Quebec Premier François Legault speaks to the media at the legislature in Quebec City on Aug. 23.FRANCIS VACHON/The Canadian Press
On a recent Saturday evening in Montreal, hockey fans spilled out of a popular Little Italy sports bar onto Boulevard Saint-Laurent to watch a Montreal Canadiens preseason game on two outdoor screens. The broadcast was in French but the crowd was a mix of English and French speakers. They cheered and chattered in both languages, but with a marked predominance of French. Even the anglophone customers ordered their beers in French.
An alien that had just landed in Montreal and witnessed the scene would have assumed French is the polyglot city’s lingua franca. The alien would have been correct. According to the most recent data, 94.5 per cent of the population of Quebec can hold a conversation in French. In 2021, 85 per cent regularly spoke French at home, according to Quebec’s commissioner of the French language.
But had the alien been granted an audience with François Legault, the Quebec Premier would have told them their observations were wrong.
Mr. Legault is currently trying to burnish his nationalist credentials after his party, Coalition Avenir Québec, lost a recent by-election to a resurgent Parti Québécois. An efficient way of doing that for any Quebec politician is to ignore the statistics and trot out the tired claim that the French language is hanging on by a thread, and then rush to its defence.
And so, earlier this month, the Legault government announced it will double the tuition charged to new out-of-province anglophone students at Quebec’s three English universities – McGill and Concordia in Montreal, and Bishop’s in Sherbrooke – starting in the fall of 2024.
“When I look at the number of anglophone students in Quebec, it threatens the survival of French,” Mr. Legault said. But there is zero evidence that this is true.
Mr. Legault and others who say the French language is in peril in Quebec are apt to cite the percentage of people who predominantly speak French at home at the expense of all other data. From 2016 to 2021, that percentage fell from 79 per cent to 77.5 per cent.
But that trend is based on statistics that tell more than one story. Because, while the relative number of people who speak French at home has fallen when compared with Quebec’s rising population, the actual number of them has risen steadily over the past 30 years, going from 5.6 million in 1991 to 6.5 million in 2021.
Over the same period, the proportion of people whose first language is English has basically been flat, going from 12.1 per cent in 1991 to 13 per cent in 2021.
So if it’s not people whose mother tongue is English, what is it that is, on paper anyway, affecting the percentage of people who speak French at home? The most likely answer is Quebec’s increasing reliance on immigration to meet its labour needs.
The province’s strong population growth in 2021 and 2022 has been driven by record levels of international immigration. Many of those newcomers have been temporary foreign workers; their numbers have more than doubled since 2017.
Since 2017, Quebec has also been obliged to absorb thousands of asylum seekers who entered Canada at the now-closed Roxham Road border crossing.
In other words, if the relative percentage of people who predominantly speak French at home in Quebec is falling slightly, it’s not because of 13,000 anglophone students who will likely leave the province when their studies are done, but because of an overall increase in temporary and permanent international immigration that is changing the statistical makeup of the province.
Thankfully, few people are falling for Mr. Legault’s canard. This week, the heads of five French-language universities in Quebec, as well as two major francophone student groups, came out in opposition to the tuition increase, partly because they couldn’t see how it would protect the French language.
A columnist in Le Journal du Québec took the same position, and added that the fact that over half the province’s high-school students failed a standardized French spelling and grammar test in 2022 was a more pressing problem.
But Mr. Legault will persist, because there is no reward for saying the French language is secure, and because there will always be a segment of Quebec voters who will line up behind a politician who conjures up an imagined threat to the French language, and then promises to slay it.