke anonymously.
My question for the minister is this. Is the government open to the possibility of increasing support for French in the positive measures and to adjusting its approach based on the requests of the Government of Quebec, taking into account the fact that French is in decline and that measures really do need to be taken? Furthermore, the federal measures that hasten the decline of French must be stopped.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by thanking my colleague for supporting several of the Bloc Québécois's proposed amendments to Bill C-13. We know that the Government of Quebec made some demands, and we tried to get as many of them adopted as possible.
Things were going well at the start, but later there was some manoeuvring on the part of some Liberals, who even voted against the bill yesterday. We could always ask our minister about that.
With regard to the action plan for official languages, we have a government here that says that French is threatened in Quebec but then chooses to subsidize only English in Quebec. That is quite shocking. What does my colleague think? Does that make any sense to him?
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- May/12/23 10:56:22 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his work on the Standing Committee on Official Languages and his support for a number of proposals.
I would like to hear his opinion. We know that the House of Commons recognized Quebec as a nation with one official and common language, French. We know that, in the beginning, language was supposed to fall under Quebec's jurisdiction.
What does my colleague think about the Government of Quebec's request to have authority over linguistic development and management in the province, while respecting the rights of the anglophone community, obviously?
With regard to positive measures, what does he think about the action plan that we have seen that invests a massive amount of money in English in areas under provincial jurisdiction?
I also would like to know whether he agrees that we should review the act before the 10 years is up, because, although I think that this bill does make some progress, it will continue to have an anglicizing impact on Quebec.
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Mr. Speaker, I hope that Bill C-13 marks the beginning of a change in the Official Languages Act and in federal language policy, arguably the main driver of anglicization in Quebec, which is home to 90% of Canada's francophones. Quebec is also called the heart of the francophonie in North America.
I hope that this is a sign that awareness is growing in English Canada and that it reinvigorates a movement of affirmation of the francophone and Acadian communities and a movement of national liberation in Quebec. To ensure the future of our language, our culture and what makes us a unique people, we must be freed from the yoke of a federal policy that prevents us from making French the official and common language and from exercising our right to self-determination.
It is vital to know the past in order to understand the present. To find our way in the future, we also need to know our history. That is why I am going to talk a little bit about the Official Languages Act first and then move on to Bill C‑13 and what we still have to accomplish in the future if we really want to secure our future and counter the decline of French.
Quebec poet and politician Gérald Godin, whom one of my NDP colleagues quoted recently, said this in 1983:
The federal policy on French in Canada can generally be summarized as follows: strengthen French where it is on its last legs; remain passive where there are real chances for it to assert itself and weaken it where it is strong.
Unfortunately, that is still true today.
After a majority of francophones outside Quebec were assimilated by measures taken in all the Canadian provinces, by laws and regulations that outlawed teaching French in school and using it in provincial legislatures, the government of the Canadian majority adopted legislation designed to strengthen English in Quebec and provide not quite enough support for francophone and Acadian communities to stave off their gradual anglicization.
The Official Languages Act primarily seeks to support English in Quebec because Pierre Elliott Trudeau decided that the federal government would support official language minorities in each province, and coincidentally, in Quebec, that is the anglophones. He refused to support André Laurendeau, who proposed special status for Quebec. To Mr. Laurendeau, that was essential. He looked to the Belgian and Swiss models, which are based on the principle of territoriality, but Mr. Trudeau rejected this proposal because of his anti-nationalist ideology.
The territoriality-based approach corresponds to one of the two major language policy models in the world. It seeks to establish an official and common language on a given territory. In contrast, the Official Languages Act is based on the principle of personality or, in other words, it is a policy of institutional bilingualism that seeks to give individuals the right to choose French or English. That is why we say that this type of policy encourages people to choose the language of the majority under the principle of personality.
Guillaume Rousseau, a professor of language law in Quebec, said that “virtually all language policy experts around the world believe that only a territoriality-based approach can guarantee the survival and development of a minority language”. Based on the principle of personality, the Official Languages Act seeks to impose English as the official language in Quebec.
The other main principle underlying the Official Languages Act is the presumed symmetry or equivalence between anglophones in Quebec and the francophone and Acadian minorities. Such symmetry made no sense from the start. It contradicted the scientific observations of the Laurendeau-Dunton commission, which established that, even in Quebec, francophones were disadvantaged from both an economic and institutional perspective.
Francophone workers ranked 12th out of 14 linguistic groups in terms of income. The economic status of francophones in Quebec did subsequently improve. It has come a long way, though not all the way. According to Statistics Canada data, in 2016, the average income of all full-time workers with French as their mother tongue was $7,820 less than that of anglophones.
There are all sorts of debates, but when we take indicators that are less sensitive to income disparities and that include, for example, a large proportion of immigrants, of course we come up with different results. The fact remains that members of the historical English-speaking community still occupy a very favourable position.
While laws prohibiting French schools did not apply in Quebec, French-language education has long been underfunded and severely restricted in areas such as Pontiac. It is particularly appalling that, in those days, the Official Languages Act and the official languages in education program were designed to support English almost exclusively in Quebec. The injustice was even more blatant for the francophone and Acadian communities that had suffered when French schools were banned.
A study by the Commission nationale des parents francophones showed that, between 1970 and 1988, anglophones in Quebec received 47%, or $1.1 billion, of the total funding available through the Government of Canada's official languages program for anglophone educational institutions. English second-language instruction in Quebec received 9.5%, and 14.5% went to immersion schools outside Quebec. The Commission nationale des parents francophones said that it was truly astonished to realize that 71.5% of the funds ultimately went to the majority. Only 28.5% of the funds were allocated to French first-language instruction outside Quebec. In the meantime, as the commission's report mentions, a significant number of francophones in every province except Quebec were still being denied access to education in their language and were being assimilated at breakneck speed.
In his statement on official languages, Pierre Elliott Trudeau said that “French-speaking Canadians outside of Quebec should have the same rights as English-speaking Canadians in Quebec”. However, his official languages in education program did just the opposite. It reinforced the privileged position of Quebec anglophones and generally left francophone educational institutions outside Quebec sorely disadvantaged.
Today, federal funding is more evenly distributed among the provinces, but the majority of funding continues to go to immersion schools outside Quebec. In Quebec, funding continues to be allocated almost exclusively to English schools.
According to census data, Quebec anglophones appear to exhibit more of the characteristics of a majority than a minority in terms of their linguistic vitality. While mother-tongue anglophones represented 8.8% of the population in Quebec in 2021, 43.3% of allophones chose to speak English at home. English's share of overall gains through assimilation is 50.8%.
With just under 50% of immigrants choosing to speak French at home in 2021, the proportion of francophones continues to decline in Quebec, as well as in Canada as a whole. We would need about 90% of immigrants to speak French at home just to maintain the demographic weight of francophones in Quebec. This corresponds to the relative demographic weight of francophones and anglophones.
It is not surprising that all of the projection studies that have been done point in the same direction, that is, the decline of French. In 2021, not only did Statistics Canada confirmed this trend, but the results also show that the decline of French in Quebec has been underestimated.
Let us recall the founding principles of the Official Languages Act. I spoke earlier about one of them, the principle of the minority status of anglophones, which does not take scientific data into account. At first glance, we can see that this principle is completely ludicrous in terms of political and legal power. As long as Quebec stays within Canada, it will be subject to the will of the Canadian majority, which is anglophone and which elects the federal government, with its predominant legislative and spending power. That is what we are seeing here.
In 1982, the federal government and the anglophone provinces imposed a Constitution on Quebec that has never been endorsed by any Quebec government, and pursuant to which the most important enforcement measures of the Charter of the French Language were weakened. Let us recall that 74 of the 75 Quebec MPs were Liberals and that all but one of them voted in favour of that. That speaks volumes about the objective of the Liberal Party at the time.
In an opinion requested by stakeholders on the language of commercial signs in Quebec, the UN Human Rights Committee affirmed in 1993 that English-speaking citizens of Canada cannot be considered a linguistic minority because they are part of the Canadian majority.
I have compiled data from the public accounts of Canada. It shows beyond any doubt that the vast majority of funds allocated to Quebec contribute to anglicization and strengthen the so-called anglophone minority. More than 95% of this funding is allocated to English in Quebec. Since 1969, more than $3.4 billion has been allocated for English in Quebec, even though the anglophone community was already in a privileged situation with overfunded institutions. This only increased its advantage.
In several areas, such as post-secondary education and health and social services, English institutions are also significantly overfunded by the Quebec government. In addition to programs that support the official languages, the federal government heavily overfunds English institutions, such as universities and health care facilities, through its infrastructure projects and research funds.
As Frédéric Lacroix has pointed out, the institutional network is a zero-sum game. The anglophone and francophone networks both serve the same population and are both funded from the same budget. What one group gets, the other must do without. Several anglophone lobby groups have said it is not a zero-sum game, but if anyone tries to touch their budget, all of a sudden it does become a zero-sum game, and they react quite aggressively.
In 2017, nearly 40% of federal university funding went to English universities. This institutional overfunding of anglophone establishments contributes significantly to the anglicization of newcomers, including allophones and even an increasing number of francophones in Quebec.
The federal language policy can be regarded as the blind spot in Quebec's language debate. Rather than challenging the Quebec government directly by constantly opposing its efforts to make French the common public language, the feds prefer to encourage anglophone lobby groups to form. It has even helped shape and finance them. These organizations intervene to weaken the Charter of the French Language through legal challenges funded by the federal court challenges program, which was established, coincidentally, in 1978, after Bill 101 was enacted.
These organizations have a very important impact. We must not minimize that. For example, they constantly favour services in English and institutional bilingualism, which makes it really difficult for the Government of Quebec to make French the common and official language.
For example, when speaking in support of French signage, René Lévesque said that, in a way, every bilingual sign tells immigrants that there are two languages in Quebec, French and English, and that they can choose whichever one they like. It tells anglophones that they do not need to learn French because everything is translated. We saw it with the official languages action plan. This is still happening.
The government really needs to rethink that funding. We saw it with the support of federal institutions that define anglophones using the criterion of first official language spoken, which includes 33% of immigrants. These organizations work to diminish the place of francophones with the support of the federal government. We also know that the Quebec Community Groups Network, or QCGN, and the 40-some organizations that are directly affiliated with it often use speech that blames francophones and victimizes anglophones. Josée Legault referred to this as xenophobic speech, and it is very effective in influencing the public opinion of the anglophone majority in Canada and abroad.
We saw many examples of just that in the challenge to Bill 96 and here in the debates over Bill C-13. The member for Mount Royal showed up with opinions that essentially echoed those of the QCGN. This former president of Alliance Quebec argues that services in English for English-speaking immigrants are a fundamental right. We also saw another member repeat the QCGN's disinformation, which said that Bill 96 aims to prohibit health services in English, which is absolutely not true.
The fact remains that there are positive aspects to Bill C-13, which acknowledges that “Quebec's Charter of the French Language provides that French is the official language of Quebec” and that “the goal...is to protect, strengthen and promote that language”. In addition, there were all the last-minute amendments, following a compromise between the Quebec and Canadian governments to amend the new law on the use of French within federally regulated private businesses. Those amendments included significant changes in favour of the asymmetry between French and English.
These amendments ensure that the federal legislation incorporates several clauses inspired by the Charter of the French Language, such as generalizing the use of French at all levels of a business. There are other clauses that aim to protect the right to work in French in Quebec. It is an asymmetrical measure that applies in Quebec and in regions with a strong concentration of francophones, which corresponds to the territorial model Bill 101 was based on. It could also apply in other regions, alongside other language planning models for francophones outside Quebec.
Since culture and the French language are at the heart of what makes Quebec a nation, the Bloc Québécois is working very hard and being pragmatic to achieve every possible gain. The recognition of the Charter of the French Language and the asymmetrical elements included in Bill C‑13 represent as much progress as we believe possible for the time being. That is why the Bloc Québécois will be voting in favour of Bill C‑13.
The fact remains that the Official Languages Act will continue to exert an anglicizing influence on Quebec. We will continue to work to amend the Official Languages Act to make it no longer apply to Quebec, so that we can truly make French our common and official language. We will take the Official Languages Act out of the blind spot where it hides in public debate in Quebec.
I think people will have to face facts: Unless we get results fast, the only solution is for Quebec to become its own country.
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- May/12/23 12:38:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank our good friend, the Minister for Official Languages. I hope she will be as co-operative, so that the action plan for official languages supports this asymmetry that is recognized in the law on the use of French in federally regulated private businesses.
Even Quebec's minister of the French language was surprised that there were no measures for French in this bill. We were talking about $137.5 million allocated to projects already identified to support English in Quebec. That is more than $800 million over four years. I think it is unacceptable to continue funding English in Quebec when the government has recognized that it is the French language that is under threat. I hope the minister will be open to the idea of making the action plan and the principles set out in the bill more consistent. We are going to work very hard on that.
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- May/12/23 12:42:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague. We did indeed work well with him. I think we have done everything possible in the circumstances. We could have gone farther, by naming the Treasury Board as the central agency in charge of implementation, for instance. Many of the amendments sought by the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne, the FCFA, fell by the wayside.
The Liberal-NDP coalition seems to have been fairly effective, although I concede that the NDP supported the amendments we managed to table, because it took the combined efforts of all the opposition parties. However, we could gone a lot farther. The NDP's Sherbrooke declaration and support for Quebeckers' self-determination did not seem to count for much during the committee debates.
To get back to Minister Roberge, I think the people of Quebec made their own calculations. It was not what they had asked for. They wanted control of language planning and wanted the Charter of the French Language to take precedence. They even suggested excluding the concept of an anglophone minority altogether. Although they did not get these things, they still secured significant changes in the Official Languages Act in relation to federally regulated businesses.
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- May/12/23 12:45:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am definitely ready to go. However, I would like to point out that post-secondary education in French is broadly lacking in western Canada. Some huge challenges remain, which is preventing western Canada from having decent French-language educational institutions.
I want to point something out regarding the right to self-determination. If Quebec is considered a nation, it should have control over what makes it a nation and over its language. The Charter of the French language should take precedence over the Official Languages Act. We should have a say in the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that are awarded to support English. The NDP has not always supported these proposals, but it has supported some of them.
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- May/12/23 12:47:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I could not have put it better myself. The Bloc Québécois certainly supports francophone and Acadian communities. We think what has been happening for the past few years is totally unacceptable. There was a strategy that led to the presentation of action plans on official languages that promoted that. Again, it is the same thing.
A journalist asked a question and a senior official answered on condition of anonymity. That is how we were able to find out that $800 million was going to be allocated to English in Quebec. I found out because I combed through the public accounts. I think that Quebeckers do not agree with this. Francophones from Quebec do not agree, and we are going to make it known. If we get enough people to rally behind the Government of Quebec and the Bloc Québécois, the federal government is going to have to change this. Otherwise, as I said, we will soon have to resume marching toward Quebec's independence.
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- May/12/23 1:09:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her co-operation and work on the Standing Committee on Official Languages.
I would like to know if she considers Quebec to be a nation with French as its official and common language, and if she recognizes Quebec's right to self-determination.
If so, does she think it is okay for the federal government to swoop in and spend hundreds of millions of dollars in areas of Quebec's jurisdiction to support English?
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