Rechercher dans la communauté

(Courtesy of CBC / The Canadian Press)

L`article est un peu facultatif, je veux porter votre attention aux nombreux commentaires en relation avec celui-ci. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071204.wcensusmain1204/CommentStory/census2006/home/ Canada's tenuous French connection BRODIE FENLON Globe and Mail Update December 4, 2007 at 4:12 PM EST Just a day after the Prime Minister appointed Bernard Lord to head a committee on bilingualism, newly released census figures suggest that Canada's official-languages policy and the vitality of the French language are under increasing pressure outside Quebec. There are nearly as many Canadians with a non-official language as their mother tongue as there are francophones, while the peak rate of bilingualism for anglophones living outside Quebec has dropped again. The new figures on immigration, language and mobility, gleaned from the 2006 census, paint a dramatic picture of Canada's changing demographics. Among the highlights: • One in five Canadians – 19.8 per cent of the total population – was born outside the country, a rate not matched since 1931, when the percentage of foreign-born citizens peaked at 22.2 per cent. Only Australia has more foreign-born residents. • More than 60 per cent of immigrants live in the large urban centres of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver; only about 5 per cent live in rural parts of Canada. • Most of the recent newcomers to Canada are from Asia – 58 per cent when those from the Middle East are included. Europeans, the dominant immigrant group for most of the 20th century, represented only 16 per cent of those who moved to Canada between 2001 and 2006. • Canada's foreign-born population increased by 13.6 per cent, four times greater than the growth rate of 3.3 per cent for the Canadian-born population. But it is the language numbers released Tuesday that will likely make headlines, following as they do on the heels of Mr. Lord's appointment by Stephen Harper to head a high-profile committee on bilingualism in Canada. The former premier of New Brunswick will travel to seven cities across the country during the first two weeks of December to speak to members of English and French minority communities and provide advice and guidance to the federal government. Mr. Lord will then report to Official Languages Minister Josée Verner in January. What Mr. Lord will find outside Quebec and New Brunswick, Canada's only officially bilingual province, is increasingly isolated French-language communities, the census suggests. One indicator is mother tongue, defined as the first language learned at home and still understood at the time of the census. For the first time, allophones – those who speak neither English nor French as their first language – represent fully one-fifth of the population. The numbers jumped to 20.1 per cent from 18 per cent in the last census, driven primarily by immigration. Conversely, the proportion of francophones and anglophones decreased slightly after population growth is taken into account. This will be no surprise for Canadians in many parts of the country. For several years, Chinese has topped French as a first language in Ontario, Alberta and B.C. The 2006 census reaffirmed the position of Chinese languages as Canada's third most common mother tongue group. More than one million Canadians reported one of the Chinese languages as their first language, a jump of 18.5 per cent. Experts are quick to note that allophones speak about 200 languages and are not a homogeneous group. Francophones still represent about one-quarter of the population; people who report Chinese as their mother tongue represent 3.3 per cent of the total population. Moreover, the census showed that nine out of 10 Canadians speak English or French most often at home: Just over one-fifth spoke French, 67.7 per cent spoke English, and 11.9 per cent spoke a non-official language at home. It is important to note, however, that the English and French numbers dropped from the previous census, while the non-official language numbers increased by 1.5 per cent. Even in Quebec, the percentage of people who spoke French most often at home dropped to 81.8 per cent from 83.1 per cent. The bilingualism rate is another indicator of the tenuous French connection. Outside Quebec, only 5.6 per cent of allophones in 2006 reported knowing both official languages. While there was a slight increase – 7.4 per cent from 7.1 per cent – in the number of anglophones outside Quebec who said they could carry on a conversation in both official languages, the number dropped for a key demographic: young Canadians. Because most anglophones learn French at school, the peak bilingualism rate for Canadians outside Quebec occurs in the 15-19 age range. That rate has slipped over the past decade, to 13 per cent in 2006 from 16.3 per cent in 1996. The ability of young anglophones to maintain their knowledge of French as a second language appears to decline with time. In 2001, 14.7 per cent of anglophones aged 15 to 19 were bilingual. Five years later, only 12.2 per cent of that same cohort reported being bilingual. The numbers are disappointing, considering that one of the chief objectives of Ottawa's $787-million plan on official languages – launched by the previous Liberal government in 2003 – is to double by 2013 the percentage of young bilingual Canadians to 50 per cent. Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies and advocate of official bilingualism, warned against an “ethno-local” reading of the numbers, which he said could foster tensions and challenge public support for French in areas where other languages dominate. “When you start breaking things down locally, then you risk tearing away at the fabric of national unity. ... That's the Canada of multiple parts, not the Canada with a national vision both of its demographic reality and its history,” he said. “Bilingualism is the fundamental feature of a strong Canadian identity to the extent that more than a quarter of the country, nationally, consists of people who are French speakers.” Others suggest, however, that such sentiments are antiquated in a multicultural Canada and ignore the demographic reality of much of the country, especially urban areas such as Toronto or Vancouver. “Nobody's asked any longer what is the place of French. Now I walk on hot coals to even say that out loud,” said Heather Lotherington, associate professor of multilingual education at York University. “We're living in a global society. We have this influx of people who speak the languages of the world, and we're not doing a damn thing with these languages. We're just letting them go to waste.” Ms. Lotherington, whose research is focused on Toronto-area schools, advocates for the inclusion of students' mother tongues in the curriculum. She said decades of research shows that if you maintain the languages children know, they learn other languages better, fast and more easily. “French immersion needs to be looked at critically,” she said. “I do not want to throw it out. Canada is a world leader in immersion education. But you have to think about the way we learn languages and the possibility of learning more. "It's a very colonial stance to say that English and French are the languages of Canada.” Concerns about official bilingualism and the impact of immigration on the French language inside and outside Quebec are not new. In September's Throne Speech, the Prime Minister pledged to extend official bilingualism programs for minority communities. The appointment of Mr. Lord is seen as the first step in that commitment and a response to the critical report by Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser, who accused the Harper government of having “directly undermined” the official languages plan with budget cuts and by eliminating the Court Challenges program, which financed minority-rights court cases against the government. Citizenship and Immigration recently set targets through 2011 to attract between 8,000 and 10,000 French-speaking immigrants a year to francophone communities outside of Quebec. Driving these targets are demographic data showing that for every new immigrant whose mother tongue is French, there are 10 whose mother tongue is English, and that the vast majority of newcomers adopt English upon arrival in Canada. Meanwhile, the debate over immigration and language continues in Quebec, where the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodation of minorities heard last week from a prominent Parti Québécois strategist that only an independent Quebec could protect the French language. The commission also heard from French-speaking immigrants to Quebec who said their lack of English was impeding their ability to get jobs. And in October, PQ Leader Pauline Marois caused a small furor when she proposed the Quebec Identity Act, which would require all new immigrants to the province to learn French within three years. Those who failed a language test would not be permitted to hold public office, raise money for a political party or petition the National Assembly. The bill was widely condemned. The Official Languages Act, first passed in 1969 and updated twice since, stipulates Canadians' right to receive federal government services in either English or French where numbers warrant, the right of public servants to work in either language in certain areas, the right of either English or French speakers to advance in the public service, and that the government must promote bilingualism.

Montreal hosts global programming event By: Rafael Ruffolo ComputerWorld Canada (17 Sep 2007) OOPSLA 2007, an international conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications bringing together a wide variety of computing professionals, is coming to Montreal next month. The conference offers demonstration sessions, panel discussions and keynote speeches geared towards industry practitioners, managers and researchers. Speakers will address subjects such as improving programming languages and software development, as well as exploring new programming methods. The event will also host doctoral students who will get the opportunity to interact and present their work to industry researchers. "We have a fair number of managers from various IT organizations coming to the conference," Richard Gabriel, OOPSLA 2007 conference chair, said. "This year's event in particular has a real superstar lineup as we have some keynote speakers that people in the field would try over a ten-year period to see. But, we've got them all." One such keynote speaker is Gregor Kiczales, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. Kiczales is known for his work on Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) and helped lead the Xerox PARC team that developed the AspectJ programming language. He intends to talk about how people work together toward building and using complicated systems. "We have these very scientific and technical theories that account for how people work together versus the social factors that account for how people work together, and everybody knows that the middle is where the action is," Kiczales said. "The thing I want to claim our field should work on over the next 10 years is that theory in the middle of how people work and how technology works and I think that could have a dramatic impact on what we do." Kiczales said that AOP, which is what he's most known for, touches on these same issues. He said it's about how different people see the same thing in different ways. "I've been working with AOP a little over 10 years now and what I'm trying to do now is go back to this set of intuitions that produced AOP and fish out the next idea," Kiczales said. Because the OOPSLA conference is so diverse, he said, both technologists and methodologists will have the opportunity to hear these ideas together; something the specialized nature of most conferences fail to address. "OOPSLA is really about this mix of people from our field trying to see the ideas that are going to be breaking in about five or 10 years from now," Kiczales said. "The thing that truly makes OOPSLA unique is the mix it brings together with practitioners, managers, consultants and researchers. You have people who believe that technology is the answer, people who believe that methods are the answer, and people who believe that management is the answer. And when you mix these sorts of people together you tend to produce insight." Another notable speaker is John McCarthy, an Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) Turing Award winner, whose credits include coining the term "Artificial Intelligence" as well as inventing the Lisp programming language. McCarthy also did work in computer time-sharing technology and suggested it might lead to a future in which computing power and programs could be sold as a utility. "This is going to be a talk from one of the most famous computer scientists ever at the tail-end of his career," Gabriel said, adding that McCarthy is expected to discuss his work on a programming language called Elephant 2000. "He's been working on it for about 15 years now, but he doesn't talk about it much and has not released many papers on it, so it should be an interesting discussion," Gabriel said. Gabriel said what he knows thus far about McCarthy's proposed programming language is that it's designed for writing and verifying programs that facilitate commercial transactions such as online airline bookings. Frederick Brooke, another ACM Turing Award winner, is also speaking at the event and will discuss how companies can collaborate and "telecollaborate" to achieve conceptual integrity. "He's going to deal with the issue of groups of people who are designing systems together, but aren't situated in the same place," Gabriel said. "A lot of his current research deals around the issue of virtual reality." And speaking of virtual reality, two other notable speakers include Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner, who are software engineers behind the virtual world of Second Life. The two will deliver keynotes on the event's Onward, which is about trying to look to the future, Gabriel said. "Large companies like IBM and Sun Microsystems have presences in Second Life, so we're hoping some of the higher level, business-type people who attend will be the target of this keynote." OOPSLA organizers expect roughly 1,200 IT and computing professionals to attend the conference, now in its twenty-second year. The event runs from October 21 to 25, at the Palais des congrès de Montréal.