The Globe and Mail

Immigration is key to ensuring the vitality of French in Canada

A 2024 graduation at Collège Boréal. Photo credit: Collège Boréal.

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To Mehak Srivastava, Pacinthe Mattar and Rebecca Stoneman: merci-shukriyaa-shukran-thank you for your fellowship as writers. À Alex Tétreault – merci de m’avoir gentiment prêté ton inoubliable expression du “New-To-Us-Ontario.”

I live in le Nouvel-Ontario, the “New-to-Us-Ontario,” an imagined geography on Indigenous land in Sudbury, where Franco-Ontarian artists and intellectuals have created a rich culture in the shadow of windswept pine, frail and fière, germinating where an industrial past once scorched the earth.

Anishinaabemowin is spoken here. So is Cree. English. And French in all tongues imagined. Franglais/Frenglish, a local bilinguish patois punctuated by English and French – and increasingly, by Lingala, Wolof, Arabic and myriad other languages.

Ours is a Welcoming Francophone Community, one of 24 communities in Canada officially designated to help francophone immigrants build new lives while fostering a sense of belonging. Many new Franco-Sudburians are African. They are young, and a good deal of them are students. Shaped by the many African languages they speak, they are adapting to the distinct French spoken in the North. And importantly, they are learning English – each new syllable of that other colonial tongue painstaking and hard-won, a path to better job prospects and financial stability for themselves and their families.

Author and current rector at the L’Université de Hearst, Aurélie Lacassagne, once said that Franco-Ontarian communities across the province understand the importance of francophone immigration. “It’s about stemming demographic decline, saving our schools, justifying access to French-language services,” she wrote on the website of French-language broadcaster TFO.

Through contact between host and immigrant communities, she continues, “Franco-Ontarian culture can continue to be creolized, and thus to flourish, to project itself into the future – in short, to live, not survive.”

Oui.

Francophones hors Québec are teetering on the brink. We live with the cruel reality of the threat of extinction: 44 per cent of francophones in Ontario no longer use French at home, most often swapping their mother tongue for English, with the trend intensifying in Western Canada.

In response, our cultural and political institutions, from the Assemblée de la francophonie de l’Ontario (AFO) to the Fédération des communautés francophone et acadienne du Canada (FCFA), have advocated for increased immigration to our communities, notably from francophone Africa.

It isn’t up to young African immigrants to save us. That would be unfair. Paternalistic – even colonial. These immigrants have a unique path to blaze – their own.

And yet: immigration is our salvation.

Recently, some economists have criticized the prioritization of French for immigrant selection, saying it’s harming Canada’s ability to attract top talent. Some experts recently told The Globe and Mail that when Canada prioritizes French, prospective immigrants in other streams with higher scores who would contribute more to the country’s economy are bypassed.

It is a narrow view.

A calculus that overlooks the many Francophone immigrant entrepreneurs, journalists, intellectuals, writers, politicians, artists and community organizers who have played a pivotal role in shaping discourse, activism and culture in French-speaking Canada for generations, even centuries.

It ignores the fact that speaking French is, in fact, a skill. It is critically relevant in francophone communities, like Sudbury, allowing our communities to thrive and protect our hard-won linguistic rights like access to healthcare, justice and education.

Vital francophone immigration targets, international student quotas, and the protection of the French language under the Official Languages Act are not just legal obligations – they are also human and cultural imperatives.

The stakes could not be higher.

“In a very real way,” wrote legal scholar François Larocque, “The continued existence of the Canadian federation as we know it is irrevocably tied to the vitality of its minority official language communities.”

These communities can be francophone, anglophone or Indigenous – in fact, First Nations, Métis and Inuit languages face a more “urgent and existential” threat than our official languages, notes Mr. Larocque.

Francophone immigrants, many of whom are “young, gifted and Black,” are les forces de l’avenir that will ensure the future of French outside Quebec – a future that reverberates with the splendour of French with intonations of franglais, Lingala, Wolof, Arabic and all other tongues of our shared reality.

Francophone immigrants are not just rebuilding our declining demographics; they are reweaving the tapestry of our Francophonie. What is “top talent,” after all, if not the people who rebuild a culture?