Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says English or French should be required for new Canadian citizens

Jason Kenney (né le 30 mars 1968 à Oakville, Ontario) est un homme politique canadien. Il est actuellement député à la Chambre des communes du Canada et représente la circonscription de Calgary-Sud-Est (Alberta). Il est membre du Parti conservateur du Canada, qui forme le gouvernement sous le premier ministre Stephen Harper. Kenney est aussi maintenant le Secrétaire parlementaire du Premier ministre.

This statement by Jason Kenney is getting quite a bit of attention. He said the following:

Immigrants who can't speak English or French well enough should be denied citizenship, a federal cabinet minister says.

Canada needs to improve its efforts to integrate newcomers, Jason Kenney, minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, said Friday.

"I believe one area that we can ask immigrants in the country to make a greater effort [in] is that of language," Kenney said in a speech to an immigration conference in Calgary.

"Last January I was in Delhi and sat in on a few immigration interviews. I encountered one woman who has lived in Canada for 15 years and been a Canadian citizen for nearly 12 years," he said.

"This woman was sponsoring a spouse to come to Canada but she could not conduct the interview with an official in either of our official languages. It made me wonder — is this an isolated example? Regrettably ,I don't think it's isolated enough."

Kenney later told reporters that immigration needs an overhaul and a key effort must be to ensure that immigrants and those who want to become new Canadians speak a competent level of French or English.

He said the requirement is already there but isn't being enforced strictly enough.

"In terms of the citizenship, if you can't complete the test in one of those two languages, you're not supposed to become a citizen, which I don't think is harsh," he said.

"It's just basically saying go back and study more and come back to us when you can get by in one of those languages."

Overall this is not a bad thing, as most immigrants to a country actually want to speak the language of the country they have immigrated to fluently, and this can provide a bit more of an impetus to do so. The question is though: what standards are going to be used to gauge this? One thing to bear in mind is that when a politician says that immigrants need to speak the language, this is code for "immigrants need to understand the country better", and so a better idea than just making language requirements more stringent (because some people just aren't good at languages and will never reach fluency) might be to start some sort of immigrant group session, where immigrants from all linguistic backgrounds gather along with one or more government employees, and carry out discussions about the country in order to improve their linguistic skills and their knowledge of the country at the same time. People that aren't especially skilled in the language but show a passion for the country and its history/culture could then be given an exemption, if the linguistic bar alone is too high.

In articles like this you can often find stories of someone whose mom or dad came from Country X, loves Canada and works hard, but just never mastered the language as well as they had hoped. Not only are these people good taxpayers, but their children growing up in the country are now fluent in the language so the fact that mom or dad aren't quite fluent shouldn't be a problem in the eyes of the country if they are benefiting Canada in other ways.

So in short, this is a good idea in general but there should be a lot of effort towards making sure that it is carried out in the spirit of the law, and not always the letter alone.