(Ottawa) After repeatedly refusing this week to acknowledge the decline of French in Quebec, preferring to speak of a “threatened” language, Minister Marc Miller is now taking the step to add “nuance” to the position of his own government .
Posted at 12:07 p.m.
Michel Saba The Canadian Press
“I don’t deny it at all when we talk about the decline of French as a native language,” he said in an interview with The Canadian Press on Thursday night.
Furthermore, according to Minister Miller, learning French in early childhood is “the most important indicator” as the Liberals shout from the rooftops that they are “the first government” to recognize the decline of the French language in Quebec.
Mr. Miller, who is minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship and represents a riding in downtown Montreal, also protested that the Bloc Québécois was “excessively” quoting that “famous statistic” in the native language, which he concluded , “reliable portrait of Quebec today” doesn’t make sense.
He said he felt “left out” by this data, as did his ministerial colleagues Pablo Rodriguez and Soraya Martinez Ferrada.
“It affects me personally,” he said. It eliminates [aussi] a whole class of immigrant Quebecers who don’t speak French at home but speak French. »
Mr. Miller said he feels the Bloc Québécois is “making people question whether or not I’m a proud Quebecois,” so much so that he wonders “at what point am I?” “I am a fully qualified Quebecois,” said Mario Beaulieu (the bloc’s spokesman for official languages).
“I’m not even from the West Island,” he added, in reference to comments made by Mr Beaulieu, who described the reluctance of certain English-speaking Liberals to reform official language law as a “West Island story” earlier this year.
The statistics buffet
Therefore, Minister Miller, who “refuses to dumb down the debate”, prefers the statistic that “94%” of Quebecers can speak French and judges that “given this figure, we also have to talk about the number of people in absolute terms”. rises in Quebec.
“It is an honor for the Charter of the French Language,” he stressed. This is obviously an increase since the Quiet Revolution. »
However, the latest census reconfirms the decline in French proficiency in Quebec across all indicators.
From 2016 to 2021, Statistics Canada observed a decline in the proportion of Quebecers who had French as their first language (from 77.1% to 74.8%), as the language was predominantly spoken at home (from 79.0% to 77.5%) %) and spoken as the official language as the first language (from 83.7% to 82.2%).
This decline can also be observed in Mr. Miller’s statistics, as the proportion of Quebecers who can converse in French rose from 94.5% to 93.7% over the same period, although after a significant decline in the 1970s remained stable for several decades.
For the language most commonly used in the workplace, French rose from 79.9% to 79.7%. Compared to the 2011 census, in which the French received 81.9%, the difference is even more striking.
Sociologist Jean-Pierre Corbeil and demographer Marc Termote, professors at the University of Laval and the University of Montreal, both pointed out in interviews with the newspaper Le Devoir that data on native language increases over time due to the influence of immigration to the United States Losing relevance country.
While Mr Termote considered that the language spoken at home was “a key indicator”, the two experts disagreed on the indicator of French proficiency.
Mr. Miller acknowledged that English is not under threat in Quebec and even believes that “it would be stupid to say that.” However, he noted that English as a native language is declining in the province. “It is strange if we apply this logic to what Mr Beaulieu said,” he said.
The controversy over acknowledgment of French decline in Quebec flared up again on Wednesday evening when Mr. Miller, during his testimony before a parliamentary committee, insisted on reiterating that French was “under threat” in the province and responded to questions from the Conservatives and then block speakers on official languages.
The next day, during question time in the House of Commons, the bloc mocked the minister’s reluctance. “One would have thought that James Bond would be tortured and refuse to reveal the truth,” explained his group leader Alain Therrien.
Mr. Miller has so far been the only minister to refuse to acknowledge the decline of the French in Quebec, but other elected officials in the Liberal Party of Canada have done the same in the past.
This forced the member for Saint-Laurent, Emmanuella Lambropoulos, to resign from the Official Languages Committee. And just recently, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce – Westmount MP Anna Gainey refused to move forward on this issue, despite the insistence of journalists.