Under the new immigration rules, I had to become a francophone in one year.

As an ambitious teen in Manila, I always knew I’d have to leave the Philippines to reach my full potential. I zeroed in on Canada, believing what most international students then believed: that if I paid three to five times what domestic students paid in tuition, did well in school, built a respectable life and worked for a year, I’d be able to stay there permanently and, one day, become a citizen. I knew of a friend of a friend, an average student, who, after graduating, worked an administrative job, took a break for almost a year, did more clerical work and ultimately became a Canadian permanent resident. I thought I’d be an ideal immigrant. 

I heard about Canada everywhere I went: at education fairs, from Canadian representatives coming to my school, in Reddit and Quora forums and in articles listing the best countries for studying abroad. I read government of Canada pages that explained the immigration process for international students, just to make sure it was all true. And it was. “The time you spend in Canada as a student or temporary worker counts toward eventually applying to become a Canadian citizen,” chirped the government’s cheery “Study, Work and Stay” campaign video. “After all this, maybe you too can become Canadian, eh?” In 2019, I arrived in Canada and enrolled at the University of Toronto.

That year, the government planned to welcome more than 330,000 new permanent residents. But during COVID, when borders closed and processing slowed, Ottawa only reached half of its intake goal. The Liberals made up for it, raising the target to 411,000 for 2022, 465,000 for 2023 and 485,000 for 2024. Officials pitched immigrants as an all-in-one fix. Got labour shortages? An aging population? Fiscal pressure on public service and a lull in economic productivity? Boy, do we have immigrants for you.

But not all newcomers were actually new to the country. Every year, people like me who are already living here on temporary permits vie for permanent status, and our numbers have risen. Canada admitted 600,000 temporary residents in 2022, then another 800,000 the year after—mainly temporary workers and international students. By 2024, Canada had more than 3.1 million temporary residents. Throughout the pandemic and afterwards, Ottawa kept telling us to picture a future here. Marco Mendicino, then the minister of immigration, preached to international students like me: “We don’t just want you to study here; we want you to stay here.” 

By the time I graduated in 2023, I’d surpassed what Canada had asked of me. I finished at the top of my class, with a perfect GPA. I was a finalist for awards like the Governor General’s Academic Medal and the Rhodes Scholarship. In my last semester, I fell in love and started a serious relationship with a psychology student named Dmitry. My three-year work permit arrived in October; a few months later, I started a job at Maclean’s. What I ultimately wanted was to write for a living, and for that living to support my lifestyle without help from my parents.

But if the government saw immigrants as a solution to post-pandemic recovery, many Canadians saw us as the reason recovery was slow. The country’s long-brewing housing crisis was worse than ever, and hospitals strained to meet demand. In their minds, high immigration targets only meant more competition for homes and doctors. By 2024, the government’s own polling showed that more than half of Canadians said there were too many immigrants.

Once the political tide turned, so did Ottawa. In October of 2024, Justin Trudeau held a news conference on Parliament Hill. “Today, we’re announcing that we will reduce the number of immigrants we bring in over the next three years,” he said. “Between addressing labour needs and maintaining population growth, we didn’t get the balance quite right.” 

All at once, Canada tried to get rid of the people it had spent so many years courting. It cut permanent residency spots by 20 per cent—from 500,000 to 395,000—and would further reduce the target over the next two years. It closed immigration pathways for caregivers and agriculture workers. The three-year post-graduation work permit, which I had, used to be open to all graduates of Canadian post-secondary institutions; now it’s only available to those who finished university and specific college programs. 

The Canadian Border Services Agency, or CBSA, has ramped up removals like never before. It sent more than 23,000 people home in 2025 and aims to oust 40,000 over the next two years. In March, Ottawa passed legislation that denied refugee hearings to certain asylum seekers, making them easier to deport. Altogether, Canada expects more than a million people to leave every year. And the Immigration Red Wedding is working. The country’s population declined for the first time in 2025, largely because there were fewer non-permanent residents.

I was next on the chopping block. Nearly 1.4 million work permits were set to expire in 2026, including mine in October. I couldn’t believe the government had the gall to double-cross people who’d planned their lives around immigration. I was livid: I’d done absolutely nothing wrong, yet my future was in limbo. I’d lived my entire adult life in Canada. To go would mean to leave my job, my professional contacts, my friends and my partner. It would mean starting over in a country where I hadn’t lived for almost a decade. And it might mean giving up my career; journalists in the Philippines regularly face persecution, legal harassment and physical violence. I’d have to move back in with my parents because, even if I worked as an editor back home, I would only be earning around $600 a month. All the freedoms I took for granted would be erased. I couldn’t imagine reaching, much less exceeding, my potential there.

Toward the end of 2024, a friend who was in the same situation suggested we study French. That’s so random, I initially thought. But it turned out to be my only option. As Ottawa slashed overall immigration spots, it invited more francophone newcomers than ever before. Last year, 43 per cent of permanent residency invites went to people applying through the French pathway, while 13 per cent went to health-care workers and one per cent went to the trades.

But I didn’t know a lick of French beyond bonjour and merci. To be considered a francophone under the immigration system, I’d need to pass a language exam. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the international system of assessing fluency, ranks proficiency in reading, listening, speaking and writing on a scale from A1 (beginner) to C2 (mastery, fluency). To reach my goal, I would need a B2 (upper intermediate). That would mean understanding complex texts, discussing abstract topics and writing detailed arguments. It would require up to 800 hours of focused study. Students enrolled in the French cultural organization Alliance Française usually reach B2 after three years. I only had one. 

I already spoke three languages: English, Tagalog and Chinese Mandarin. I convinced myself that I could do one more. But this wouldn’t be a Duolingo hobby. I would have to be fluent in record time, while working a full-time job and living in a city where French is barely spoken. My future in Canada depended on it.

For much of its history, Canada mainly admitted Americans and Europeans; most other immigrants were restricted through taxes, quotas, travel rules and outright exclusion. But in 1967, Canada became the first nation to introduce a points-based system, where applicants were scored on qualities like education, age, work experience and language skills. The idea was to replace racial criteria with a more economically oriented system that favoured people most likely to succeed in Canada and contribute to its success. For many years, this system was the envy of the world. But it eroded over time. Applications were processed on a first-come, first-served basis. As global migration increased and Canada accepted more applications than it could handle, that system produced a years-long backlog. Someone who applied in 2005, for example, could still be waiting for a decision in 2010.

To solve that problem, in 2015, Ottawa launched Express Entry, an online system to manage applications. Candidates can now express interest in moving to Canada, receive a score out of 1,200, then wait for an invitation to apply. The ones with the highest scores get permanent residency. The youngest applicants, like me, max out the 110 points available for age. A bachelor’s degree is worth 120 points, while a master’s can get you 135. If you earned that degree in Canada, it’s an additional 30 points. One year of Canadian work experience is 40 points; three years are worth 64. A Canadian sibling gets you 15. The golden ticket is a nomination from a province, which nets 600 points. 

As for francophone candidates, they get 25 bonus points, another 25 if they’re also proficient in English and another 24 depending on their level of English. Those 74 points are worth more than if they’d studied in Canada and worked in Canada combined. In 2025, almost half of all invitations issued for economic immigrants went to francophones. People already working in Canada needed around 530 points, but francophones just needed 422, with some receiving invitations at just 379. Say you’re a young person with a bachelor’s degree who’s never worked a day in your life—but you speak French. You could easily qualify. The reason French wields outsized power comes down to one of Canada’s oldest political anxieties: bilingualism.

In the 1960s, after the Quiet Revolution, French Canadians pressed Ottawa to address systemic inequalities between anglophones and francophones, including giving French equal status in federal institutions. Ottawa’s answer was to pass the Official Languages Act in 1969, which made English and French equal in Parliament, federal laws, courts and government services. The idea was that if French was protected inside Canada, then so was Quebec.

But the law hasn’t done much to preserve French language and culture beyond the halls of government. By 2021, francophones, along with Acadian communities, made up only 3.5 per cent of the population outside Quebec, down from 6.1 per cent five decades earlier. And so Ottawa came up with another solution—this time, it would import French speakers. Marc Miller, then Canada’s immigration minister, announced the change in a policy brief. “There is an urgent need to address this decline,” he wrote, “particularly by leveraging francophone immigration.”

To achieve this goal, the government set aside 8.5 per cent of permanent residency spots for francophones last year. Because family reunification and humanitarian pathways don’t select people for their language skills, Ottawa has mainly relied on the economic immigration class to meet its francophone target. This makes Canada the only country in the world that has a pathway to permanent residence based on linguistic ability—perhaps at the expense of everything else. Doctors and entrepreneurs, both of which Canada desperately needs, often have no choice but to learn French if they want to stay in the country. When Michael Antil, an American doctor in Toronto with 2,000 patients, couldn’t get permanent residency, his lawyer said French was his best bet. Mai Trinh, the Indonesian co-founder of the $34-million tech startup Internet Backyard and a recent business graduate from Simon Fraser University, also took French classes while working at her company to boost her immigration score. 

In January of 2025, desperate to stay in Canada, I bought a French textbook, booted up the audio file on my computer, turned to the first chapter and began mimicking each syllable the narrator was pronouncing. I did two chapters every day, always with a water bottle on my desk; I often spoke French until my voice was hoarse. By March, I had the basics down, so I moved on to conversation classes with tutors on the online language-learning platforms Italki and Lingoda, spending almost $800 each month. I studied regularly with Marie, a French woman who’d lived in Canada for 15 years but is now in Panama; Caroline, a Quebecer who now lives in England; and Iméne, a woman from Algeria. All of them have been teaching French full-time on Italki for years. Only in the past few years, they told me, have they seen demand explode from people learning French specifically to immigrate to Canada.

For me, each morning began with French, and each night ended with French. I’d wake up at 6:45 a.m. and spend an hour writing essays. Then, I’d work all day, hunched over my computer. When I came home, I’d eat, shower and then sit at my desk to do it all again: articles, videos, grammar drills, tutoring sessions, more writing. I’d wind down at 10 p.m. to make sure I could wake up the next day to repeat the cycle. On weekends, I stretched the three-hour session to eight. My neck and back ached constantly, and I lost handfuls of hair from stress.

With much of my income going to tutors and lessons, I shrank my TFSA and RRSP contributions, went out less and dipped into my savings whenever I fell short. To simulate a French environment, I cut English-language books, songs and podcasts out of my life. It was La Presse, L’actualité, Radio France International, Céline Dion, Angèle, Stromae and French podcasts on a loop. Even my doomscrolling was replaced by clips from France 24 or Radio-Canada. 

I made some rules: I could only see friends twice a week, maximum. I turned down networking events, coffee chats and movie nights. If I was going out, I had to wake up an hour earlier to get at least two hours of studying done. I felt that if I skipped an essay, missed my French class or failed to review all the conjugation mistakes I’d made, I’d immediately lose my progress and have to leave Canada. It was full-on A Beautiful Mind cuckoo.

Technically, I had nearly two years between the moment I started learning French and my work permit expiring, but I didn’t want to leave the test to the last minute. I knew all too well that immigration rules could change at any time, and I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. I’d also read stories online about people who’d taken the exam many times before getting a B2. Iméne told me about a student—a woman in the Middle East who wanted to move to Canada—who was taking the exam for the sixth time. So, I booked test dates for October, November and December of 2025. They cost $390 each.

I held myself together most days. But sometimes I just lost it. I didn’t know anyone who’d become fluent in French in a year. It felt impossible. And learning a language just to stay in a city that doesn’t use it was absurd. I resented having to do so much more, on top of everything I’d already done, to prove my worth, while other people were getting immediate permanent status just because they already spoke French. Sometimes I cried just to purge my anger and clear my head. Then I’d get back to studying.

I was heartened by how many people around me wanted to help. A high school friend from Manila recruited her French-speaking Canadian friend to practise with me every Sunday. I also spoke French with some old university classmates. Even my boss put me in touch with her mother-in-law’s friend—a French teacher who’d taught in B.C. for around 20 years—for free lessons.

I struggled to make time for my relationship with Dmitry. “What you’re doing is incredibly impressive, and I have your back all the way,” he told me, six months into the routine. “But I feel completely ignored.” I realized I couldn’t put my relationship on pause like I’d done with other aspects of my life. We settled on a standing date every Saturday evening. Other times, he came over to my apartment and vacuumed the floors or cooked me meals; he knew I was too exhausted to keep up with my chores. Even then, I tried to turn our time together into something productive. After one particularly stressful Saturday study session, we planned a movie night. We watched Taxi, the hit French action-comedy about a Marseille cab driver who yells “C’est parti!” before racing his banged-up Peugeot like he’s in Formula One.

Iwas one of hundreds of thousands of people across Canada scrambling to stay. While reporting this story, I met people in finance, consulting and tech who had done what the government once told them to do—study, work and contribute—but had to get crafty about holding on to their Canadian lives. I met a Filipino tax analyst, for example, who went back to school for a master’s degree to earn more immigration points. I also spoke to a woman who’d lived in Canada since she was 12 and worked at a bank, but still wasn’t eligible for permanent residency; she married her Canadian boyfriend so he could sponsor her.

I realized that Canada is trying to solve two problems with one immigration system. The country needs workers in specific sectors like agriculture, hospitality, long-term care, health care and construction. But Express Entry is engineered to reward high human capital: education, youth, linguistic ability, Canadian work experience. Rarely do these two purposes overlap. I am exactly the kind of person Express Entry has historically favoured: educated, employed, English-speaking and already socially integrated in Canada. The country, however, isn’t exactly crying out for more journalists and financial analysts like us. 

French makes the equation stranger. If francophones are being hand-picked for economic immigration, what kind of labour need does French satisfy, exactly? It isn’t a shortage of doctors or carpenters. With French, Canada is now tasking the immigration system with solving a third problem: a political and demographic one. A person’s ability to conjugate verbs could suddenly matter more than the job they do, the life they’ve built or the labour Canada claims to be missing.

Of all the available workarounds to stay in Canada, French is the most reliable because it depends least on anyone else. You don’t need an employer to sponsor you, a province to nominate you or a partner to marry you. You just have to learn the language well and fast enough. Immigrants in Canada aren’t the only ones who’ve figured this out. One time, I had a teacher on Lingoda who was teaching French at a local language school in Lagos, Nigeria. I told him I was surprised that people there were learning it, because Nigeria didn’t have the same colonial relationship to France as, say, Côte d’Ivoire or Senegal. “Oh, it’s just people who want to pass the French exam to immigrate to Canada,” he told me.

Learning French is the new secret weapon passed between immigrants. Joel Yan, a McGill graduate from China who recently learned French to become a permanent resident, told me that his girlfriend back in China is also studying French full-time to prepare for her application for Express Entry. Osman Savkuev, a Russian graduate from the University of British Columbia who learned French to become a permanent resident, said his younger brother, now an international student at UBC, was studying French too. 

Some people went to even greater lengths to learn French than I had. Eber Ferreira is a Brazilian HR coordinator who was already living and working in Toronto when the rules changed. He sold the apartment he owned in São Paulo and used part of that money to enrol in a three-month French-immersion program in Lyon. From August to October of 2023, he attended classes from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., then logged into his Toronto job around 3:30 p.m. and worked until 11 p.m. Sometimes he had meetings at midnight because of the time difference. “It was very stressful, but it was worth every penny,” he said. Ferreira passed the French exam and became a permanent resident in March of last year.

I came across strange cases, too, where people already working in sectors with labour shortages still needed to learn French to stay. Bani Arora, an immigration consultant in Surrey, B.C., says two of her clients—a welder and a tile setter—studied at Canadian post-secondary schools specifically to become tradespeople because they knew the immigration system favoured those jobs. Canada needs more than 1.4 million new skilled trades workers by 2033 to meet housing, transit and infrastructure demands. And yet, after roughly two years working in the trades, neither of Arora’s clients got permanent status. Both men were pursuing provincial nominations when Ontario abruptly closed its trades pathway in 2025 and sent their applications back. So what did these trades workers do next? They signed up to learn French. “Do you know the saying ‘All roads lead to Rome’? In Canada, all roads lead to French,” Joel Yan says.

For many people, studying is only half the battle. Finding a seat for the exam has become its own ordeal, with exam centres across the country constantly running out of spots. Osman Savkuev, for example, had to fly from Vancouver to Montreal to take the test, because it was the only place where he could find an open slot. Petra Jichova, an immigration consultant in Vancouver, says one of her clients had to travel from Calgary to Vancouver for the same reason. In late May, my friend Arushi logged into the Alliance Française website to book a test at its downtown Toronto location, only to be met with a Ticketmaster-style waiting room with 1,500 people ahead of her in the queue. (She eventually booked a seat for late September.) 

With all this demand, business is booming for French teachers—many of whom are tailoring their services to people learning French for immigration. In Brampton, Ontario, Toronto French Academy offers to take students from zero to B2 in 12 months for around $3,000, while Learn French in Vancouver charges $4,000 for the same service. There’s even an AI-powered French-learning platform called Simple French With Hems, which sells a package of A1 to B2 lessons for $2,900. Overseas, many of these immigration-focused prep companies are concentrated in India and Nigeria. Online, Facebook groups have as many as 20,000 members trading information on tutors who can get them to B2 as quickly as possible, posting vocabulary quizzes and chronicling their immigration journeys. The comment sections are often crowded with teachers promoting their services.

Few have cashed in like Janete Silveira, a French teacher in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For a long time, she taught at French schools while tutoring students on the side—people who already spoke French but just needed extra help for exam prep. In 2020, when Ottawa added more points for French-language proficiency on the immigration scoring system, Silveira says many people suddenly became interested in her tutoring services. For the first time, she was hearing from people with zero knowledge of French who wanted to pass the exam to immigrate to Canada. In July of 2020, Silveira launched a $550 online course to take students to the equivalent of B2 in one year. In 2025, after some students said they wanted to make even faster progress, she created a special six-month course. Overall, she’s had more than 2,000 students so far, most of whom are in Brazil, while about 30 per cent are Brazilians in Canada. 

The French scramble was a boon for Silveira. She refined her one-year course and prices it today at around $1,650. She currently has a staff of 25, lives in a gated community and has a housekeeper to help with childcare. “I can travel, eat whatever I want and purchase the best food,” she says. “I got lucky. Nobody used to care about French. People wanted to learn English.” In 2024, Silveira herself applied and received her Canadian permanent residency a year later. She’ll be moving this fall to B.C., where she’ll deliver her courses remotely. 

While English-speaking immigrants are racing to learn French, francophone newcomers don’t always have to learn English. Silveira says she’s had a handful of Brazilian students who were able to immigrate to Canada by learning French alone. Francophone candidates with no English skills usually need C1, or advanced-level French scores across the board—so Silveira is creating a supplementary course that takes students from the equivalent of B2 to C1. “I tell them all the time: study French, get your permanent residency, then study English,” she says. “If you want to have a good life in Canada, you need French as an immigration strategy, but you need English for your professional life.” 

If Ottawa’s goal is to cut immigration, the francophone scheme does little to make that happen. In 2024, more than 80 per cent of people who received permanent residency through the French-language stream were living abroad, unlike most other immigration streams, where the largest share of applicants were already in Canada and simply transitioning to permanent status. Almost half of all new French-speaking permanent residents are from Cameroon, followed by Algeria, Morocco, France and Côte d’Ivoire. So many new Cameroonians have arrived that, last year, the country entered the top five sources of immigrants to Canada for the first time.

It’s not that Canadians asked for a glut of new francophones. Every year, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada conducts public consultations to determine what Canadians believe should guide the country’s immigration system. Since 2023, the number-one priority has been to help fill economic and labour-force needs and bring new skills to Canada. Supporting the development of francophone culture is always dead last.

By September of 2025, eight months into my French project, I was surprised at how good I’d become. I chatted easily with my tutors. I wrote essays and short news articles every morning. One of my tutors was shocked to find out I’d only been learning French for a few months. She thought it had been three years. 

The more I learned, the less it felt like pure self-preservation. It became, annoyingly, kind of fulfilling. The first French song I memorized was “Le Festin,” from one of my favourite childhood movies, Ratatouille. Understanding the song helped me better understand the character of Remy. Then I fell down rabbit holes about French-Canadian history and culture. In the process, I came to understand Canada’s broader context in ways I probably wouldn’t have bothered to until, say, I studied for a citizenship test.

Eventually, Dmitry and I wholeheartedly embraced the third party in our relationship. Some nights, he tested me by typing short sentences into Google and having me translate them in French. Since he didn’t understand what I was saying, I often had to explain the grammar rules, which reinforced my learning. Other times, when I wanted his attention, I’d say, “Mon chum!” (Canadian French for “my boyfriend”). “Mon amour?” he’d reply.

The night before my exam in October, I was so nervous that I kept seeing my vocabulary lists on the backs of my eyelids. I barely slept. Everything I’d done that year came down to this. Hell, everything I’d been doing for six years in Canada might come down to this. I woke up at 5 a.m. to review and, at 7 a.m., had my last tutoring class. It was pouring rain, and the subway was unexpectedly out of service, so I had to Uber to the Alliance Française testing centre in downtown Toronto. I’m not superstitious, but that day I couldn’t help but worry the storm was bad juju. 

The exam began at 9:45 a.m. Two and a half hours later, I’d completed the reading, listening and writing sections. My hands and armpits were drenched in sweat, and my jaw ached from clenching it so hard. We had a break before the speaking portion. In the waiting room, candidates for the afternoon session had already arrived. One man told two other test-takers that it was his second time taking the exam, and he planned to keep coming back every month until he got B2. Ten minutes later, they were called into the exam room and wished each other luck.

Eber Ferreira, an HR coordinator from Brazil, was already living in Toronto when the immigration rules changed. He sold his apartment back home and used the proceeds to enrol in a French program in Lyon, which he completed in the hours before work. He finally got permanent residency through the French pathway in 2025.Photograph by May Truong

When it was my turn, I put down my half-eaten protein bar and followed the examiner in. Even as I answered her questions, I could hear every small grammatical mistake I was making, one after another. The errors echoed in my head in a continuous stream, chipping away at my confidence. I knew I had bombed the speaking portion the second it ended.

The next day, I found out via email that I’d indeed passed everything except the speaking section, which meant I had to retake the entire exam. I wasn’t surprised, but I was frustrated. I hated that I had to spend more time and money on this. I doubled down and booked eight one-on-one lessons each week with my tutors. They all said I’d let the nerves get the best of me, because I was speaking fluently to them.

I cried on my birthday in November. I’d received a torrent of messages from people wishing me well—some I hadn’t seen or spoken to in months. It hardened my resolve to pass the second time. I was studying so hard that Dmitry was certain I would get at least C2, the highest level, on two sections. I told him he was out of his mind.

When I took the exam again, the examiner recognized me as soon as I arrived for the speaking portion. “Nous nous sommes déjà rencontreés,” she said. We’ve met before. Afterward, as I was leaving, she said, “À plus tard!” See you later! And I said, “J’espère que non—no offence.” She laughed.

Two days later, I was at the Maclean’s office when the results came in. I was too nervous to open the email myself, so I called Dmitry and forwarded it to him so he could open it first. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. “Holy shit, I told you!” he said. That’s when I knew I’d made it. This time, I scored C2 in reading and writing, C1 in listening and B2 in speaking. 

I was shaking when I walked back to my desk. There was no chance I was getting any more work done that day. I turned to the colleague beside me and said, in barely a whisper, “I passed my French exam.” Then I burst into tears. My co-workers burst into applause. I texted my family, my friends and my tutors. I messaged everyone to say I passed the French exam—that is, that I was getting my life back. 

Technically, I’m a francophone now. I earned 71 additional points for learning French, which pushed my immigration score to 545. I received a letter from the government with the subject line “Living in French in Canada!” It gave me information on how I could settle in a francophone community outside Quebec, many of them rural or semi-rural—no way in hell was I doing that. A week later, I was finally invited to send in my application for permanent residency. After forking over the $1,500 fee and sending over all my documents, I got my permanent residency in July.

Post-French life was bizarre. Every night during the first week after my exam, as it neared 8 p.m. I got anxious because I’d programmed myself to sit at my desk at that time to start studying. I had to constantly remind myself that I had nothing scheduled anymore. I read three English-language books in seven days and started listening to Sabrina Carpenter again. It’s as if I was a thawing French iceberg, melting away in the English sun.

I remembered how I used to love losing track of time. One night, Dmitry and I were trying to dissect why we love Jon Stewart’s comedy, which somehow morphed into a discussion about the boundaries between entertainment, education and news, and whether it’s now necessary to blur those lines to hold people’s attention. We talked about Hasan Minhaj’s The Patriot Act and Morning Brew’s video series Good Work. We talked about how we kept up with pop culture growing up (him via Family Guy and me via MTV Philippines). When I looked at my kitchen clock, it’d been two hours since we started talking—and I wasn’t stressed about it.

I’d put so much effort and money into learning French, I figured I might as well maintain it. I now take an hour-long class with a tutor each week. I still listen to Radio-Canada and intentionally read the French on bilingual signs and labels in Toronto (which have many errors; totally great for a country professing to build French communities outside Quebec). When I watched Heated Rivalry, I was proud that I’d understood all the French and chuckled when one of Shane Hollander’s teammates said “Câlisse!” I listened to French-language interviews with François Arnaud, the Québécois actor who plays Scott. I also watched Le Comte de Monte Cristo without English subtitles. Understanding the second half of Mark Carney’s speeches and Air Canada announcements is pretty cool, too.

The government seems to be mending some of its mistakes. This year, it created a pathway for doctors, so Michael Antil, the Toronto-based American doctor who was advised to learn French, could finally qualify to stay permanently. It also launched a one-time program to transition 33,000 foreign workers already working in Canada to permanent residency between 2026 and 2027. 

As for Ottawa’s scheme to increase the francophone population outside Quebec, I have my doubts. Language is obviously hard to maintain when you’re not surrounded by it, which is the case for the vast majority of Canadians, except, of course, in Quebec, parts of New Brunswick and a handful of francophone communities in Ontario. English is still Canada’s dominant working language, required to find a job, build a career and navigate daily life. My French is less fluid today than when I was preparing for the exam, because I rarely need to use it. All the people I interviewed living outside Quebec said the same thing. And yet Ottawa plans to raise the francophone intake incrementally until it reaches 12 per cent of permanent residency spots by 2029. For better or for worse, all roads in Canada really do lead to French. 

In the meantime, temporary immigrants to Canada are leaving in droves. Their numbers peaked at 3.2 million in October of 2024; by January of 2026, that number had dropped to roughly 2.7 million. The federal government is mainly counting on people to leave once their permits are up, but some will likely remain undocumented.

For now, for me, life is good. People always say it’s about the journey, not the destination—which is total bullshit. The destination is without a doubt the best thing here. I’m finally at the endpoint of a journey that I started when I was 18 years old, during which, for a period of time, I didn’t think I was going to make it. Now I have a piece of paper that confirms I belong in Canada. For the first time in almost 10 years, I know what total peace of mind feels like. Becoming fluent in a language in less than a year is one of my proudest achievements. And yet the experience was 80 per cent bitter and 20 per cent sweet. I wish I could say I love Canada without reservation. But it’s hard to love a country fully when it tried so hard to get rid of you.

I Wanted to Stay in Canada. So I Learned French.