Couillard urges Anglos to return
SHERBROOKE, QUE. • Premier Philipe Couillard has launched an appeal to English-speakers who left Quebec to come home, saying “we need you” to build a better future.
And to anglophones still here, Couillard said they should stick around, hop on Quebec’s surging economic bandwagon and never feel like second-class citizens.
But his message, made in a speech wrapping up a two-day Liberal youth wing policy convention, came on the heels of an acrimonious party debate on a possible softening of the Charter of the French Language.
It’s not going to happen. Despite an emotional appeal by anglophone delegates who said the measure is needed to help save the declining English school system, delegates rejected a resolution calling for a pilot project in which normally inadmissible francophones would be allowed into the English elementary school system.
“There’s a huge problem in this province and it’s been going on and on and on,” Nikolas Dolmat, a McGill University economics student and youth delegate from Montreal said. “The English school boards in Quebec are dying. My high school is less and less used every year. It’s a really sad state of affairs.”
Dolmat went on to say the Liberal Party is one of the few places he, as an anglophone, feels accepted.
“When I am walking around on the street, I’m accepted,” he said. "The second I open my mouth, someone will say you have an anglophone accent. I’m sneered at. I’m despised.”
Informed of Dolmat’s remarks following his speech, Couillard was aghast.
“It’s unacceptable,” Couillard said at a news conference. “The English language is part of who we are, it’s part of our history. It’s not because we (francophones) were treated bad in the past — I remind you there were moments in our history where bad things were said to people speaking French in the streets — but that’s no reason to do the same and behave the same way.”
Noting anglophones are more and more bilingual, he added people should feel free to use English in the streets. “It’s not acceptable to sneer at someone because of who he is, what colour the skin, what language is spoken,” Couillard said.
At his news conference, Couillard was asked to explain his decision to devote a large chunk of his speech wrapping up the convention to the English-speaking community.
“I don’t want us to drift apart from one another,” Couillard said.
“I want to be totally sure that they know their premier is the premier of all Quebecers . ... I know you will talk to your friends who have to decided to live elsewhere and go away from Quebec, tell them to come back to Quebec. This is the moment to come back and build Quebec, the new Quebec with us.”