Immigration is largely behind the recent rise in the number of people in Quebec who can only speak English, 2021 census figures made public Wednesday show.
And fewer recent immigrants to the province can speak French compared to 2016.
But that doesn’t mean Quebec should cut immigration to protect the French language, a Université Laval demographer says.
In August, a previous Statistics Canada report found that as of 2021, 73,000 more Quebecers could only speak English — an increase that caused alarm among politicians and commentators and helped make language and immigration a top issue in the election campaign.
Demographer Jean-Pierre Corbeil, who specializes in Canada’s linguistic situation, said census immigration statistics help explain the rise in the English-only population.
Among recent immigrants who have settled in Quebec permanently, there was a rise in arrivals from countries where people are less likely to have a knowledge of French, Corbeil said. They include China, India, the Philippines, Iran and Syria.
“Obviously, this has affected the figures in terms of knowledge of French in Quebec,” Corbeil said.
In addition, there was a big jump in the number of foreigners temporarily in Quebec, also from countries where people are less likely to speak French, Corbeil added. These include international students, people on work permits to respond to labour shortages in specific industries, and transient workers in the agricultural sector.
There were 206,000 of these temporary immigrants in 2021 — more than double the 86,000 reported in the previous census five years earlier.
Some of these temporary residents go on to become permanent residents of Quebec, while others return to their homelands or move to other provinces.
Among recent permanent immigrants, 75.8 per cent could speak French in 2021, down from 80.7 in the previous census, Corbeil noted.
The 2021 census also showed that more recent immigrants to Quebec are adopting English and fewer are opting for French as their first official language spoken.
In 2021, 25.5 per cent said English was their first official language spoken, up from 18.4 per cent.
The trend was reversed on the French side: 54.5 per cent said it was their first official language, down from 60.5 per cent five years earlier.
The impact of immigration on French coupled with a severe labour shortage has led to a numbers debate, with political parties divided on whether to keep current immigration levels, raise them or lower them.
“This is a complex situation for Quebec,” which has seen its share of immigration drop as other provinces boost the number of newcomers in part to help fill jobs, Corbeil said.
In 2021, 15.3 per cent of all newcomers to Canada settled in Quebec, down from 17.8 per cent in 2016.
This helps explain the ongoing decline in Quebec’s demographic weight within Canada. The latest census showed the province’s share of the Canadian population fell for the 11th consecutive census, going from 23.2 per cent in 2016 to 23 per cent in 2021.
Premier François Legault has vowed to keep immigration at current levels, arguing increasing immigration would be “suicidal” for Quebec’s French-speaking majority. He also insists Quebec needs to wrestle more immigration powers from the federal government so it can better select new arrivals.
But Corbeil noted Quebec desperately needs workers and the province already “has the power and the resources to put forward measures to make sure that the francization of these newcomers is more efficient.”
He said people calling for fewer immigrants often focus on mother tongue and the language spoken at home. But Quebec language policy has always focused on the use of French in the public sphere, Corbeil noted.
He added the government can and should do more to ensure temporary immigrants in Quebec learn French before they settle down in the province.
Jack Jedwab, a researcher and president of the Association for Canadian Studies, said a growing number of recent immigrants coming to Quebec end up speaking both English and French.
“People need to understand that immigrants to a significant degree know French, but in terms of their demographic identity, they’re not French in terms of their first language or that being the only language they speak at home,” Jedwab said.
He said Quebec is sending mixed signals on immigration.
“Immigrants are being described by some policymakers and thought leaders as a threat to our identity, while we’re at the same time talking about how much we value them” and need them amid a dearth of workers, Jedwab said.
Statistics Canada on Wednesday also released data regarding how Quebecers describe their ethnic or cultural origins.
The figures showed a decline in the proportion of people who chose “Canadian” and a jump in those self-identifying as “Québécois.”
Because of a change in how people were asked the question, there’s some debate on what the results mean.
In 2016, Statistics Canada offered 28 choices, not including Québécois.
This time, respondents could choose from 500 answers, including Québécois. In both cases, respondents could fill in their own answers and multiple responses were allowed.
In 2021, 982,000 chose Québécois, compared with just 184,000 in 2016. Those who chose Canadian numbered 2.4 million in the latest census — down from 4.6 million five years earlier.
Corbeil said people shouldn’t read too much into this.
“It’s not really surprising and I don’t think it has anything to do with politics or political perspectives,” he said. “I think it’s just the way the new question was phrased had an impact on how people responded.”
Jedwab said the census shows “a lot of people in Quebec see Québécois as better reflecting how they understand themselves from the perspective of ancestry, ethnicity and nation, which are conflated here for a lot of people and particularly francophones.”
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