4. Immigration as a driver for the Francophonie

Ontario is the province that hosts the highest number of immigrants in Canada, which should still be the case in 2028, even though the federal government has put in place policies encouraging immigration to all parts of the country. The hypothesis of the reference scenario for all of Ontario sets the annual intake of the province’s population at 0.8%, which would represent approximately 119,000 immigrants in 2020 and 129,000 immigrants in 2028.

According to Statistics Canada’s hypothesis, 3.9% of these immigrants would be Francophones. Ontario would therefore welcome 4,622 Francophone immigrants in 2020 and 5,042 in 2028. These numbers can hardly be compared with those recorded annually by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, knowing that they define Francophone immigrants in a less inclusive way. The data from this federal department revealed that Ontario had welcomed 2,650 Francophone immigrants in 2017 and 2,380 in 2016.

The censuses indicate that the proportion of Francophone immigrants in Ontario went from 2.1% in 2006 to 2.4% in 2016. However, this percentage remains significantly lower than the proportion of Francophones in the province, which was 4.7% in 2016. As such, the scenario of Francophone immigration averaging 5% annually aims at imagining a situation in which political and community immigration goals would be reached.

In 2016, immigrants represented 28.9% of Ontario’s population. In 2028, the proportion of immigrants in Ontario should increase to represent 33% of the entire population. Immigrants only made up 14.8% of the Francophone population in 2016, which is half the number for the general Ontario population. By 2028, however, the proportion of immigrants will increase significantly among the Francophone population to reach numbers between 22% and 26%. This increase will be more apparent in the Central region, where half of the population comes from immigration.

Of the 92,385 Francophone immigrants from the 2016 Census, a little more than half named French as their native language (57.4%). In all of Ontario’s regions, we are likely to see an increase in the proportion of the population with a mother tongue that is neither English nor French, although this would be more significant in the Toronto region.

This evolution, however, should have more impact on Anglophone immigration in the province than on the French. In all cases, the decrease in the number of immigrants with either French or English as a first language could influence the distribution of immigrants within the two linguistic groups.

The average distribution of immigrants by factors of age and gender observed over the last five years should remain constant. More than 85% of immigrants who settled in Ontario in 2015-2016 were between 0 and 44 years old.