OPINION: Affamer la bête: French-language education cuts only boost the government’s bottom line

Submitted by Farnell Morisset*

You may have heard of “starving the beast” – a tactic employed by government privatization hawks for decades. Intentionally underfund and mismanage public services, and when they inevitably become dysfunctional, point to that dysfunction as evidence that private sector solutions are better. It’s an old trick, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.

It’s very hard to see government cuts to francisation services to immigrants as anything else – and let’s be clear from the outset, despite what the government is saying, these are cuts. The government may claim that they haven’t changed their budgets, and that’s strictly speaking true, but their budgets are unchanged against their 2020-2021 figures, when immigration was at its lowest in decades (borders were closed!) and the pre-inflation dollars making up these budgets had nearly 20 per cent more purchasing power. Denying budget cuts to these services since then is passing off accounting technicalities as truth.

It’s not that the government has no money to promote French. Just two months ago, it announced and launched a $2.5-million campaign to promote the use of French.  The year before, the Quebec government gave $1.5 million to the city of Montreal alone to promote the use of French. There are budgets available – significant ones, apparently – they just aren’t going towards front-line language classes for new immigrants.

This, of course, comes on the tail of Bill 96, adopted in 2022, which gave immigrants a shortened six-month period before requiring their use of French for almost all public services and correspondence.

So on the one hand, new immigrants now have six months to learn French (both written and verbal) to function as full members of society, but on the other, waiting lists for public French classes have exploded. This leaves immigrants with very few options.

Some may be lucky enough to rely on friends or family to do most of the translating for them while they muddle through, informally learning as much French as they can. The rest, though, will have to turn to the private sector for French classes – and I suspect, if it hasn’t already begun, that it’s just a matter of time before for-profit language schools and translation companies develop a cottage industry of translating and transcribing official government forms specifically for the forest of red tape immigrants specifically face.

A brand-new, potentially highly profitable industry to boost GDP, which the government can then tax to extract further revenues from new immigrants? It’s a government accountant’s dream. So what if it further impoverishes new immigrants in the process? They can’t vote. For a government that only seems to be thinking as far as the next election, that’s all that matters.

*The writer is a Quebec City resident and the creator of two TikTok channels (one in French and one in English) exploring civic and political issues in Quebec.