Chris Selley: French is not dying in Quebec and the Official Languages Minister should be clear on that

To pretend that French is dying in Quebec is essentially table stakes for entering any Quebec-related political conversation nowadays

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Published Jan 04, 2025  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  4 minute read

Official Languages Minister Rachel Bendayan was willing to speak the truth about the French language in Quebec, for a short time. Photo by Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press/File

Historians won’t likely have much to say about Justin Trudeau’s latest — last? — round of cabinet appointments. The old gang couldn’t pass legislation thanks to the “green slush fund” stalemate in the House of Commons. The new gang will have the same problem. Besides which, everyone knows by now that Katie Telford, the prime minister’s chief of staff, is essentially Minister of Everything. Barring a major and unexpected change in circumstances, what the new gang has signed on for is really just to assist Trudeau in his quixotic efforts to avoid the inevitable.

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But in the spirit of the New Year, when hope and good cheer spring eternal, let us note for the record that for a few wonderful moments late last year, newly minted Official Languages Minister Rachel Bendayan was willing to speak the truth about the French language in Quebec — namely, that it’s not dying in a fire.

Or more accurately, she didn’t proactively speak the more common untruth about the French language in Quebec — namely, that it is mortally imperilled, and that “Louisianisation” is at hand.

“(Speaking to) journalists gathered in the freezing cold at Rideau Hall, (Bendayan) twice refused to answer whether or not she believes French is under threat in Quebec,” Le Devoir breathlessly reported. “Instead, she praised (Canada’s) ‘linguistic duality’ and emphasized her identity, having been born to a French-speaking father and an English-speaking mother.”

Generally speaking, not answering questions is Job One for a cabinet minister. But this question is an exception. To pretend that French is dying in Quebec is essentially table stakes for entering any Quebec-related political conversation nowadays, and the media — francophone and anglophone alike — have bought into the fallacy as enthusiastically as every party in the National Assembly and House of Commons.

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Bendayan “refus(ed) to acknowledge the decline of French in Quebec despite the fact that all linguistic indicators show this to be the case,” The Canadian Press reported in English. “From 2016 to 2021, (Statistics Canada) observed a decline in the proportion of Quebecers who had French as their mother tongue (from 77.1 per cent to 74.8 per cent), as the language spoken predominantly at home (from 79.0 per cent to 77.5 per cent) and as their first official language spoken (from 83.7 per cent to 82.2 per cent).”

People are looking for numbers to prove incipient calamity rather than letting the numbers guide their thinking

Leaving aside the less-than-earth-shattering statistical declines in evidence: Mother tongue? First official language spoken? Why is Canadian Press citing characteristics of infants and toddlers as evidence that grownups can’t or won’t speak French? The whole idea of official bilingualism is that we’re all supposed to be able to learn whichever official languages we wish to, regardless of where we come from. If that’s a total sham and a fantasy — and it is! — then that’s the story, not how many Quebecers said “mama” or “maman” as their first word.

As for the language spoken most often at home, which suffered a definitely-statistically-meaningful plummet from 79 per cent to 77.5 per cent, it’s interesting to note that this figure represents the number of Quebecers who speak only French most often at home. The number who speak French plus another language most often at home actually rose slightly.

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That should be good news, right? Like hell.

Look, it’s true that French-speaking trends in Quebec are generally, very slightly down. But at a certain point, it becomes obvious people are looking for numbers to prove incipient calamity rather than letting the numbers guide their thinking. That point looks something like this, per The Canadian Press: “As for the language most often used in the workplace, French fell from 79.9 per cent to 79.7 per cent.”

So it remained stable at 80 per cent.

Bendayan, a 44-year-old lawyer, represents the very diverse central-Montreal riding of Outremont. According to the 2021 Census, it’s the sixth-most French-English bilingual riding in the country. In theory she would be well placed to advance a more nuanced, less panicky, more fact-based version of the linguistic narrative. She might acknowledge understandable (if wildly overblown) concerns about French’s future in Quebec, while stressing the benefits of bilingualism and multilingualism, which in mainstream Quebec-nationalist discourse are just bywords for anglicization.

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It can’t be said enough that no one else in the world sees language this way. Czech and Slovak are different, perfectly healthy languages, as are Danish and Swedish, Dutch and Flemish, Spanish and Catalan. Those are mutually intelligible languages that survive in their own particular ways when cold logic might suggest they needn’t. And then you have quite impenetrable languages like Finnish, Hungarian and Basque, which by the logic of Quebec’s linguistic politics should have ceased to exist decades ago in favour of more dominant tongues.

Instead, naturally, Bendayan threw in the towel and quickly conceded that yes, French in Quebec is in terrible danger. Happy New Year, one and all.

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