LANG Committee Report

Supplementary Opinion

Bloc Québécois

First and foremost, the Bloc Québécois wants to thank all the witnesses who appeared before the Committee on Official Languages, both while it was on tour and at the hearings held in Ottawa.

Generally speaking, the Bloc Québécois supports the objectives of the present report and applauds the concern of all parliamentarians for the future of official-language minority communities in Canada, especially the French-language minority communities.

The situation of the anglophone minority in Quebec cannot and must not be compared to that of Canada’s francophone communities, which face the danger of assimilation and where the use of French in the home has been eroding for years.  Furthermore, Quebec’s anglophone minority has become almost as large as all the francophone communities in Canada put together.

The challenges faced by these two communities are so completely different that it would be wrongheaded to formulate recommendations that try to ignore these differences.  Among other things, Quebec’s anglophone community can count on a complete educational network, including three universities; a network of health and social service institutions dedicated to them; and a wide choice of English-language television channels.  Francophones in English Canada enjoy no such advantages.  Indeed in our opinion the passing of Bill 101 in Quebec led to a special sensitivity there about the treatment of Quebec’s linguistic minority.  It was agreed that the public language was French but that the rights of the anglophone minority would be respected and protected.  Canada’s francophone communities face far more daunting challenges.

The lessons of the last census

The data from the last census are especially revealing in this regard.  In Canada’s provinces, not including Quebec, the number of people claiming French as the language of use in the home is much lower than the number of people claiming French as their mother tongue.  This discrepancy results from language transfers by francophones who use English in the home rather than French, as well as from the lukewarm appeal that French makes to immigrants.

According to the 2006 Census, 4.1% of the population outside Quebec has French as its mother tongue, a drop from 2001 (4.4%).  This is a trend that has been continuing for over 50 years.  There are 975,000 francophones in English Canada, compared with 980,000 in 2001, a decrease that is in the main the result of migration in and out of Quebec.  The proportion of people who tend to use French most in the home also fell, dropping from 2.7% in 2001 to 2.5% in 2006.  The number of people who speak French most often at home is lower than the number with French as a mother tongue by almost 400,000.

These observations contrast with the vitality of the anglophone community in Quebec.  They illustrate what the Bloc Québécois has been arguing for a long time:  a genuine Action Plan for Official Languages must focus strictly on helping the francophone minority communities.

Respect for the Charte de la langue française

It is impossible to work actively to enhance the place of French in Canada without also reaffirming the place of French in Quebec.  The Bloc Québécois considers that the government must withdraw from the area of language policy in Quebec, by undertaking to respect the Charte de la langue française; hence Bill C-482.  Quebec has effective and progressive legislation on language that the rest of Canada does not seem to understand, as philosopher Charles Taylor pointed out some years ago:

[translation]

Quebec has a feeling of national identity that is very strong but also very disconcerting for most North American anglophones:  a feeling of national identity tied to a national language, and what is more a threatened language.  Because of this threat, preserving their language will always be one of the main goals of francophone Canadians.  This means that a great deal of importance will always be placed on language as a means of expression in all the activities that define a modern civilization:  politics, technology, the arts, economic management, means of communication, and so forth.

In the rest of Canada, language does not play this role, and people find it odd that there is so much discussion and legislation about it in Quebec.  Because English is now practically the dominant global language, it is hard for those who speak it to understand the feelings of those who see their own language threatened.  Instead of considering their language as an indispensable vehicle for self-expression and realization, anglophone North Americans see it simply as a way to communicate.  This attitude is reinforced by the fact that English Canada and the United States are societies built on immigration, which have welcomed and integrated into the dominant culture a host of immigrants with very different cultures and languages.¹

The Bloc Québécois considers that Quebec’s approach is doing more to strengthen French on Canadian territory than any federal Action Plan for Official Languages.  In the circumstances, the Bloc Québécois intends at every opportunity to go on recalling two simple and fundamental principles:

The anglophone community in Quebec is not threatened, and the Charte de la langue française gives it adequate protection.

The Action Plan on Official Languages must not clash with Quebec’s language policy.

We will thus take every opportunity that this Committee affords to reiterate our demand that the federal government and its Crown corporations comply with the Charte de la langue française on Quebec territory.