What Canada’s population will look like in 2036
Increased immigration will change Canada’s always-thorny language politics:
- Over a quarter of the population (26-30 per cent) will have a mother tongue other than English or French, up from 20 per cent now.
- The proportion of native-speaker Francophones will fall faster than Anglophones, to 17-18 per cent from 21 per cent now. The French mother tongue population will fall both in Quebec (from about 80 per cent to about 70 per cent) and in the rest of Canada (from 3.8 percent to about 2.8 per cent.)
- The first official language spoken will more often be English and less often French (English, 75 per cent to 78 per cent; French, 23 per cent to 21 per cent.).
- More Francophones in Quebec will be bilingual (39 per cent to 49 per cent), and proportionately, slightly fewer Canadians will be able to speak French at all.
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