This study presents the results of a variationist analysis of the future variable and two corresponding variants, the inflected future (IF) and the periphrastic future (PF), in spoken Ontarian French. The data used were extracted from the Mougeon and Beniak corpus of speakers of four minority francophone communities, all of which are categorized according to their level of language restriction. Results of this study indicate that polarity remains the only significant linguistic factor--a unique pattern in Canadian French. Its effect is far from uniform and varies from one community and one language restriction group to another. For example, in Hawkesbury (franco. pop. 85%) variant choice is categoric: the IF is used only in negative utterances and the PF dominates in affirmative utterances. Conversely, polarity does not appear to condition variant choice in Pembroke (8%), where the school system, though an essential medium for transmitting the minority language, has a standardizing effect on language use.