Juno News - Does a Conservative leader need to speak french？

00:00:00.000 Conservatives don't win in Quebec. That's the reality. Conservatives currently have 10 seats

00:00:03.940 in the province of Quebec. The most that they've won in recent elections was 12, and that was in

00:00:09.600 2015, right? So no matter what conservatives do, they have a very, very, very, very small footprint

00:00:15.940 in Quebec. The majority of people in Quebec don't like the conservatives, won't vote for the

00:00:20.480 conservatives. They have fundamental differences in terms of their worldview and their values.

00:00:24.780 And so the fact that we waste so much time, the conservatives waste so much time trying to make

00:00:28.880 inroads, trying to win in Quebec, participating in the spectacle that we saw in the debate last

00:00:33.400 night, it doesn't help, right? It doesn't help. And the reality is the majority of Canadians don't

00:00:38.280 speak French. Only 22% of Canadians have French as their first language. It's about just a little

00:00:44.460 under 8 million. And then another 6 million are bilingual. So Canadians from the rest of the

00:00:50.140 country who have learned to speak French or have French families, a lot of those people live in

00:00:54.940 other sort of bilingual areas, like Francophones in Ontario or in New Brunswick. So just a few more

00:01:02.000 stats on the official languages according to the census. So you can go through and you can see by

00:01:08.740 province what percentage of the population is bilingual. So Newfoundland, 5%, PEI, 12%, Nova Scotia,

00:01:17.140 10%, New Brunswick, 33%. You know, those aren't provinces, again, where conservatives do very well or win

00:01:23.920 very well. But 11% of people in Ontario are bilingual. And then once you start to go west,

00:01:28.880 those numbers really drop off, right? 8%. Saskatchewan, 4.7% are bilingual. Alberta, 6.6%,

00:01:35.960 British Columbia, 6.8%. So really, there's not a lot of need out west to learn French. It doesn't

00:01:41.500 seem like an important language. I mean, I grew up in British Columbia. And I remember in grade 11,

00:01:47.360 they started offering Spanish at my school. And most of the students got out of French and started

00:01:52.900 taking Spanish because, I don't know, maybe they thought it was more useful or a language that

00:01:57.380 they would actually use in the world. French isn't that useful. Wes, the point that JJ McCullough

00:02:02.780 makes, a journalist who I've talked about this topic on the show with before, he talks about how

00:02:08.020 the only real reason that you could learn French is if you're forced into a situation where you have

00:02:14.140 to speak French, right? It's not just a choice. You can go take some courses at a local community

00:02:18.360 college and learn French. The way that you're going to learn French is if you're in a situation where

00:02:23.400 you must speak French to survive, you have no other option. And the reality is in Western Canada,

00:02:28.280 that's never the situation that you're going to confront unless you go and choose to like spend a

00:02:33.400 spend a year abroad or go spend some time in a very kind of French part of Quebec, not Montreal, but outside.

00:02:40.360 And then daち rehab continues to be open, so again we'll contact pubanatize.

00:02:47.400 Let's get to that first and this is pretty helpful.

00:02:51.320 It's easy to do.

00:02:55.800 And the menu while you're going to try,

00:02:57.400 it's really soft.

00:02:58.920 Look at this space in London,

00:03:00.440 so let's see if you move on a second and you give us

00:03:03.280 that space apart and we don't have enough space in that space.

Juno News - May 27, 2022