LANG Committee Report

Dissenting Opinion—Bloc Québécois—October 18, 2024

The Bloc Québécois member and second Vice-Chair of the Standing Committee on Official Languages respectfully submit the following dissenting opinion: ________________________________________________________________________

This dissenting opinion of the Bloc Québécois is not so much about the record of testimony, or reports presented to the Standing Committee on Official Languages as much as the report’s failure to respect the guidelines set out in Section 2 of the new Official Languages Act, namely:

b) support the development of English and French linguistic minority communities in order to protect them while taking into account the fact that they have different needs;

(b.1) advance the equality of status and use of the English and French languages within Canadian society, taking into account the fact that French is in a minority situation in Canada and North America due to the predominant use of English and that there is a diversity of provincial and territorial language regimes that contribute to the advancement, including Quebec’s Charter of the French language, which provides that French is the official language of Quebec;

(b.2) advance the existence of a majority-French society in a Quebec where the future of French is assured; 

On pages 7 and 8, the LANG Committee document indeed states: “The report takes into account the new asymmetrical approach of the Official Languages Act, which recognizes that French is in a minority situation in Canada and North America due to the predominant use of English and that the English linguistic minority community in Quebec and the French linguistic minority communities in the other provinces and territories have different needs.

In addition, Part VII of the OLA states that positive measures, “taken shall respect: (i) the necessity of protecting and promoting the French language in each province and territory, taking into account that French is in a minority situation in Canada and North America due to the predominant use of English.”

The Committee cannot plead ignorance of the new OLA provisions, since it reaffirms them in the preamble to the report. However, there is no evidence that these guidelines have taken into account the report’s conclusions and recommendations with regard to:

—the protection and promotion of French in Quebec; and —the privileged status of the Anglo-Quebec community, more an extension of the Anglo-Canadian majority on Quebec soil, rather than a minority on the same footing as other OLMCs.

The reality, amply demonstrated by federal censuses and recognized by the government, is that French is declining everywhere in Canada, including Quebec, and that English is on the rise or holding steady everywhere in Canada, including Quebec. Whatever the criteria used (mother tongue, language of use, even the suspect first official language spoken, FOLS), the English-speaking community in Quebec continues to grow, while French-speaking minorities are in decline everywhere, and even threatened with extinction in some places.

PERT’s proposal to portray an impoverished Anglo-Quebec community with tailor-made statistics doesn’t hold water but seems to be still supported by the federal government, including the office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. PERT’s use of median employment income, combined with the inclusion of nearly 270,000 lower-paid non-English speakers in its calculations unjustifiably tarnishes the portrait of a community that remains at the top of Quebec’s economic pyramid.

In his testimony, Pierre Serré explains that the use of FOLS adds to the overall historical English-speaking community some 267,000 people, many of them from “allophone immigrant backgrounds”, with incomes “well below average”. Their statistical presence lowers the median annual income by $4,000 (11.1%) and the average annual income by $4,130 (7.8%). The more realistic use of average income and home language figures to define the Anglo-Quebec community, as proposed by Mr. Serré, gives a more realistic picture of the situation, where anglophones earn on average $6,000 more per year than Quebec francophones.

In the context of a privileged Anglo-Quebec community since Confederation, enjoying socio-economic status and accelerating demographic growth thanks to the linguistic transfer of allophones, and even francophones, one might have expected the LANG Committee to have weighed the desirability of limiting funding for Anglo-Quebecers under programs of the Action Plan 2023–2028, when these serve to anglicize Quebec, or at least when the report refers to measures—financial or otherwise—to protect and promote the French language in Quebec, while respecting the jurisdiction of the Quebec State, in accordance with Section 2 of the OLA.

By not questioning the Anglo-Quebecois community’s access to the same economic programs as Francophones in other provinces, the LANG Committee’s report dismisses the fact that Quebec anglophones are also part of the Anglo-Canadian majority, behave as such and benefit greatly from it. In this respect, the Committee, in keeping with the asymmetry it claims to defend, could have considered the Franco-Quebec majority as an OLMC for Canada as a whole, and as such, while respecting Quebec’s jurisdictions, offer them access to the programs of the Action Plan on Official Languages, with the aim to “advance the existence of a majority-French society in a Quebec where the future of French is assured.”

On the contrary, some of the report’s recommendations violate the letter and spirit of Quebec’s Bill 101 and disregard Quebec’s constitutional jurisdiction. Recommendation 10, calling on the Government of Canada to raise awareness and encourage municipalities to become bilingual municipalities, ignores the fact that, in Quebec, the choice of obtaining bilingual status is limited to municipalities with a majority of English-speaking residents. Furthermore, the issue of Francophone immigration is addressed in the report without considering either the consequences for Quebec or the data on the anglicization of immigrants and their children outside Quebec.