Jean-françois Lisée hits a brick wall

We’re pathetic, we English-speaking Quebecers. And after four months of listening to our whimpering, our nanny minister is showing signs of impatience with us.

“You are Quebecers,” JeanFrançois Lisée snapped in English last week, after announcing a $20,000 subsidy for a tour of the province to promote the bilingual pop song Notre Home, an anglo-angsty plea for acceptance.

“Stop doubting. Stop asking permission to be Quebecers. Stop thinking that you are defined in the eyes of the other.

“You are Quebecers. Get over it.”

Lisée’s apparent frustration is understandable.

Sure, the anglo “leaders” he’s been meeting, starved for attention after nine years of neglect bordering on abuse under Liberal former premier Jean Charest, are flattered that a minister, even one in a Parti Québécois government, appears to take them seriously.

But Lisée can’t grant their request on behalf of the English-speaking community. He can’t make Quebec accept us.

“You are Quebecers,” he said.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re Quebecers. We’re not Québécois.

We refuse to assimilate into the French-speaking community, and we compete with it to assimilate immigrants.

For Quebec, and in particular for the government in which Lisée is a minister, our community, and the language that defines it, are problems to be contained.

And it does matter how we are “defined in the eyes of the other,” since the other is the majority for which public policy is made.

It’s been only four months since PQ Premier Pauline Marois sent Lisée to calm us down. But it’s already clear that when he talks to us, he’s speaking only for himself, not the government.

“French isn’t declining in Montreal because of English or because of immigration,” he told Westmounters last week. “It’s declining because the policies of municipal governments have encouraged urban sprawl. French-speaking people are moving into the suburbs.”

Yet Bill 14, the government’s proposed new antiEnglish legislation to address the supposed decline of French, has nothing to do with urban sprawl.

Last month, Lisée boasted to The Gazette that he had persuaded the government to relax a provision in the bill restricting the availability of municipal services in English. But the next day he was publicly contradicted by a senior public servant, some- thing that rarely happens to a cabinet minister.

Marois delegated responsibility for relations with the English-speaking community to a minister at the suggestion of Graham Fraser, the federal commissioner of official languages. In an interview with Le Devoir after the election of the PQ government, Fraser suggested Marois imitate Ontario, which has a minister responsible for francophone affairs and a French-language-services commissioner.

But, unlike his Ontario counterpart, Lisée is not responsible for any law providing access to minority-language services, and has no office of minority-language affairs to support him.

And neither Lisée’s title nor his official government biography even mentions his responsibility for the English-speaking community.

As minister for anglos, Lisée is little more than a glorified parliamentary secretary.

He has less influence over PQ government language policy than anti-English hawk Mario Beaulieu, who, as The Gazette disclosed, got Health Minister Réjean Hébert to order the Lachine Hospital transferred out of the officially bilingual McGill University Health Centre.

When Lisée was asked about Beaulieu’s influence, he ducked by claiming unconvincingly not to have read that morning’s Gazette.

The next day, the National Post’s Quebec correspondent, Graeme Hamilton, called Lisée the PQ government’s “good cop” in an approach to anglos of “good cop, bad cop, bad cop, bad cop.”

Hébert has since backed off on the Lachine Hospital, because of French-language opposition. And it was the opposition of French-speaking students, not Lisée, that got the government to renege on its “CEGEPs 101” promise to Beaulieu to restrict access to English-language colleges.

Lisée has no clout with the government because the PQ is under no illusions that he’ll be able to shake any anglo votes loose from the Liberals.

So he has to try to have us literally for a song, since he has little else to offer.