Côté attempts to cool furor over language remark
Candidate says someone has to represent the city’s interest in provincial linguistic debates
Mayoral candidate Marcel Côté played down the mini-furor over his party’s pledge to appoint a “promoter of French” to the city’s executive committee, saying the only intention is to ensure Montreal has more of a say in language issues normally dominated by Quebec.
“Montreal can’t leave the management of the city’s linguistic duality uniquely to the government of Quebec,” Côté said Wednesday. “We have to be involved in it.”
Language issues in Montreal often involve “quarrels” that make international headlines, tarnishing the reputation of the city, he said. Having a councillor overseeing the language dossier would ensure Montreal “gets involved where there are problems ... and gets there before the Office québécois de la langue française does. ... We can’t let Quebec alone handle those issues. I mean, look at what they’re doing with the Charter of Values.”
The party would have a similar role on the executive committee to oversee the concerns of anglophones and cultural communities in the city, Côté said.
On Monday it was reported former Parti-Québécois minister Louise Harel, a co-director of Côté’s Coalition Montreal party, said she planned to give a member of the city’s 11-member executive committee responsibility for promoting the French language in Montreal. The councillor would create an annual report on the status of French in the city, Harel said, as was outlined in the party’s program, released six weeks ago. Harel told 24h newspaper she was also concerned about the number of English signs in stores.
Asked why Harel chose to raise the contentious language issue two weeks before the municipal election, Coalition Montreal press aide Christine Mitton said she was responding to a series of questions about the party’s language platform, and the newspaper highlighted that one.
Harel, who is running for re-election in the Ville Marie borough, featured the news article on her Facebook page.
Reaction to the article was “poorly interpreted to say we wanted a language watchdog,” said Côté, a federalist. “When you know Marcel Côté, you know we don’t talk about watchdogs or inspectors or language police.”
The roles of the executive committee members responsible for the vitality of French and the concerns of the anglophone and cultural communities will differ, Côté said. On the French side the issues tend to be about sign laws and linguistics, whereas with anglophones and minorities the concerns are more about attaining services in their language or employment discrimination.
Coalition Montreal has pledged to impose “positive discrimination” in its hiring practices if elected so Montreal’s public service will better represent the prominence of the cultural minorities that make up 40 per cent of its population, Côté said.