BILL101 @ 40
As Quebec marks four decades of the controversial language law, Philip Authier looks at how it might actually have laid the groundwork for linguistic peace.
QUEBEC It was Quebec’s language minister Luc Fortin who stated the obvious.
Commenting recently on new census information indicating French had slipped in Quebec and English was up, Fortin pointed out a pretty basic fact.
The data in question chiefly concern the language spoken privately at home; not the language used in the public domain such as schools, on commercial signs or in the workplace.
“You have to keep things in perspective,” Fortin said. “This (the public sphere) is our area of jurisdiction. It is not the responsibility of the state to legislate or meddle with the way people express themselves in their living rooms.”
Point taken. But even if Statistics Canada later corrected itself and released new numbers showing the situation is less dramatic, in Quebec’s long and tumultuous history of language politics there have always been those who wanted to go further than the original Charter of the French Language — also known as Bill 101 — intended.
At the very least, they want enforcement of the existing charter beefed up.
It doesn’t take much to stir the pot. In this case Parti Québécois leader Jean-François Lisée used the initial Statistics Canada numbers as the basis for his announcement that if elected, a PQ government would adopt a new tougher charter, Bill 202, within the first 101 days of taking power.
And on the other side of the debate, it is never hard to find a merchant complaining about being forced to add French to a website, translate menu items or Frenchify a company name.
In reality, the tug of war between language hawks and minority groups who feel Bill 101 goes too far endures year after year, although the passion has certainly cooled, at least when compared with the new hot-button issue: identity politics.
Today, as Quebec marks the 40th anniversary of the charter — the bill passed in the National Assembly Aug. 26, 1977 — it’s remarkable to see how the basic arguments one way or another have not changed.
While much has been written on how moderates on both sides of the linguistic divide consider the charter an appropriate compromise — the line the current Liberal government uses is that Quebec has attained a kind of linguistic balance which preserves social peace — people representing more extreme views soldier on.
There are at least 10 nationalist groups, including the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste (SSJB) and the Mouvement Québec français, ready to argue the charter needs to be reinforced because it has been weakened by the close to 200 legal challenges it has faced over the years.
Nationalists say the charter drafted by Camille Laurin, a psychiatrist turned politician, has helped French progress, but the goal of making it the true common language of Quebec has not yet been achieved.
Despite the charter’s rules forcing immigrants into French schools, too many new arrivals find their way back into the English world in the workplace, they say. Quebec’s outdoor commercial signs may be mostly French, but getting served in French in Montreal’s downtown shops is still not guaranteed.
Those will be the themes of a rally nationalists are holding Saturday at Parc Camille-Laurin in Montreal (corner of Sherbrooke and St-Urbain), which will feature speakers including SSJB president Maxime Laporte and Lisée. One anglophone, Jennifer Drouin, an English literature professor and head of Anglophones for Québec Independence, is also scheduled to speak.
This week, an umbrella Frenchlanguage group, Partenaires pour un Québec français, held a joint news conference to try and drum up some interest in the birthday. They launched a promotional campaign: La loi 101: 40 ans de fierté. Toujours à la mode, depuis 1977. (Bill 101 : 40 years of pride. Still in fashion, since 1977).
Criticizing the government for its handling of the issue, they said more needs to be done to enforce and apply the law.
“Bill 101 is not a relic of another era,” said group co-ordinator Éric Bouchard. “It remains completely pertinent in 2017.”
Christian Daigle, head of the union representing Quebec civil servants, agreed.
“Unfortunately, the government is doing nothing to make sure that French is the language of the state,” he said. “On paper everything is fine and dandy, but in reality it’s not.”
Language minorities, on the other hand, won’t be popping champagne corks to toast the grand dame of Quebec’s laws. Even 40 years later, many find the charter too severe, the language restrictions bad for commerce and a disaster for the English school system in terms of enrolment.
In short, they say, the focus on saving French has reduced English-speaking Quebecers to second-class status.
“English-speaking Quebecers won’t be celebrating,” former Equality Party leader Robert Libman wrote recently in a 40th-anniversary opinion piece in the Montreal Gazette. “Hundreds of thousands of our compatriots picked up and left Quebec because of it.”
But time marches on. Libman says those who did not flee Quebec when the charter was created no longer have the energy to fight the law. Those who stayed have made a genuine effort to adjust to the new reality.
Libman is not the only one talking about language fatigue. Gary D. Shapiro, a Montreal businessman who used to be the chairman of the English language rights group, the Office québécois de la langue anglaise (OQLA), recently announced his organization is shutting down for good.
“The reason for our closing is not that the need has disappeared,” Shapiro said. “It is more because of apathy. It is just that the anglophone community is tired after four decades of language fights and referendums.”
Many of the other personalities who were involved in the old language wars have also either retired or died. Laurin died in 1999. Former Parti Québécois leader Jacques Parizeau died in 2015.
‘UNTOUCHABLE’ STATUS
Minus these players, the charter, nevertheless, has taken on a kind of mythical “untouchable” status, observers note.
“There is tremendous symbolic investment in the charter, beyond the provisions in it,” Jack Jedwab, a veteran of Quebec’s language debate and executive vice-president of the Association for Canadian Studies said in an interview.
“It’s sort of an outgrowth of what the objectives were of the Quiet Revolution, which was to correct the position of francophones on the economic playing field. It’s lumped in as part of the narrative.”
And if some minority language rights defenders have given up the fight, many moderate francophone Quebecers also appear to have closed the books on this issue, sleeping well at night in their belief the charter is doing just fine protecting their language and culture.
“It is perhaps the PQ’s most significant legacy but it’s a kind of pyrrhic victory,” historian Éric Bédard said in a recent RadioCanada interview marking the 40th. “Perhaps it showed some that we could defend the French fact within Canada, as long as we were reasonable.”
He said the charter gave francophone Quebecers a feeling of security, which may have diminished the drive to seek independence. The fact that the most recent attempt to beef up the language law — by the government of former PQ Premier Pauline Marois — went nowhere, shows that the current law suits most francophone Quebecers, he said.
“For a majority of Quebecers, going ahead with more legal restrictions seems unnecessary.”
And in fact, the official watchdog agency of the French language, the Office québécois de la langue française, regularly churns out data that backs up that premise.
According to the office in 2016, 94.4 per cent of Quebecers say they are able to carry out a conversation in French. The percentage of Quebecer’s with an English mother tongue who speak and read French has increased from 37 per cent to 72 per cent between 1971 and 2016.
As for those whose mother tongue is neither English nor French, the percentage of those who speak and read French has gone from 47 per cent in 1971 to 76.6 per cent in 2016.
The children of immigrants who grew up under the charter now can be heard conversing together on the métro in perfect French — including the Québécois accent — and are respectfully featured in television documentaries about “Les enfants de la loi 101.”
In their recent book on Quebec’s evolution, Le Coeur des Québécois, authors Marie Grégoire, Éric Montigny and Youri Rivest, lump language wars in with the battles of another generation. The paradox is that the charter, which was so controversial, laid the foundation for a certain linguistic peace.
“This law, which was attacked by many, is today recognized as an obligatory passage in the affirmation of Quebec’s francophone character,” they wrote.
Today, years after the bill was drafted, even federalists find merit in it, the authors wrote. When the law turned 30, former federal Liberal leader Stéphane Dion told a language workshop, “Bill 101 was a great Canadian law,” because it revealed Quebec’s language and culture could flourish in a flexible federal system.
Certainly watering it down now appears to be almost an impossibility.
Take the most recent attempt. At the Liberal youth wing’s annual policy convention in August, a pocket of Montreal anglophone Liberals tried to push through a resolution calling on the government to set up a pilot project that would allow francophone youth into the English school system.
They described the plan as “win, win.” Overflowing French schools would be allowed to transfer students into neighbouring underused English schools if parents made the request.
“The English school boards in Quebec are dying,” Nikolas Dolman, a McGill University economics major and Liberal delegate told the plenary. “It’s a really sad state of affairs. Can we just try this?”
He got sympathy but not enough support for the idea to pass.
Premier Philippe Couillard and Fortin appeared relieved that they didn’t have to open the Pandora’s box of a charter amendment this close to the general election, set for Oct. 1, 2018. Fortin quickly told reporters the decision by the youth wing to reject the resolution reflected the policies of the Liberal government.
Two days later, Le Devoir editorial writer Robert Dutrisac wrote that the young Liberals were right about one thing: the decline in the English school system is very real, just as it is in the French system.
He noted that from 1971 to 2015, enrolment in the English system dropped from 260,000 to 95,000, a two-thirds reduction.
Trying to transfer groups of francophones in to save the English schools was not realistic, he wrote. But he argued that an idea pitched back in 1992 by former McGill University Chancellor Gretta Chambers — to allow the children of parents from the United States and the Commonwealth countries into English schools — remains “reasonable” today.
But any discussion of options runs up against Couillard’s “policy of inaction,” when it comes to language, Dutrisac wrote.
Jedwab, however, says he’s noticed that time has produced another phenomenon; a reinterpretation of what Laurin and the old PQ government set out to do with the charter and unrealistic expectations of what tougher language rules can actually achieve.
It was never Laurin’s intention to assimilate everyone in Quebec and make Quebec an exclusively French world, he notes.
For example, while the restrictions on access to English schools have produced tangible results in protecting French, it’s unclear the language of signs had much impact except to put pressure on anglophones and allophones to learn French, which they have done, in response to a perceived economic need.
“Certain provisions of the charter remain necessary,” Jedwab said. “But those people who feel it has not been as effective would like it to be based on an unattainable objective.
“Some individuals have changed the goalposts. They’ve changed the targets. They’ve put up unrealistic targets.”