In October 2019, François Vaillancourt, CIRANO Researcher and Fellow and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Economics at the Université de Montréal, was a Visiting Scholar at the Fundación Alternativas (Madrid, Spain), an independent public policy research institute.

He then worked with Jesús Ruiz-Huerta Carbonell, CIRANO Associated Researcher and Fellow and Professor at Rey Juan Carlos University. As part of an activity of this institute with the Canadian Embassy, he also participated in two comparative Canada-Spain round tables on 1) the distribution of powers between levels of government and 2) language policies, respectively, in the case of decentralized countries. Finally, in November 2019, he gave the inaugural lecture in Bilbao of a symposium of the Academy of the Basque Language on the theme "The socio-economic field and the revitalization of the Basque language".