Hardly anyone is happy with Bill 14
CONTRADICTIONS regarding the PQ government’s proposed language legislation leave many Quebecers puzzled and unsatisfied
I t’s an objective of the Marois government’s proposed language legislation to make public services in English less available at the provincial level as well as the municipal.
When the minister responsible for the French Language Charter, Diane De Courcy, introduced Bill 14 last week, she said the government is worried about “slippage toward institutional bilingualism in the municipalities, hospitals, government corporations, ministries and government bodies.”
So, at the municipal level, the bill would allow the government under certain conditions to withdraw the “recognized” bilingual status of some municipalities that allows them to provide more services in English.
And at the provincial level, it would have the government, its ministries and other public agencies play an “exemplary” role by making French the “normal and everyday language” in which they “address others and are addressed,” and “the language used in the public sphere.”
Among other measures, the “new Bill 101” would amend the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms in a way that could weaken the protection of linguistic minorities against discrimination, in the private sector as well as the public.
It would give the “language po- lice,” the inspectors of the language-law-enforcement Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), new powers of search and seizure, in “any place where an activity governed by this Act is carried out.”
But the bill doesn’t mention any requirement that the inspectors, like the real police, would first need to go before a judge to establish they had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed.
Warrants? They’re the Quebec language police. They wouldn’t have to show anybody any stinking warrants.
The OQLF would no longer give an alleged offender time to comply with the law. Instead, it would immediately refer the matter to the director of criminal and penal prosecutions.
And De Courcy encouraged Quebecers to become “language sentinels,” promising a website on which anyone who has anything against the owner of a convenience store can post an unproven complaint alleging poor service in French for the benefit of language vigilantes.
These and the other measures in the 94 sections of Bill 14 are not intended to address any real language problem.
Rather, their real purpose is to compensate the anti-English hawks in and around the Parti Québécois for the government’s reneging on a promise to restrict access to English colleges. But the hawks aren’t satisfied.
Bill 14 is “a step in the right direction, but not enough to ensure the future of French in Quebec,” sniffed Mario Beaulieu on behalf of the Mouvement Québec français.
And Pierre Curzi, who proposed the college restriction before leaving the PQ, wrote in sovereignist-friendly Le Devoir that the government was using its lack of a parliamentary majority as an excuse for a lack of “political courage.”
From the other side, anglophone opposition to the municipalities’ proposal had Marois’s ambassador to the English, cabinet minister Jean-François Lisée, rewriting the bill on the fly.
The bill says municipalities could lose their recognition if the proportion of their residents with English as their mother tongue falls below 50 per cent.
Lisée boasted to The Gazette of having persuaded the cabinet to lower the bar to 40 per cent.
But then, in a rare public contradiction of a minister by a civil servant, the deputy minister for language policy told Le Devoir that Lisée’s 40 per cent is only “one hypothesis among others.”
This left the Marois government appearing to have too many language ministers and too many language policies, all contradicting each other, and none satisfying very many people.