Fake it 'til you make it?

This doesn’t make sense to me: classifying people who don’t speak French as Francophones just to make it look like we have a bigger francophone population in Ontario? Je vois comment plus la population minoritaire est grande, plus nous avons du poids. Mais il faudrait essayer d’encourager la communauté francophone à grandir, pas classer des gens come francophones alors qu’ils ne le sont pas.

The Ottawa Citizen

2009.06.29

David Gonczol

StatsCan against language policy shift

Statistics Canada does not support a new definition Ontario has adopted to count francophones that will effectively boost that group's shrinking population by including some people who can't even speak French.

In essence, the new definition includes as francophones exogenous immigrants, people whose first language is neither English nor French, but who could speak French if they wanted to.

Proponents of the new definition include François Boileau, Ontario's French language services commissioner, and Ottawa-Vanier MPP Madeleine Meilleur, the minister responsible for francophone affairs.

Jean-Pierre Corbeil, chief specialist of the language statistics section at Statistics Canada, said the agency stands behind its policy of asking people to declare their "first official language spoken" as the most accurate way to determine how many French and English speakers there are. More importantly, he says, this question accurately captures which immigrants are francophone or anglophone.

However, the statistician believes the new definition adopted by Ontario is taken from a survey meant for a different purpose: to look at the vitality of minority communities. It was, in fact, designed to "study the dynamics to see what extent immigrants, for instance, entered the minority language," not to accurately count the number of francophones.

Previously, Ontario counted people as francophones if they said they could speak French, or if French was their mother tongue and they were still able to sustain a conversation, or if it was the most commonly used language at home.

The new definition will include those who "speak a language other than an official language as their mother tongue, know both French and English, and speak either a non-official language or French alone or in combination with another language most often in the home."

Corbeil said "activists" trying to expand the official size of minority groups see reclassifying immigrants as an opportunity to reverse the perception of declines in their populations.

"All the francophone communities outside of Quebec, obviously because of low fertility rates, because of assimilation, want to focus on immigration as maybe a potential source of growth for their community," he said.

Boileau and others defend the survey's wider use by saying Statistics Canada has given it credibility as a tool to measure minority populations.

The agency has been under pressure for years to change its method of counting francophones outside Quebec and anglophones inside the province.

The first volley in this initiative was fired in 2003 in the form of a research report by Rodrigue Landry, director-general of the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities. The Moncton-based organization was created in 2002 with a $10-million federal endowment fund.

One of the group's first initiatives was to produce a research paper that advised that all children from exogenous families should be considered francophone if they speak any amount of French at home.

A strategy was soon developed around the idea by the Commission nationale des parents francophones, which funded Landry's study. It called for French-language schools, day cares and other appropriate resources to be deployed around these newly classified francophones. The group has worked with its counterparts in several provinces to set up a number of these support structures, such as Le Coccinelle in Orléans.

Some want the definition of a francophone expanded even further. Murielle Gagné-Ouellette, the former executive director of the Ottawa-based group, wants every child born to couples made up of one francophone and one anglophone to be classified as only francophone because "it's not the anglophone community that is in difficulty."