It’s not the job of artists to sell French language

What counts as Quebec culture, and who gets to decide in 2017?

The Quebec government recently released a draft of its new cultural policy, the first time it’s been updated in 25 years. This summer, Quebecers are invited to respond to the proposed policy through an online questionnaire. In September, it will be submitted for consultation to national organizations in Montreal.

The older version of the policy, which came into effect in 1992, was stamped with a very particular DNA. It was shaped by the constitutional tensions between Canada and Quebec unfolding at the time — Meech Lake, Charlottetown, the rise of the Bloc Québécois. It’s no surprise, then, that the policy was focused on shoring up Quebec nationalism and promoting the French language as an affirmation of cultural identity.

Today the main political tensions are likely to revolve around a growing cleavage between Montreal and the rest of Quebec, and the ideological divide between left and right.

The current government has said that Quebec’s cultural policy is being revised to reflect the 21st-century realities of globalization, digital technologies, demographic shifts, cultural diversity and changing cultural practices.

Minister of Culture and Communications Luc Fortin has indicated that the new policy will be used to promote Quebec culture as an economic tool, both at home and abroad.

Last year, that ministry undertook a public consultation in 17 regions of Quebec. It’s clear that the updated version incorporates some of this feedback in its acknowledgement of indigenous cultures, Quebec’s Englishspeaking community and ethnocultural minorities.

Yet like the 1992 policy, the new version still refers to the French language as a “vector of identity” that must be protected through cultural production. The government insists on the need to privilege strategies that valourize the use of French among cultural producers.

Participation in our shared cultural life is strongly linked to “mastery” of the French language, it says. This, it argues, will lead to a better sense of social inclusion for all Quebecers.

In short, the new cultural policy approaches social diversity as an asset, and linguistic diversity as a cultural threat. It’s a familiar conundrum in Quebec.

How do you promote art and culture in all its forms while insisting that artists conform to steadfast rules about linguistic purity? Who is excluded from this idea of Quebec culture? How, for example, will this policy framework take into account massively successful Quebec-based groups like Nomadic Massive, a hiphop collective that bills itself as Montreal’s multilingual super-group?

Or quadrilingual comedian Sugar Sammy? Or bilingual hip-hop group the Dead Obies? Or the trio Loud Lary Ajust, deemed ineligible for an award at the 2015 Gala d’ADISQ because they weren’t francophone — or anglophone — enough. (According to ADISQ, a French language “product” must contain at least 70 per cent French language content.)

All these artists use French, just not exclusively. Can we celebrate them as exponents of Quebec culture?

All of this raises questions for policy makers who, not unlike 25 years ago, are still linking Quebec culture to a fixed idea of language and nation.

Is it the job of Quebec-based writers, artists, filmmakers, and other cultural producers to “save,” “promote” or “protect” the French language? Should their legitimacy, recognition, grants or awards depend on doing so?

Or is the job of cultural producers to reflect our world back at us, sometimes in ways that provoke, challenge and make us uncomfortable?