Barrel Strength

There was discussion at the office the other day concerning the traditional formula for the distribution of federal money.

Earlier in the process we had automatically allocated one third for French-language companies and two-thirds for English language companies.

Why, you ask, is the “traditional”, accepted, automatic division when the population division is roughly one quarter French-speaking and three quarters English-speaking?

Several reasons are used. First, the language divisions are not as clear-cut as you might think. Second, some rough-justice allocations started in the 1970s and have continued ever since unchanged, guarded by the French-Canadian members of the government.

The 2006 census reports the following division of the country by mother tongues:

English                                        57.2%

French                                         21.8%

Both E&F                                      0.3%

Other                                            19.7%

English and Other                      0.8%

French and Other                      0.1%

http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/hlt/97-555/T401-eng.cfm?Lang=E&T=401&GH=4&SC=1&S=99&O=A

So the question becomes: Is there a fair way to divide the nearly 20% of Canadians who have neither French nor English as their mother tongue, for the purposes of allocating federal money to only two language groups?

You can play with the stats in many different ways. For instance, you can divide the other category proportionately to the presence of English and French in the total population. Thus you take 57.2% of 19.7% allophone figure for the English language share, and 21.8% of 19.7% figure for the French language share.

Alternatively you can find statistics for who speaks English at home and who speaks French at home and divide the allophone figures according to those two numbers.

Taking figures from the 2001 census ( a little old but all I could find), we find:

“The proportion of the population that spoke English most often at home, 67.5%, was appreciably higher than the proportion whose mother tongue was English (59.1%). This was due to the attraction of English for members of other language groups. Even in Quebec, where anglophones represent a minority, the same situation prevails.

“Only 10.5% of the population spoke a non-official language most often at home, far lower than the 18.0% who reported a non-official language as mother tongue. These individuals adopted one or the other official language as home language. Generally speaking, the longer immigrants stay in Canada, the more likely they are to speak English or French at home.”

I did the figures both ways: calculating English spoken at home and by dividing the allophone figures by the proportions of English and French mother-tonguers. Either way it comes out to a bit over 67% of the population which speaks English regularly.

Accordingly a rough 70-30 division of federal spending between the two language groups is fair, if  you accept that proportion of the population speaking English or French is the appropriate basis of division. On the other hand, if you think that French gets two thirds because of their special needs or special status, you will not be pleased.