WINNIPEG – It was from a 2003 magazine ad that Stephane Wild first learned about a place called Manitoba. A year later, he was living there.
Now, eight years after Wild and his wife Sophie packed up their home in the Alsace region of northern France and set out for their unlikely Prairie destination, the pair is thriving in the Winnipeg community of St. Boniface – and so is their mother tongue.
“There was an ad that said they were looking for tradespeople and craftsmen to come to Manitoba, Canada, along with a telephone number. And so we called that number,” said Wild, a chef, as he sat in his restaurant in the city’s French quarter, the heart of French-speaking Western Canada.
The ad belonged to an economic development council that represents Manitoba’s French-speaking communities. They followed up with a trade mission to the region that included some of Manitoba’s most senior politicians.
“The people at the (council) explained to us that francophones were a minority in Manitoba, that they make up about 10 per cent of the population, and that it was a community that needed business activity, business people to help the French language thrive,” Wild said in French, the language he uses every day.
“That pleased us, that seemed to us like a challenge, so we said OK, we should give it a try.”
The percentage of French-speaking households outside of Quebec has been declining slowly but steadily for decades. The reasons are many: French-speaking kids switch to English to play with their friends and neighbours. Many grow up and marry anglophones and raise the next generation in English. There has also been a big shift in immigration – more newcomers are arriving from countries where neither French nor English is the mother tongue.
On Wednesday, Statistics Canada released data from the 2011 census that indicates the slide was slowed, if not altogether stopped, over the last five years. Outside Quebec, 1,067,000 people reported French as their mother tongue last year, a modest increase over 1,013,000 in 2006.
The 2011 numbers, however, represent a decline in the proportion of the Canadian population: 4.2 per cent, down from 4.3 per cent five years ago.
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And in Manitoba, the percentage of those with French as their mother tongue slipped to four per cent from 4.2 per cent in 2006, although those speaking the language at home – either “most often” or “on a regular basis” – edged up to 3.6 per cent from 3.5 per cent in 2006.
Those in the province who considered themselves able to have a conversation in French slipped to 104,630, or 8.8 per cent, down from 105,450, or 9.3 per cent, five years earlier.
Even in New Brunswick, Canada’s only officially bilingual province, the drop has been steady: those with French as their mother tongue comprised 32.5 per cent of the provincial population last year, down from 33 per cent in 2006. Only 42.2 per cent say they would be conversant in French, down from 43.6 per cent five years ago.
“If we take out the very Francophone regions, such as the Acadian Peninsula and the northwest of New Brunswick, we see that in the urban settings, such as Moncton, Fredericton and Saint John, the attraction toward English, the assimilation, is probably much higher,” said Michel Doucet, a law professor at the University of Moncton who specializes in official language issues.
“We also see that the (rural) Francophone regions are de-populating.”
The decline can have a spiral effect. As francophones become more outnumbered, there are fewer French-speaking neighbours to speak to, and fewer people to offer services in French. There can also be less of a demand for governments to provide schools, hospital care and other services in French.
In St. Boniface, the largest Francophone community west of Quebec, not every service is available in French. While most of the cafes and restaurants that line Provencher Blvd. have bilingual signs and staff, large stores and other retailers in the surrounding area conduct their daily business in English. The farther from the centre of St. Boniface to the rest of the Riel district – the southeast quadrant of Winnipeg recognized as the traditional Francophone area – one ventures, the more English becomes predominant.
Faced with the domestic decline, Wild is part of a new immigration strategy to ensure the French language survives.
The Manitoba government and Francophone community groups have been targeting potential immigrants not only in France, but also in French-speaking African countries such as Mali and Ivory Coast. The province has set a target of having Francophone immigrants account for seven per cent of all newcomers. The rate is currently around three per cent.
The issue has long been a focus for Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger, who represents St. Boniface in the legislature and has served as the minister for francophone affairs for 13 years. Raised entirely in English, he married a francophone and raised his two sons primarily in French.
Selinger has helped establish bilingual service offices in St. Boniface and other communities – one-stop shopping where francophones can deal with three levels of government in their language. The NDP has also expanded the number of French-language schools. The idea is that if people can use French every day, they won’t lose it.
“(Immigrants) know when they come here, there’s a network of supports and resources that allows them to do their daily living in French,” Selinger said in a recent interview.
The supports are usually available as soon as immigrants arrive. Groups such as the Franco-Manitoban Society help Francophone newcomers line up housing and register their kids for school.
“We basically have a system where we pick them up at the airport … and we make sure they have everything they need: their health card, how to use the transit system, how to shop, their banking,” said society president Daniel Boucher.
Boucher and others see some encouraging signs amid the decline in French-first households. In much of Canada, more English-speaking kids are attending French-immersion schools. They’re anglophones, but they stand a good chance of using French after graduating.
That feeling is shared even in provinces where francophones make up a very small minority.
“I think we have more occasions now to use French and that there are many more people who are interested in speaking French than in the past,” Christine Sotteau, general manager of the British Columbia Francophone Federation, said from Vancouver.
“I see this in a very positive way.”
In New Brunswick, Doucet said he sees a need to stop or at least slow down the rate of assimilation.
“We have to give to the Francophone community the resources so they can reach out to francophones who may be on the path to assimilation … and bring them back,” he said.
“We have to solidify services in the educational sector, for example, right from early childhood.”
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