English Canada at War with the French – World

“The French language is under threat in Canada, including Quebec,” official languages ​​minister Jeanette Petitpass Taylor admitted on Radio-Canada last August. According to the National Institute of Statistics Canada, French was the language of 27.2% of Canadians in 1971, and “in 2021 it will be the language of only 21.4% of Canadians.

8.5 million Quebecers are immersed in an English-speaking North American group of more than 350 million. The Canadian government does not protect the French language, beyond fine speeches. No preference.

On the contrary. Justin Trudeau launched reforms to the Official Languages ​​Act two years ago, but adoption has been postponed indefinitely. A minority of English Canadians speak French. Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau has lived in Montreal since 2007. In 2021 she made headlines for saying she didn’t have time to learn French. Many complaints continue to be filed against Air Canada, including that some employees speak Moliere outside of French-speaking areas.

This decline of French was the culmination of the ancestral hatred between Francophones and Anglophones since the loss of New France to England in 1760.

French immersed in immigration

Quebecers remember the harsh English occupation and discrimination that followed. With ups and downs, depending on the era, Quebec has always fought for a kind of independence, not without the risk of breaking up Canada. For English speakers, Belle Province represents danger and the easiest way is to drown it in the English Canadian Ocean.

Justin Trudeau recently announced a massive non-Francophone immigration program to further reduce the influence of the French language. Canada welcomes 430,000 in 2021, up from 248,000 immigrants in 2011. The prime minister wants to increase his country’s population from 38 million today to 100 million by 2100.

If the government rejects it, this strategy will further weaken the French language and reverse historical achievements, notably changing the status of French as an official language, but will also destabilize Canada sociologically. This is already the case in Toronto, where almost no one speaks French, and so-called visible minorities already represented more than 51% of the population in the 2016 census. According to Statistics Canada, they will represent 71% of Torontonians in 2041. English-speaking officials, however, swear to their great gods that French means no harm.