Premier sounds a welcome note of inclusion
Over the weekend, Premier Philippe Couillard reached out to anglophones who have left Quebec and invited them to return to the province.
“We need you,” he said in a speech at the end of the two-day Liberal youth wing policy convention held at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville. “It’s time to come home.
“To English-speaking Quebecers, I say, this is your home, this is your moment. Let’s build it together.”
Couillard’s message came on the heels of Statistics Canada’s acknowledgment that a computer error had been responsible for its earlier data indicating a significant increase of English-mother-tongue speakers in Quebec, data that had provoked a wave of anxiety among some francophones.
The message also capped off an intense weekend in which the Liberal youth delegation voted down a resolution for a pilot project that would have allowed a small number of normally inadmissible francophones to have access to the English elementary school system. Certainly, the premier’s words were welcome. But what does his call-out to Quebec’s exiled anglos mean in tangible terms?
A cynic might chalk it up to the Liberals trying to curry favour with the province’s English-speaking minority community. Let’s be honest. There is work to be done here. The last few years have yielded much frustration over the way the current government has handled restructuring, actual and attempted, in the health and education sectors, without proper consideration for the collateral damage to anglophone institutions. More broadly, many in the province’s English-speaking community feel they have been taken for granted by the Liberals. It appears many are looking for a political alternative in the 2018 general election.
Government action must rise to meet the rhetoric.
(This trend isn’t confined to the anglophone community, by the way. Recent polls have shown that province-wide support for the Coalition Avenir Québec is on the rise.)
But the time may be right to try to woo back some of the people we’ve lost along the way. The economy is good. The politics are stabilizing.
The impact of Quebec’s language laws and decades of political and economic instability, including two referendums on sovereignty, brought about a mass exodus of people (not only anglophones) and capital from Montreal to Toronto.
It sure would be great if some of them decided to return.
However, whether the premier’s goal is to draw people back to Quebec or to the Liberal party, it will take more than just political messaging. Government action must rise to meet the rhetoric. Couillard would do well to connect his words about the valued place of Englishspeakers in the province to a larger policy framework fostering diversity and inclusion.
On this, there has been progress. After years of rejecting a call by Canada’s official languages commissioner to set up an anglophone affairs secretariat to better serve the province’s linguistic minority, Couillard recently changed his mind and promised to create an official institutional mechanism that would bring the particular concerns of the English-speaking community into the policy-making process. (Anglophone community reaction to health administration changes and proposed school governance changes seemed to take the government by surprise.)
It is to be hoped this secretariat will remain in place over successive governments and influence the government’s strategic outlook over the course of the coming years. If so, it could have real impact.
It is one thing to say that anglophones are “first-class Quebecers” who should feel at home here, but quite another to ensure that policies and political decisions around things like health and education are informed by a joint vision, one that captures the everyday realities of Englishspeaking communities around the province.
There is more at stake here than just Liberal success in the next election. The creation of an inclusive Quebec where everyone feels at home requires a concerted, long-term strategy.