Quebec should be a bilingual province, Liberal MP tells language committee (2024)

OTTAWA — Quebec Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette added his voice to the Bloc Québécois and Conservatives in Ottawa who say they are outraged by comments from Laval Liberal Party MP Angelo Iacono, according to whom Quebec would benefit from becoming an officially bilingual province rather than having only French as an official language.

“No. … What a lack of respect,” Jolin-Barrette wrote Friday on X.

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“Quebec is a French-speaking state and will remain so,” said the architect of Quebec’s language reform. “That’s what sets it apart. The federal government is always there to defend diversity, but when the time comes to defend the specificity of Quebec, it is absent.”

Iacono made his controversial remarks Thursday during a meeting of the Standing Committee on Official Languages ​​in Ottawa. “I believe that Quebec, and I believe that Canada, should be a bilingual country, to be stronger and not just be a unilingual French-speaking province, because there you will exclude others who want to learn French,” he said. he asserted.

The MP, who represents the riding of Alfred-Pellan, is among the Liberals who took turns in an apparent attempt at parliamentary obstruction to prevent a vote to be held for the committee to seek the expulsion of their colleague Francis Drouin for having called witnesses campaigning for the protection of language “full of s–t” at the beginning of the month.

The subject wasted no time in making its way to the House of Commons. “According to (Iacono), French reduces us,” Bloc MP Marilène Gill (Manicouagan) said during question period.

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Gill, whos said such a comment is “revealing of a cultural problem in the Liberal Party” where linguistic missteps are multiplying, asked if this is a point of view shared by the Liberals and if they intend to call their MP to order.

The leader of the government in the House of Commons, Steven MacKinnon, did not respond directly, but he reiterated that his party recognizes the decline of French and has a “dedication” to “our two official languages ​​in the country.”

As the Bloc returned to the charge, he went on the attack. “The Bloc, on the other hand, is there why? Do one thing: put Quebec’s neighbours against Quebec’s neighbors, create chicanery and divide people. We’re not here for that. We are for linguistic unity.”

The Conservative Party also joined in the criticism.

“I am stunned,” said the MP for Mégantic—L’Érable, Luc Berthold. “This is unacceptable! And not a single Liberal member from Quebec in this caucus stood up to denounce these comments, not even the member for Papineau (Trudeau).”

Franco-Ontarian Marie-France Lalonde, MP for Orléans, fired back. “This will allow me to highlight the inaction of the Conservatives for nine years in relation to the priorities in terms of the modernization of official languages, in terms of the action plan,” she said.

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There is only one officially bilingual province in the country: New Brunswick. Quebec’s only official language is French.

Although Canada has two official languages, the Constitution provides that the two levels of government — the federal government and the provinces — have the power to legislate on linguistic matters in the areas of jurisdiction assigned to them.

To support his argument, MP Iacono said he began his school career in English “because the French speakers … the Quebecers, the native French, did not want to have the Italians because they felt threatened,” although he “was due to go to a French school.”

At university, after his political science studies at McGill, he chose to continue his law studies at “the most French-speaking, the most Québécois, we will say the most “French” of universities: UQAM.

“And I fit in well,” Iacono said. “And I was well respected. And look: I speak the French language today. There are sometimes words that I don’t understand, there are sometimes words that I say with a bit of an Italian accent, but I am a product of Quebec, I was born in Quebec, and I learned French.”

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Statistics Canada data say that the rate of bilingualism (English-French) is increasing in Quebec and decreasing outside this province.

Quebec is by far the province where the proportion of the population capable of carrying on a conversation in French and English is the highest. It went from 40.8 per cent in the 2001 census to 46.4 per cent in the 2021 census.

The latest census confirmed the decline of French in Quebec across all its indicators, including the percentage of Quebecers with French as mother tongue, with French as the language spoken predominantly at home, with French as the first official language spoken, with the ability to carry on a conversation in French.

Both the Bloc and the Conservative Party said Iacono’s remarks are added to a series of cases where the Liberals have put their foot in their mouth when it comes to the defence of French in Quebec.

They notably recalled that Saint-Laurent MP Emmanuella Lambropoulos had denied the decline of French, when she said Bill 96 prevents anglophones from being treated.

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