In Canada’s language debate, a turn toward inclusion?

On a dazzling Sunday morning, this small town tucked into a glacial valley begins to stir. Kayakers launch their boats into the fjord, and locals take morning walks along country streets dotted with flower-potted front porches.

Here, deep in the heart of rural Quebec, hardly a word of English is heard. It’s the last place – in a province where French is the only official language – that you would think Louisiana-style Anglicization posed a threat, as politicians here warned recently.

Yet resident Manon Lortie, who works at a dockside office selling whale-watching cruises to the St. Lawrence estuary, is always worried about the French language. Every effort to defend her mother tongue is worth it, because “if our language is not protected, English will take its place,” she says.

The provincial government shares her concerns. At the end of May it passed Loi 96, a package of measures to further strengthen official support for the use of French in public life and business.

The legislation has proved controversial, both within and outside Quebec. At the bustling waterside Café du Quai, serving Breton crepes and cider, 20-something waitress Corinne Lareau has her doubts. “I think people are so worried about losing French that they want to control every aspect of it,” she says. “And I don’t think forcing people is the best way to make them want to learn.”

But some see the new law as an opportunity to move beyond the traditional zero-sum, defensive attitudes that have long shaped the debate over language in Canada, and to find ways of fitting the protection of a minority language into the country’s larger ideals of inclusion.

“We need to change the paradigm,” argues Richard Marcoux, who studies the worldwide Francophone community from his demographic observatory at the University of Laval in Quebec City.

More French, more Canadian

Language laws here date back to the 1970s and have always been politically explosive. But obliging people who move to Quebec to learn French have actually made the province more “Canadian,” says Andrew Parkin, who directs the Environics Institute, which recently surveyed national sentiment on the language issue. By bringing new people into the French-speaking community, such laws increase Francophone diversity in a country where diversity is highly prized.

Laws promoting the use of French have “made the experience of growing up in Quebec for Francophones more like the experience of growing up in Toronto or Vancouver,” he says. And in a country that is bilingual by law, Quebec is the most Canadian province in the Confederation simply because it is the most bilingual, adds Dr. Marcoux.

Yet French is in decline across Canada. Data released this month by Statistics Canada showed a continued drop in the proportion of Quebecois who predominantly speak French at home, from 79% in 2016 to 77.5%.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the finding “extremely troubling.”

After introducing Bill 96 to the provincial parliament, Quebec Premier Francois Legault warned that without more support for the French language it would be “only a matter of time” before Quebec resembled Louisiana, where only a small fraction of inhabitants speak French, the state’s original language.

Most Quebecois agree with him. Dr. Parkin’s survey found that nearly 70% of them, more even than at the height of the separatist movement in Quebec, say their language is under threat. And the new census figures reveal that in a multicultural city such as Montreal only 58.4% of the population use French as their first official language, while immigration has boosted the number of citizens whose mother tongue is neither French nor English.

“It’s crucial to protect the language,” says L’Anse-Saint-Jean native Rodrigue Gagné, a retired lumber worker walking across his town’s pretty covered bridge.

An extra burden?

Loi 96 stipulates that all immigrants to Quebec should speak French within six months, and that they will thenceforth be treated as if they do so. Critics, who include the province’s Anglophone minority and Indigenous groups, call the law discriminatory. The new rules also extend the requirement that Quebec-based businesses should operate primarily in French to all companies with more than 25 employees.

The law has generated considerable backlash, including an open letter from dozens of tech sector CEOs who complained that just when skilled talent is scarce, “bringing newcomers to Quebec is more difficult under the requirements of the new language law,” and that obliging firms to operate primarily in French is “an extra burden” on companies working internationally.

The business leaders added, however, that they “support the spirit of Quebec’s language law – protecting our distinct Francophone identity.”

That was a necessary diplomatic rider: Last year, when the CEO of Air Canada, Michael Rousseau, gave a speech almost entirely in English and later told reporters that he had lived for 14 years in Montreal without needing to learn French, he sparked an outcry, reminding Quebecois of the Anglophone dominance in the city before the language laws were put in place.

“We are a country of two languages, but it seems it’s not easy for everyone,” says Ms. Lortie, who is originally from outside Montreal. She sees nothing anti-immigrant about stricter French language requirements for immigrants to Quebec, mirroring the expectation that people who move to Ontario will learn English.

In Ontario, and other predominantly English-speaking provinces, there is a sense that French and bilingualism are thriving in Quebec and that further regulation is unnecessary. That is not how most Quebecois see things, though. 

“When you’re in the minority position, you’re never done,” says Dr. Parkin. And in Quebec, people think that “things are only good now because all these protections are in place.”

But for Dr. Marcoux, looking at the future of the French language in the world, it is time for Quebecois to abandon their defensive posture on the language issue, which he says is born of insecurity. Instead, he advocates, they should seek equilibrium between a flourishing French language and the fact of demographic life that Quebec relies on immigration amid declining birthrates.

He has called on his fellow Quebecois to embrace a “new Francophonie” in Quebec that leaves behind historic debates about French-Canadian identity and puts pride in language laws that bring immigrants into the French language.

“We should be proud of these laws,” he says. “And point out that it’s precisely these laws that have ensured that French is a living language spoken across Quebec and that in 2022 we are part of a global community of French speakers from five continents.”

Back in L’Anse-Saint-Jean, waitress Ms. Lareau is “confident that French will survive. It’s still a beautiful language,” she says. “And I see people from everywhere trying to learn it and just making an effort.”