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There is some segregation of social circles by language, but there is a lot of mixing. The young native Montrealers tend to be much more bilingual than anglophones from outside Quebec or French immigrants. They're also much more bilingual than the older generation.
Many people do live in Montreal without speaking French though. You can get by without it, especially if you know it well enough to read the signs, even if you can't speak or understand it. The hardest thing would be getting a job where you don't have to speak French. They do exist though.
Montreal was the largest city in and commercial capital of Canada until the 1970s. There are multiple reasons why Toronto took over. Montreal is not on the coast, but it is at sea level on the Saint Lawrence River, making it easily accessible in the summer when the river isn't frozen. It's strategically located just as far as you can go up the river before you hit rapids. This made it an important port until the Saint Lawrence Seaway, a system of canals that connected the Saint Lawrence River to the great lakes, made Toronto the more important port city.
In Montreal, business had always been conducted in English, with French being more spoken by the French Canadian working class that had immigrated later from the countryside. Forcing these mostly unilingual anglophones to do business in French was of course, highly disruptive. Today's anglophones are much more likely to speak French, and so they integrate more easily into French society, but it still makes it difficult to attract outside talent.
I've heard of accusations that the English oppressed the French, but I don't find them convincing. There may have been some discrimination, but it seems more likely that there was a selection effect, with Montreal specifically attracting anglophone businessmen and French Canadian workers. There were lots of successful French Canadians in Montreal, but there were fewer of them than anglophones, so they spoke English. This was much less the case in Quebec City, where French dominated and which had been the largest city in the country before the British conquest.
French Canadians blame the English for holding them back, but there are many other things they could blame, such as the very conservative Catholic Church which controlled French Canadian society until the 60s or possibly the seigneural system. The French way of life was very different and the British did not interfere with it when they took over, much to the annoyance of British Americans at the time. This was one of the Intolerable Acts that led to the American Revolution.
It's plausible that these policies saved the French language from decline, but I can't be sure. Quebec is very different than Louisiana in the size of its French speaking population, in both relative and absolute senses. Francophones have been increasing in number relative to anglophones since the early 19th century when the influx of English speakers peaked. So it was increasing in dominance for one hundred years before there were any policies that encouraged the use of French over English.
However, it is true that this was in large part (but not entirely) because of the higher French Canadian birth rate, and what precipated the controversy over language was the fact that Quebeckers of Italian descent were starting to enrol their children in English schools instead of French schools.
But my point is not that these laws were not necessary to protect French, but that French is today very well protected and does not need further protection. These policies have been in place for 50 years and they have worked in forcing immigrant children to attend French schools. They now do so overwhelmingly. English is on the decline, and there is a new barrage of policies clearly aimed at finishing off the anglophone community. The goal is not to protect the French language but to abolish the English language. This is why I call it ethnic cleansing.
I'll go further though and say that even if the language laws are needed to protect French, that isn't enough to justify their existence. In a free society, people should be allowed to speak whatever language they want, and if French dies in that environment, it's because French speakers choose not to keep speaking it. Since they clearly do want to keep speaking it, I am highly skeptical that any of these laws are actually necessary. I do think that French would lose a bit of relative importance in a linguistically free Quebec, but I do not think it would come close to disappearing or to become in any sense threatened.
Are you talking Quebec-only, or does moving east a little change anything? I think by most standards people have for 'ethnic cleansing', this would be that.
I am talking specifically about French Canadians in Quebec after the French and Indian War.
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