QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Canadian Heritage—Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency
Francophone Immigration
May 11, 2022
Welcome, minister. As we know, many of the services offered to francophone minority communities depend on their demographic weight, which is declining. Francophone immigration is probably the most effective remedy. However, Bill C-13 merely states that the future immigration policy is one of the factors that contributes to maintaining or increasing the demographic weight of the francophone and Acadian communities.
Minister, isn’t this vocabulary too weak, too vague, to ensure that we have an ambitious policy, considering that, for more than 20 years, Canada hasn’t met the targets set in this area at all? The current rate of francophone immigration outside Quebec is only 2%, when we would need a target of 8% just to maintain our demographic weight.
Thank you very much for that important question. We certainly have a lot of work to do to address the demographic weight issue. We recognize that French is in decline in Canada and in Quebec. If we look at some statistics, in 1971, the francophone population outside Quebec was 6.6%. Projections indicate that it will be 3% by 2036. That is a 3.6% loss of francophones outside Quebec, which is huge.
That is why we drafted this bill with Minister Fraser. We want to go further than Bill C-32. We want to make sure we have an ambitious immigration strategy with targets and indicators. If we want to adjust this country’s demographic weight, we need targets and we have to do the work to meet them. We want to establish this policy for francophones outside Quebec, but we also have to make sure we can offer French integration services to immigrants to Quebec.
Once again, I’m very happy I had the opportunity to work with Minister Fraser to make sure that Bill C-13 includes an ambitious immigration policy complete with targets and indicators. This is a step in the right direction towards correcting that loss of demographic weight in this country.
