There is no reward for saying the French language is secure, so Legault will persist in attesting that it is under threat in Quebec
On a recent Saturday evening in Montreal, hockey fans spilled out of a popular Little Italy sports bar onto Boulevard Saint-Laurent to watch a Montreal Canadiens preseason game on two outdoor screens. The broadcast was in French but the crowd was a mix of English and French speakers. They cheered and chattered in both languages, but with a marked predominance of French. Even the anglophone customers ordered their beers in French.
Mr. Legault is currently trying to burnish his nationalist credentials after his party, Coalition Avenir Québec, lost a recent by-election to a resurgent Parti Québécois. An efficient way of doing that for any Quebec politician is to ignore the statistics and trot out the tired claim that the French language is hanging on by a thread, and then rush to its defence.
“When I look at the number of anglophone students in Quebec, it threatens the survival of French,” Mr. Legault said. But there is zero evidence that this is true. But that trend is based on statistics that tell more than one story. Because, while the relative number of people who speak French at home has fallen when compared with Quebec’s rising population, the actual number of them has risen steadily over the past 30 years, going from 5.6 million in 1991 to 6.5 million in 2021.
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