Re: Canadians speaking more languages, census reveals, Aug. 2

Canadians speaking more languages, census reveals, Aug. 2

Of the wealth of information that can be extracted from the census, one of the highlights the Star chose to identify was that the percentage of Canadians who reported a knowledge of both official languages had increased to 18 per cent. But that figure merits some interpretation.

Compared with the 2006 census, the number of bilingual respondents increased by 802,665. But, of those, 602,655 were from Quebec, while only 113,515 were from Ontario. Presumably, respondents from other provinces made up the total.

In Ontario, about 11 per cent of the population is bilingual, while in Quebec, the figure is 45 per cent. So what does this tell us? It tells us that, for the most part, Ontarians don’t really need or care about French, while a significant number of Quebecers realize that, on a continent of close to 400 million anglophones, they must either learn English or exist as an isolated minority.

There is one other important lesson we can learn from the census. In Ontario, out of a population of more than 13 million, fewer than 40,000 (not quite a sellout at the Rogers Centre) speak only French and no English. This figure is 0.3 per cent of the province’s population.

Yet, to accommodate this minuscule demographic, Ontario spends millions of dollars on its Office of Francophone Affairs, to say nothing of the cost of implementing French services in everything from the legislature, the ROM, AGO and Science Centre to the LCBO and GO Transit. The list goes on.

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that French, although significant in Canada as a whole, is simply not relevant in Ontario and we can stop wasting precious tax dollars on services that benefit so few.

Ronald Weir, Toronto