Just leave municipal bilingual status alone
Intentionally or otherwise, the Parti Québécois government appears to be doing a good cop/bad cop routine with respect to new rules governing bilingual status for municipalities.
First up last week was the minister responsible for language matters, Diane De Courcy, playing bad cop with the proposed new PQ language law, Bill 14, which would confer on the provincial government the right to revoke a municipality’s bilingual status should its population whose mother tongue is English fall below 50 per cent. Under existing rules, the revocation of such status has to be requested by the municipality’s council.
This week, up stepped good cop in the person of Jean-François Lisée, the minister responsible for relations with the anglophone community, who announced that he had per- suaded his cabinet colleagues to go easier on the anglos. The new threshold under Bill 14 for bilingual revocation would be 40 per cent, he said, and even at that there would be room for discussion before a town’s bilingual status is curtailed.
He suggested that a slight dip below 40 per cent of a municipality’s anglo component should not automatically mean elimination of its bilingual status, and that a committee would then look into the situation to determine whether this was merely a temporary drop, in which case the status quo might be allowed to prevail.
While this is a welcome improvement on what the language bill originally specified, it nevertheless remains a punitive, unfair and misguided measure that serves no need other than for the government to pander to anglophobic elements on which the PQ is to a considerable degree dependent for electoral support.
It is punitive in that it changes the rules for municipalities with substantial anglophone populations, albeit below 50 per cent (or even 40 per cent), but who have managed to retain their bilingual status because their citizenry and councils were content that it should endure. This applies to places like Côte-St-Luc (41.9 per cent), Pincourt (34.9), Rosemère (12.9) and Otterburn Park (6.7).
It is unfair because the legislation specifies that for someone to count as officially anglo, the person’s mother tongue must be English. This would exclude a considerable number of people who initially spoke another language, but for whom English is their principal language in adulthood and the one they speak at home. (Included in this category would be a fair number of people who came to Quebec as children and were denied entry on religious grounds to French public schools, which, until 50 years ago, were run by the Roman Catholic Church.)
Another consideration is that the decision on whether to strip a municipality of bilingual status would be based on census figures. Yet many people list more than one language as their mother tongue on the census form, having grown from infancy speaking two or more languages. It is unclear whether this would exclude them from the PQ’s narrow definition of who qualifies as anglophone.
There are indeed francophones who chafe at living in a town with bilingual status. This month in St-Lazare, which had retained bilingual status despite a 37-per-cent officially anglo population, council voted to rescind that status because it had the language authorities on its case as a result of a single complaint that the municipality did not meet the 50-per-cent standard. However, such carping is very much limited. There is certainly no significant unrest among francophones in bilingual municipalities that would justify the crackdown being proposed, either by the bad cop or the good one. Bill 14’s proposal for unilateral removal of a town’s bilingual status is mean-spirited at its core. It is another reason for the opposition parties in the legislature to vote against this bill.