Quebec refugee advocates challenge CAQ’s unrealistic six-month timeline to learn French

In 2022, when the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government announced that newcomers to Quebec would only have six months to access services in English or another language, and that following that initial six-month grace period government services would be provided exclusively in French, many were quick to point out how unreasonable that was.

Human rights advocates, and educational experts especially, denounced the fact that Bill 96’s requirement also included refugees and asylum seekers, targeting, and completely disregarding the challenges faced by the most vulnerable immigrant population.

Organizations that work closely with refugees continue to try and raise awareness of how inhumane that added hurdle is for people often dealing with complex, multi-layered trauma and PTSD that makes it much harder to integrate, let alone learn a new language in six months.

One organization advocating for newcomer rights, The Refugee Centre, founded in 2015 in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, is now actively campaigning against this arbitrary six-month deadline to learn French.

Random deadline contradicts government’s own findings

“This deadline isn’t based on anything,” says Alina Murad, Advocacy Coordinator at The Refugee Centre. “The Quebec government even conducted a report that contradicted its own policies and found that it’s next to impossible to learn a new language in that amount of time.”

The report Murad is referencing was commissioned by the Quebec government in 2019 and presented in April 2021, a month before the CAQ government introduced Bill 96. The study concluded that six months was simply not sufficient time to learn French, yet the government chose to keep the study hidden. The report’s conclusions were only made public when CBC News obtained it under access-to-information legislation.

Adding to the stress, wait times for accessing the government’s francisation classes extend far beyond the six-month grace period allotted to newcomers. “What we’re seeing with our clients is that they’ve been waiting for on average 8 months to even access French classes,” Murad says. “And that wait time only appears to be increasing.”

Earlier this year, Quebec’s French language commissioner Benoît Dubreuil reached the same conclusion when he tabled his annual report, pointing to “bottlenecks in the creation of classes,” and “waiting lists for those requesting services.”

Unreasonable demands and insufficient resources

For organizations like the Refugee Centre, whose main mission is to create long-lasting, self-sustainable, and creative solutions to refugee integration, it’s frustrating to watch vulnerable people be told they must learn French within the six-month period by a government that’s failing to provide the required resources.

“Essentially, newcomers are being asked to dig a hole without being given a shovel,” says Murad.

“The majority of our clients are already in stressful situations so there’s already a baseline level of stress,” she adds. “They want to be here, they want to integrate, they want to build a life here, but with francisation, a number of issues in its structure and policy make it impossible for refugees to learn French. And then they’re punished for it.”

Many refugees interviewed in the past few years have resorted to private French lessons, which isn’t always a feasible option for those with limited budgets and limited sources of income. In an effort to help, The Refugee Centre offers two levels of French classes taught by one person.

“With more funding we would be able to offer more classes,” says Murad. “We’re trying to fill the gaps that are created by the system, but we really do need the government’s help in order to do that.”

Comprehensive services to help refugees integrate

The non-profit’s goal is to provide wrap-around services for newcomers, whether they’re refugees, asylum seekers, or international students. They assist with academic aid and orientation, help newcomers enrol in classes, and help newcomers navigate how they can improve their education.

Orientating people in the city, getting their drivers license, their education equivalency evaluation so they can continue to work in their field, offering social programs to help with loneliness, providing a nurse on staff that offers health assessments and offers workshops so that people know what their rights are regarding healthcare, providing baskets with food and hygiene products to those who need them, showing them how to make an appointment, how to access transitional housing programs, are just some of the many things they assist with.

“We see that there’s a need from our clients,” says Murad, “and we try and fill that to the best of our ability while making sure that they’re not dependent on us, by giving them the tools that they need to build their own support system and network.”

On-the-ground organizations like The Refugee Centre are well versed in the challenges that refugees face and recognize that Quebec’s imposed and unrealistic six-month timeline to learn French –when compounded with other barriers that are present in any part of the refugee determination process– can be the drop that overflows the bucket, penalizing people already experiencing precariousness and high levels of stress.

Past trauma interferes with efficient learning

A French teacher who prepares high-school students for Quebec’s government exams in Secondaire 4 and 5 and who spoke to me under condition of anonymity, told me that “even in a perfect situation, students need one full school year to get their bearings.” And by “perfect situation,” the teacher says, he means “students who speak a language that’s similar to French, and who arrive here with both their parents and siblings, and their parents already have jobs waiting for them.”

Refugees who arrive here with trauma can’t just jump-start a brand-new life and easily acquire a brand-new language.

“A Ukrainian teen who came here,” says the high-school educator, “speaking a language that has nothing in common with French, starting with the alphabet, leaving in a rush without most of their belongings, leaving dad behind to fight, and after seeing horrors you and I and the CAQ ministers cannot begin to imagine, is not ready to immediately learn. Their body is in the classroom, but where do you think their mind is?”

Murad underlines that it’s our collective responsibility to offer equitable and quick access to French classes because these systemic barriers, not an unwillingness to acquire the language, cause most issues. And rushing language is never conducive to learning.

“The rhetoric that the French language is on the decline has fueled this need for things to happen faster,” she says. “They [the government] have a goal in mind and they’re just looking at that and not looking at how can we make this more conducive and accessible to get what we want.”

“I had an Angolan student who travelled from Brazil to Quebec by foot,” the teacher tells me. “Seven months of walking with his mother and little sister.” The teacher says he had to let the student settle in, leaving him to ‘arrive’ here completely before he was able to focus on any lessons.

“Instead of making them love our language and culture,” he adds, “obligating them to learn French in six months will have the opposite effect.”

E-mail campaign to end arbitrary six-month deadline

The Refugee Centre essentially has three different ‘asks’ it’s trying to advocate for right now.

It’s asking the public to email the Quebec government to advocate for the following:

Extending or completely removing the six-month arbitrary deadline.
Add more classes and instructors to address the backlog.
Expand funding because there are many funding constraints that prevent community organizations currently offering French lessons free of charge from obtaining funding for French language classes. The number of organizations allowed to offer these classes is also limited.

“Francisation Quebec has only been around for a year so of course it requires some improvements and fine-tuning,” says Murad, “but this is how we can make it better and more beneficial for those who need it. We’re offering solutions.”

The non-profit’s advocacy campaign asks the public to send a pre-written email to the Quebec government, asking for these three things: the extension of the deadline, to add more classes and instructors, and to expand funding capacity.

“We’re trying to get the public more involved,” Murad says, “because there’s more power in numbers and we really do believe that people in our community, the city and the province want to be a part of something bigger and the betterment of where we live, and this is one way to do that.”

The Refugee Centre website offers more comprehensive information on the organization’s goals, while their Instagram account features monthly awareness campaigns that helps Quebecers better understand the challenges refugees face and dispels common myths surrounding them.

“We don’t want to just complain without offering concrete solutions,” says Murad. “From a grassroots point of view, we see how these policies directly impact people’s everyday lives. A lot of people in positions of policy-making don’t necessarily see that. It’s important for our different bodies –political, governmental, grassroots—to work together to ensure that we’re actually achieving what we want to do.” ■

Read more weekly editorial columns by Toula Drimonis.