Quebec’s controversial French-language charter reform garnered royal approval on Wednesday, introducing several new regulations aimed at maintaining the province’s common language.
Bill 96 was passed in the National Assembly on May 24th. Quebec MPs voted 78-29 in favor of the law, and members of the opposition Liberal Party and the Parti Québécois voted against.
Reform has implications for almost every government sector.
Among these implications, English CEGEP students will take more classes in French, new immigrants will eventually have to speak French in government communications, and changes are being made to the system to decide how many judges in Quebec should be bilingual.
Quebec’s new French-speaking ministry is tasked with maintaining French status in the province. Its leader, the newly appointed French-speaking minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, is in the process of forming a team.
Prime Minister François Legault says he will follow the statistics on the use of French in the coming years in order to measure the success of the bill.
This analysis will be based in particular on two metrics: the use of French in the workplace and the use of French at home.
The latter encouraged a barrage of questions from reporters during a scrum in Quebec City on Wednesday to ask if the prime minister wanted to influence the way Quebecers talk to each other at home.
Legault only confirmed that he would oversee the statistics. However, he added, “if no one speaks the language at home … French will end up disappearing.”
“I would also like to have new indicators on the language spoken in public places.”
The effort to protect French in the province comes in part from a recent study by the Office Quebecois de la langue francaise that predicts that fewer Quebecers will speak the language at home in the coming decades.
The study predicted that between 74 and 76% of Quebecers would speak the language at home in 2036. In 2011, 82% did so.
The Office says part of this change is caused by a growing proportion of immigrants in the Quebec population. In 2016, the majority of immigrant families spoke a language other than French or English at home (39%). About 33% spoke French at home and 14% spoke English.
“We want it to be the common language,” Legault said. “This is the language at home, this is the language at work, [and] it is the language of the public sector ”.
But some do not believe that monitoring the language spoken at home is a good indicator of the state of French in Quebec.
“Allophones are able to speak French fairly widely,” said Jack Jedwab, president of the Canadian Studies Association.
“We have very high percentages of them speaking French, but it happens to be not their native language,” he said. “Therefore, if the Prime Minister deliberately seeks to use this indicator, he knows that it will show a slight decline in the use of French at home.”
He says Quebec should have more realistic goals given the province’s linguistic diversity.
“Montreal will not be Chicoutimi. It will not be Rimouski,” he said. “Anyone who wants to make the public use of both languages unrealistic and unfair.”
– Published with files by Matt Grillo of CTV News