Immigrants in Quebec say cancelled French classes are a loss for both them and the province

Thiago Moreira says back home in Brazil, he didn’t like France or French. But after he started learning Quebec French, he grew to love it.

“The là, là?” says Moreira, laughing. “Là, là, c’est très fantastique!”

Married with two children and armed with a degree in automation engineering, Moreira spent two years searching for a job in Canada as a skilled worker. He had offers in other provinces, but he felt Quebec values best lined up with his own.

So he accepted an offer from a hardwood flooring company in Saint-Georges, in the province’s Beauce region south of Quebec City.

The family arrived in the small town, in one of the most francophone regions of Quebec, in January. Professionally, he was ready to hit the ground running. The challenge was living in French.

“It was so hard. But people here helped me and corrected me,” he says.

Moreira and his wife enrolled in government-funded French courses and his children started attending French school. Their plan was to study hard to get to Level 7 on the Canadian Language Benchmarks scale used in the selection process for immigration.

They hoped to pass the exam and apply for permanent residency next summer. But in November, they got an email saying their classes were cancelled.

Moreira is now one of thousands of temporary immigrants looking for a new French-language program after government classes across the province were cancelled this fall. He said he intends to pay out of pocket in the hope he can stay in the province — if his budget and schedule allows.

“I need to keep calm and show my kids everything is going to be OK,” he says, even if that means they might have to move elsewhere in Canada.

“I need to establish my life here.”

Budget not meeting demand

School service centres and school boards across Quebec abruptly started informing students in late October and early November that their free French classes were being cancelled.

They blamed Quebec’s Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI), saying the budgets for language training weren’t keeping up with exploding demand. But Minister Jean-François Roberge argued there was plenty of money being provided, and that it should have been better managed.

A report from Quebec’s Commissioner of the French Language from May says that between 2018 and 2023, enrolment in francisation classes more than doubled, to 68,000 students. Just under half of those students have temporary immigration status.

The report points to a change in policy as one reason for the increase. As of September 2023, temporary foreign workers must attain a Level 4 proficiency in French to renew their Certificat d’acceptation du Québec, the document required to stay and work in the province.

Despite that spike in demand, the province told service centres that francisation class budgets can’t exceed what they were at the start of the pandemic. The cancellations come as Quebec is reassessing its immigration strategy.

After the backlash from the cancellations, which has included protests in recent weeks, Radio-Canada is reporting that the province may soon free up more funding for the courses.

‘We’ll just have to work harder’

Ruslan Sirenko speaks Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and English. And he’s enthusiastic about taking on French.

Unlike most of the recent Ukrainian arrivals in Beauce, who came after war broke out at home, Sirenko and his fiancée, Yevheniia Kotsiak, had left Ukraine for Poland a couple of years earlier.

A friend living in Saint-Georges told them they should consider the region, pointing to affordable housing, plentiful jobs and free French classes. Sirenko got a job offer at the same flooring company and the couple arrived in March 2024. Kotsiak works at a downtown hotel.

In August, they were admitted to free French classes. Kotsiak says they immediately saw progress. But then the courses were shut down.

“We had just started to not be embarrassed about speaking French,” she says. “Our classes were really helping with listening and speaking.”

They’re planning to pay for private lessons. Sirenko says he learns best when working with a teacher.

“We 100 per cent want to stay in Saint-Georges,” Sirenko says. “So we’ll just have to work harder.”

Personal enrichment and fitting in

Josefa Blondele laughs when she’s asked about her favourite expressions in French.

“They’re all swear words. I learned them at the factory. We didn’t always talk like that, but this is Quebec, câline!”

Blondele arrived in Canada from Angola in December 2019 as an asylum seeker. Friends in Beauce told her she could get work at the Olymel meat-processing plant in Vallée-Jonction, without speaking French.

“It was so physical — on the line it’s always moving,” she says. “I was paying attention, seeing how they were working. And I was very attentive to how they were speaking.”

Blondele started free French classes in 2020. In five years, she went from Level 3 to Level 7, met her husband and had two sons. She’s proud of her progress and credits her classes not only for her language skills, but for teaching her about Quebec.

She intends to continue studying independently to make Level 8.

“I want more! I want to do what I was doing back in Angola,” she says. “I want a work phone. I want to send emails in French. I want to raise my hand in a meeting at my sons’ school and not worry about people not understanding me.”

Blondele says she’s proud of how far she’s come. And she doesn’t regret the effort, despite living with the knowledge that she may have to leave the country if her asylum claim is rejected.

But she’s thinking about the immigrants who are just arriving now.

“If they don’t find a way to learn French, it’s a loss for Quebec,” she says.

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