Will immigrants save the French language in Quebec, or hasten its demise?

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 15 Comments

If, as one of Quebec’s own websites proclaims, the province is on the hunt for “willing, dynamic people” to immigrate to its shores, then Jessica Rosales almost certainly fits the bill. The college-trained Rosales and her husband, Roberto Belmar Torres, a design engineer, wanted to emigrate from their native Chile and, spurred by a string of cheery, unsolicited emails from Quebec’s Immigration Department, the pair chose to settle in Montreal in March 2010. “We decided on Quebec for the French culture,” the 37-year-old Rosales says. “We chose it even though we knew it would be harder.”

It certainly was. Because neither could speak the language, they each took a 10-month French course. Save for the occasional nervous breakdown (“I got burned out, I couldn’t stop crying,” says Rosales of one episode) that even prompted the purchase of a pair of one-way tickets to Toronto that they never used, the pair is quite happy with their lives here. They even found jobs in their new-found language. Jessica is an administrative assistant at a refugee resource centre, while Belmar Torres works at a large Montreal engineering firm. They work almost entirely in French.

Yet increasingly, language advocates are turning this apparent success story into a narrative of decline of the French language in Quebec. The reason: though the pair conduct much of their public lives in French, they speak their native Spanish in the confines of their home. Earlier this year, the governing Liberals announced plans to cut the yearly number of immigrants allowed into the province by 4,000, to 50,000, by 2012, while the the right-of-centre Action démocratique du Québec has called for a further clawback to 46,000. The Parti Québécois believe “immigration should be set at the ability to Frenchify new arrivals,” says PQ spokesperson Éric Gamache, and popular former Péquiste minister François Legault, who is flirting with the idea of running for premier, has called for the number to be capped at 40,000.

Others are even more strident. “We must become our own country, period,” militant sovereignist Gérald Larose told La Presse in the wake of a report detailing a decrease in the percentage of Quebec-born francophones. His argument: an independent Quebec would have absolute power over its immigration policy.

On the face of it, so-called “allophones” (immigrants whose native language is neither French nor English) would seem an odd target, and not only because, unlike the Canada-born English population living in Quebec, they are required by law to attend primary and secondary school in French. Like nearly every other province in the country, Quebec is faced with a looming demographic problem brought on by lower birth rates—a void often filled by immigrants. Ontario, for example, took in roughly 104,000 non-refugee immigrants in 2010 alone.

And even with 54,000 new arrivals a year, Quebec is falling behind. According to demographer Jacques Henripin, the province needs between 70,000 and 80,000 immigrants a year to compensate for its lower birth rate—people like Rosales and Belmar Torres. To Rosales, the idea that Quebec would cut down on the number of immigrants allowed into the province is absurd. “I’m a taxpayer,” she says. “Who needs who?”

The feeling is often mutual. By and large, Quebecers have long cast a beady eye at Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism; a recent Angus Reid poll noted that 66 per cent of francophones in the province believe multiculturalism is a threat to the French language. Practically every major demographic report released in the province over the last two decades has sparked debate and uproar about the survival of the language.

But does the decline of francophones necessarily mean the decline of French, when those immigrants arriving here must by law attend school in la langue de René Lévesque? Marc Termote thinks so. The demographer authored a recent report illustrating the demographic decline of Quebec-born francophones in the province; he says they will be overtaken as a majority by immigrants by 2031. And while he makes pains to say he isn’t a Larose-style sovereignist—“We don’t need independence to ensure the survival of a language,” he says—he believes the sheer numbers, coupled with the creeping bilingualism of Montreal, is detrimental to the language. “I am one of those people who says that the government should have no say whatsoever over what language is used at home,” Termote says. However, “the problem is that the language used at home becomes the language of the children.”

This wouldn’t be a problem in, say, the overwhelmingly francophone city of Saguenay. But roughly 75 per cent of Quebec’s immigrants settle in the 500 sq. km of Montreal where, says Termote, “there is free choice in what language you work in.” (Montreal is home to roughly 48,000 businesses with less than 50 employees that don’t fall under the province’s language provisions.) “The problem is Montreal. In the regions there are no problems. You will only speak French in Chicoutimi.”

“It’s not up to immigrants to resolve the problems of French in Quebec,” Termote adds. “We tell immigrants to have children, because we don’t want to have any. We tell them to go out to the regions, because we don’t want to, we tell them to learn French in a hurry, because French is declining. I can’t accept that the future of the French in Quebec is the responsibility of immigrants.”

Still others see no problem at all with the immigrant influx into Quebec. Jean-Benoît Nadeau, author of the book The Story of French, recently published a column decrying the accepted definition of the term “francophone” in the province. “French is no longer the language of one ethnic group, but one for all ethnic groups,” Nadeau writes. “Only in Quebec do we tolerate such a restrictive definition. Why not include the woven sash or ketchup tortière in the definition of francophone while we’re at it? It’s a disgrace.”

Jessica Rosales agrees. After being courted by the Quebec government (and spending an estimated $13,000 in fees and plane tickets) to get here, then spending nearly a year studying the language, she knows quite well that she can still vote with her feet. “I like Quebec, I like Montreal, but I can live somewhere else.”

Political or ministerial?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 73 Comments

More concerns are raised about what Jason Kenney does with his time.

… opposition parties are far from satisfied and maintain the letter has laid bare a more serious conflict of interest: Kenney’s dual role as immigration minister and the Tories chief political organizer in multicultural communities. “It seems to me that is the real problem here,” said deputy Liberal leader Ralph Goodale. “It’s a brutal conflict of interest that leads to the exploitation of the very people that he is charged as a minister to represent.”

For whatever it is worth, the Liberals point out that they’ve differentiated between multiculturalism and ethnic outreach (Rob Oliphant is assigned that job) and immigration (Justin Trudeau is the critic). Mr. Trudeau has penned a letter to the commissioner of elections to request an investigation of Mr. Kenney’s misdirected fundraising letter.

Just what does Quebec's official answer to multiculturalism entail?

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 3:34 PM - 107 Comments

Fred Chartrand/Cp;

The Sikh religion forbids religious face covering on the grounds that it subjugates the wearer. Still, religious freedom is an article of faith for Sikhs, so the four-member contingent from the World Sikh Organization of Canada saw nothing wrong in defending the right to veil one’s face in Quebec, where the province is in the midst of passing a bill that would ban face coverings of any kind when providing or receiving government services. Invited to the national assembly, the four planned to speak in favour of Bill 94′s unspoken target: the handful of Muslim women in Quebec who wear the niqab. They were stymied by their kirpans, the six-inch knives that baptized Sikhs must wear at all times. Ceremonial or not, the National Assembly’s security guards said they amounted to just that: knives. “They told us if we weren’t satisfied with their decision, there are people who you can talk to,” says Harminder Kaur, one of two Montrealers who made the trip.

Instead, the quartet walked out the front door and into what has become the latest flashpoint in the battle over the place of religious customs and practices, as well as Canadian multiculturalism, in Quebec society. In the days following the thwarted visit, the national assembly unanimously voted in favour of a Parti Québécois motion commending the security team’s actions—not for being good security guards, but because in denying the Sikhs’ entry they “upheld the principle of the state’s neutrality.”

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Sarkozy calls multiculturalism a “failure”

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 11, 2011 at 12:47 PM - 25 Comments

French President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned multiculturalism as a threat to national identities in a televised ‘town hall’ meeting with French citizens on Thursday. “The truth is that in all our democracies we have been too preoccupied with the identity of those who arrived and not enough with the identity of the country that welcomed them,” said Sarkozy. In doing so, Sarkozy joined his counterparts in Britain and Germany, who have both characterized multiculturalism as a failed experiment. Sarkozy also emphasized France’s secular identity and warned against “aggressive religious proselytizing” during the town hall.

Financial Times

Mission Canadian

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

These engineering students will come to Canada to finish their degrees | University of Waterloo

The new campus of the University of Waterloo has lots of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Iranian students, but none from Ontario. You’ll see more hijabs than Flames jerseys at the University of Calgary’s new nursing school. That’s because both schools are in the Middle East—and they aren’t meant for Canadians.

Waterloo’s new campus in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Calgary’s three-year-old nursing school in Doha, Qatar, reflect a new strategy by Canadian universities to recruit bright students, train professors, and build connections throughout the world. These new campuses aren’t just small universities either. They’re mini diplomatic missions. If you ask Amit Chakma, president of the University of Western Ontario, they’re also the key to Canada’s future place in the world.

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Canada has never offered 'a mosaic'

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Francis Vachon/CP Images

Grab as much maple syrup as you can and run for your lives. The menacing hydra known as the “hyphenated Canadian” is stalking the land once again, awakened by some sharp statements out of Germany that have been megaphoned across the Western world by a bunch of dangerously ignorant conservatives.

Yes, ancient obsessions over immigration and social stability are roiling once again, thanks to some widely misconstrued remarks by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Taking note of the high rates of unemployment, poor educational outcomes, and increasing religiosity in Germany’s walled-off Turkish community, Merkel declared that “multikulti” had “failed, utterly failed,” and suggested that immigrants really ought to learn to speak German. While Merkel was clearly talking about a very specific, and very German, failure—40 years of abhorrent treatment of its Turkish community—conservatives across the Anglosphere jumped on her remarks as the final indictment of the whole Western pro-immigration ideal.

“This is not a lesson for Germany alone,” wrote the American economist Thomas Sowell. Multiculturalism, he said, has become “a cult that has spawned mindless rhapsodies about ‘diversity,’ without a speck of evidence to substantiate its supposed benefits.” Here in Canada, the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente echoed Sowell by noting how Canadians and Germans alike “have been swamped by official propaganda celebrating the joys of ethnic diversity,” and warned of the reckoning to come. “Our tipping point is arriving too,” she intoned. “And once it does, there’s no turning back.”

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The new debate over race

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

ROLAND WEIHRAUCH/EPA/KEYSTONE PRESS AGENCY

Germans don’t like talking about race. But lately, anti-immigrant sentiment has been growing. In a recent book, Thilo Sarrazin, the now former member of the board of the Bundesbank, wrote that Germany has become “more stupid” due to its 2.5 million Turks, whom he calls “inbred.” Last week, Horst Seehofer, the premier of Bavaria, ignited further controversy when he said that Turkish and Arab immigration should end because Muslim culture prevents integration. And Chancellor Angela Merkel herself entered the fray on Sunday, declaring that multiculturalism in Germany “has utterly failed.”

Such comments reflect increasing hostility. A new poll found one-third of Germans think foreigners “come to Germany to abuse the welfare state”; 36 per cent said that “in a limited job market, foreigners should be sent home”; 10 per cent long for a “führer,” to “govern with a hard hand.” Meanwhile, in Berlin, a museum broke with tradition by displaying Nazi propaganda, including a poster about “the dangers of interracial breeding.”

Human smuggling, immigration anxieties, and the Canadian way

By John Geddes - Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 10:11 AM - 0 Comments

Today’s announcement of the new Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act (when will the revolt against Overly Wordy and Politically Contrived Names for Acts commence?) is bound to be interpreted, naturally enough, as a bid by the government to crack down on human traffickers who prey on the dreams and desperation of people determined to come to Canada whatever it takes.

But I suspect that the prime motivation behind the Conservative government’s rush to draft the bill, after a rusty boatload of Tamil refugees arrived in Vancouver last summer, was not to find practical ways to crack down on the snakeheads. Prime Minister Stephen Harper signaled the real aim more accurately this week when he said,  “A failure to act and act strongly will inevitably lead to a massive collapse in public support for our immigration system.”

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A worldly workforce

By Angelina Chapin - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Felipe Trueba/Corbis/ Roberto Caccuri/Contrasto/Redux

Paul Beamish hired Gigi Wong because of her answer to a simple question: how would she react if a Chinese businessman belched after his meal? It was a difference in cultural etiquette he’d observed hosting Asian clients and wanted to know how a prospective employee would handle the situation. A Canadian-born job candidate said she’d politely tell the person to stop, but Wong had the correct response. “I would ignore it,” she said. “It’s a sign they are enjoying themselves.”

Thirteen years later she’s still the associate director of Asian management at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business. Beamish, director of the Asian Management Institute, was looking for someone to help set up an Ivey School of Business branch in Hong Kong, and a colleague recommended Wong, who had been working at the university registrar’s office for 10 years previously, and before that in Hong Kong as a high school teacher. He needed someone with cultural sensitivity, who could help develop teaching materials for the region, host Asian businesspeople and anticipate challenges that would arise. Wong was the perfect fit—entrepreneurial and culturally savvy.

Beamish says when it comes to expanding internationally, companies often need only look as far as their own staff to find someone with the cultural expertise. “These people are often already in an organization and should be the next incremental hire,” he says. “Too many Canadian companies are so risk-averse they don’t notice.”

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We’re too broke to be this stupid

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 27, 2010 at 6:58 AM - 599 Comments

Benoit Tessier / REUTERS

Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.”

Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent. Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public-sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.

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I’m with the ‘intolerant’ Quebecers

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 10:01 AM - 355 Comments

Photograph by Brian Howell

The other day, a reader wrote to say that, while en vacances au Québec, he had espied me in a restaurant. With a couple of obvious francophones. And, from the snatches of conversation he caught, I appeared to be speaking French. “Appeared” is right, if you’ve ever heard my French. Nevertheless: “You’re a fraud, Steyn!” he thundered. The cut of his jib was that I was merely pretending to be a pro-Yank right-wing bastard while in reality living la vie en rose lounging on chaises longues snorting poutine with louche Frenchie socialists all day long.

I haven’t felt such a hypocrite since I was caught singing The Man That Got Away in a San Francisco bathhouse two days after my column opposing gay marriage. But yes, you’re right. I cannot tell a lie. I have a soft spot for Quebec. Not because of its risible separatist movement, for which the only rational explanation is that it was never anything but one almighty bluff for shakedown purposes. Yet, putting that aside, I’m not unsympathetic to the province’s broader cultural disposition. I regard neither Trudeaupian Canada nor Quietly Revolutionary Quebec as good long-term bets, or even medium-term bets. But, if I had to pick, I’d give marginally better odds to the latter. And the reasons why can be found in the coverage of Ms. Naema Ahmed and her “illegal” niqab, the head-to-toe Islamic covering that only has eyes for you.

The facts—or, at any rate, fact—of the case is well-known: a niqab-garbed immigrant from Egypt has been twice expelled from her French-language classes at the Saint-Laurent CEGEP and the Centre d’appui aux communautés immigrantes by order of the Quebec government. That much is agreed. Thereafter, the English and French press diverge significantly. The ROC reacted reflexively, deploring this assault on Canada’s cherished “values” of “multiculturalism.” In the Calgary Herald, Naomi Lakritz compared Quebec’s government to the Taliban. So did the Globe and Mail, in an editorial titled “Intolerant Intrusion.” In La Presse, Patrick Lagacé responded with a column called “The Globe, Reporting From Mars!”

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Who we are (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 13, 2009 at 9:01 AM - 49 Comments

The word ‘multiculturalism’—perhaps the most coveted and controversial word in the Canadian lexicon—appears twice in the new guide to citizenship. It fares better than the word ‘lumberjack,’ which does not appear at all.

After the jump, an entirely unscientific index of words and how often each is mentioned. Continue…

Why do you leave the one you love?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 175 Comments

To mark Dominion Day (as you’d expect a squaresville loser like me to call it), the New York Times asked 11 Canadian expatriates to write on “what they most miss about home.” The cutting-edge funnyman Rick Moranis riffed on toques and beavers and the lyrics of God Save the Queen, raising the suspicion he’d simply recycled his beloved Dominion Day column of 1954—which is not just environmentally responsible but very shrewd given New York Times rates for freelance contributors.

But thereafter the expats got with the program. The musician Melissa Auf der Maur, after years in the “American melting pot,” pined for “the Canadian mosaic.” But the great thing about the Canadian mosaic is that it engages in “a national conversation about literature like a big book club,” so the bookseller Sarah McNally said she missed “the pride and simplicity of a national literature, which probably wouldn’t exist without government support. We even have a name, CanLit, that people use without fearing they’ll sound like nerds.” Continue…

Religion at work

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 8 Comments

For those given to worrying about how well people from different faiths get along in Canada, there has been plenty of evidence of late to feed their fears.

Canada’s various human rights commissions have been doing brisk business investigating perceived slights of one type or the other. Quebec’s “reasonable accommodation” hearings have heard from people who were upset by the sight of women wearing headscarves in Montreal, or by too much kosher food in their supermarkets. And a recent poll by Maclean’s found that many Canadians say they are divided by religion. But whatever religious fault lines exist in Canada, we’re much less divided than Europe, and only slightly more so than the United States. Recent polling by Gallup tried to determine the amount of what they call “interfaith cohesion” around the world, by asking respondents how they treat and are treated by members of other faiths—whether they would object to someone from a different faith moving next door, for example. Respondents were then classified as either “isolated,” “tolerant,” or “integrated.” Among countries in western Europe and North America, only the U.S. had more respondents who rated as “integrated” (and fewer who rated as “isolated”) than Canada. Continue…

Tamil questions that can't be asked

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 179 Comments

The other day, one of the least soft-headed of Canadian columnists, Lorrie Goldstein, wrote a piece in the Toronto Sun called “Protest backlash unearths racism”:

“Let’s not pretend that much of the condemnation of Tamils in Canada for protesting the plight of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka isn’t racist.

“Any journalist who’s been around knows what’s going on and we have an obligation to speak up.”

I’ve been around. Well, okay, I’ve been nearby, as Mary Tyler Moore liked to say. And, insofar as I feel an obligation to speak up, it’s only to wonder at how far even the remarkably tensile concept of “racism” can be stretched.

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Maclean's Interview: Jason Kenney

By Kenneth Whyte - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 1:15 PM - 25 Comments

Q: When you’re speaking at citizenship ceremonies, you tell new Canadians our history is now their history, that you don’t want Canada to be viewed as a hotel where people come and go with no abiding commitment to our past, or to citizenship. What is the meaning of our citizenship?

A: Legally speaking it gives people status in Canada and certain rights like voting, but I think we need to reclaim a deeper sense of citizenship, a sense of shared obligations to one another, to our past, as well as to the future. In that I mean a kind of civic nationalism where people understand the institutions, values and symbols that are rooted in our history.

Q: They don’t understand those things now?

A: Well, heck, if you look at polling data—there’s a massive historical amnesia about the Canadian past, and massive gaps of knowledge about our parliamentary institutions, our democratic procedures. There’s a massive civic illiteracy. Continue…

What Canadians think of Sikhs, Jews, Christians, Muslims . . .

By John Geddes - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 4:45 PM - 200 Comments

Canadians like to think of their country as a model for the world of how all sorts of people can get along together. But when it comes to the major faiths other than Christianity, a new poll conducted for Maclean’s finds that many Canadians harbour deeply troubling biases. Multiculturalism? Although by now it might seem an ingrained national creed, fewer than one in three Canadians can find it in their hearts to view Islam or Sikhism in a favourable light. Diversity? Canadians may embrace it in theory, but only a minority say they would find it acceptable if one of their kids came home engaged to a Muslim, Hindu or Sikh. Understanding? There’s not enough to prevent media images of war and terrorism from convincing almost half of Canadians that mainstream Islam encourages violence.

The poll, by Angus Reid Strategies, surveyed 1,002 randomly selected Canadians on religion at a moment when issues of identity are a hot topic in Ottawa. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has led a push by the Conservative government to revamp citizenship law, emphasizing the need for real bonds to Canada, and Kenney is looking for ways to encourage immigrants to integrate faster and more fully into Canadian society. But as federal policy strives to encourage newcomers to put down roots and fit in, the poll highlights an equal need for the Canadian majority to take a hard look at its distorted preconceptions about religious minorities. “It astonishes and saddens me as a Canadian,” said Angus Reid chief research officer Andrew Grenville, who has been probing Canadians’ views on religion for 16 years. “I don’t think the findings reflect well on Canada at all.”

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Uncle Jason

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 12:26 AM - 4 Comments

Kevin Libin profiles Jason Kenney.

A few years ago, Mr. Kenney boarded an entire family newly arrived from India in his Calgary home while they settled into Canadian life. “It gave me, for the first time, a real view of the immigration experience from the eyes of a family that’s landed without any previous connections in Canada,” he says. “I benefited from it as much or more than they did.” Today, the kids call him Uncle Jason.

Multiculturalism is for others

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, May 12, 2008 at 7:50 PM - 0 Comments

After the last election campaign in Quebec, Bernard Landry told me:

My personal position is that Quebec is not multicultural and should not be. The Canadian constitution – which we never signed – should not be applied here. No Quebec government is favourable to multiculturalism.

It struck me then that, despite all the hoopla around “reasonable accomodations,” there had been no virtually no discussion of the role multiculturalism should play in Quebec, if any at all. Pauline Marois raised it (somewhat tangentially) after taking over the PQ by calling for Quebec to repatriate full control over immigration from the federal government because too many immigrants “believe that they are settling in a bilingual state. It’s not true. Quebec is a francophone state that respects the rights of its anglophone minority.” Otherwise, there’s been nary a peep about multiculturalism as official (and sancrosanct) Canadian policy.

Until now. Continue…