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After widespread media coverage of Emilie Dubois’s plight became an international embarrassment for Quebec, the citizen of France was promised the immigration selection certificate she had originally been denied. Dubois had written a chapter of her doctoral thesis at Université Laval in English, leading bureaucrats initially to reject her application under the Quebec Experience Program (PEQ) on the absurd grounds that her French was not adequate.

Hers is not an isolated case. Something similar happened to me.

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Raised bilingually in New Jersey with a deep love for La Belle Province and la langue de Molière, I moved to Montreal in 1999 and eventually collected nine years’ worth of post-graduate degrees from world-class French language universities (Université de Montréal and Sciences-Po Paris).

Yet, despite uncontestable French fluency, at the end of my PhD program in October 2016, Immigration Quebec rejected my PEQ application on the grounds that I could not prove I spoke French. According to PEQ rules, I had to demonstrate either three years of post-secondary French-language education or pass the language test. My two-year MA was eliminated in its entirety because I took a Spanish class to fulfill a foreign-language requirement. My seven years of doctoral studies, research, and teaching at UdeM was also completely disqualified because my dissertation was in English. The dissertation was in English because most of it had been accepted for publication by English-language journals — a sign of success for a PhD student, not incompetency. Although I passed the French-language test with flying colours, Immigration Québec also rejected the test results because of the earlier rejections of my MA and PhD diplomas.