Expanding access to government-offered French classes easier said than done, reports show

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

Kent Boudreau came to Quebec City from Alberta in 2021 with the express purpose of learning French. Three years later, despite reforms to the province’s French language learning program that gave newcomers from English Canada like Boudreau the possibility to enrol in the same government-run French classes as immigrants, he still hasn’t set foot in a class. It’s not for lack of trying.

Boudreau is a baggage handler at Jean Lesage International Airport and has yet to find a class that fits around his work hours. He also finds the application process – which is entirely in French apart from an English-language landing page – nearly impossible for a unilingual person to manage without help.

Mike Ulusoy, a Turkish-born Torontonian who moved to Quebec City to learn French last year, had less difficulty fitting classes into his schedule than Boudreau, but raised concerns about course mate- rial that was irrelevant to his career aspirations and an environment where he and his classmates felt “pushed,” rather than encouraged, to learn the language. Like Boudreau, he chose Quebec City for the French fact; like Boudreau, he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to learn in a way that suits him.

Francisation Québec, the province’s one-stop shop for registering for French-as-a- second-language courses, run jointly by the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI) and the Ministry of Education and Higher Learning (MEES), was created last year by Law 14 (better known as Bill 96), the massive bill brought forward by the Coalition Avenir Québec to shore up the role of the French language in public life. The same bill opened up government-run French classes, previously available only to immigrants, to Canadian-born non-French speakers. However, several recent reports – in addition to anecdotal stories like those of Ulusoy and Boudreau – show that the system doesn’t seem to be living up to its ambitious promise, at least for now.

In a wide-ranging recent report on anglophone-franco- phone relations, the federal Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages cited a learner’s partner who found the program “disorganized and [potentially] discouraging for English speakers.” Earlier this spring, the office of the Commissaire de la langue française, a provincial government- appointed language watchdog, released a highly critical report on the program’s implementation, noting it was “variable and sometimes delayed” and had difficulty responding to an avalanche of increased demand brought about by the reforms and by increased immigration, which led wait- ing lists to more than double (from just over 21,000 to over 48,500) between October 2023 and April 2024. The target wait time before learners are placed in a class is 50 days; some learners are placed in a class a few weeks after a preliminary assessment while others wait five to six months.

School service centres, which administer about half of all of francisation classes, may have to reduce capacity further due to a funding shortfall brought about by a dispute between the federal and provincial governments, Carl Ouellet of the Association québécoise du personnel de direction des écoles (AQPDE; Quebec school principals’ association) told the QCT last week. “We won’t be reimbursed for services we’ve already paid for and we’ll have to turn people away.”

“Prior to Bill 96, [Canadian- born] English-speaking Quebecers were not eligible for francisation, and Bill 96 has kind of solved that problem,” said Nicholas Salter of the Provincial Employment Round Table, a nonprofit address- ing barriers to employment for English speakers in the regions. “But now we have an accessibility problem instead of an eligibility problem.” He added that the waiting lists for French courses combined with the fact that new Quebecers can only receive government services in English for six months after arrival create a “short runway” to learn the lan- guage, especially for learners who have to balance courses with work or caregiving respon- sibilities.

“Francisation is a priority for the Legault government, but from what I have seen, they don’t have a consistent approach,” said Quebec Liberal immigration critic André A. Morin, calling on the MIFI, the MEES, the finance ministry and the ministry of agriculture, which oversees the working conditions of temporary foreign workers, to co-ordinate their efforts more closely. “I’m not saying that centralization is a bad idea, but when you do it, you have to plan, and this government hasn’t planned.”