To know us isn’t always to love us
SUPPORT FOR THE VALUES CHARTER among francophone Montrealers is higher than it is among any other Quebecers
“Montreal the Distinct” said the head on a recent opinion article in La Presse.
The article, based on results of a 2012 poll, said Montrealers have different attitudes from other Quebecers.
In particular, the poll found that Montrealers were more open to immigration and more accepting of cultural diversity.
Since Montreal is where Quebec’s linguistic and cultural minorities are concentrated, authors Éric Bélanger and Eva Falk Pederson of McGill University concluded that the poll results supported the “contact theory.”
This theory holds that “the more individuals are in contact with immigrants and different lifestyles, languages and religious, the more tolerant they are.”
It’s the explanation that’s been offered for an apparent geographical split between the province’s metropolis and its hinterland, over the Marois government’s proposed an tihijab Charter of Quebec Values.
Polls consistently show that opposition to the charter is stronger in Montreal than in the rest of Quebec.
For example, in a survey conducted last month by the Léger firm for Québecor’s French-language media, 49 per cent of respondents on the island of Montreal expressed opposition to the charter, compared to 42 per cent for the whole province, including Montreal.
A closer look at the results, however, reveals that the real split is not geographical — between Mont- real and the ROQ — but linguistic: between francophones and nonfrancophones.
Unlike other polls, this Léger survey had a sample for the island that was large enough to allow the results to be broken down meaningfully by language.
And they showed that support for the charter was higher among French-speaking Montrealers than among any other Quebecers.
That is, at 55 per cent, it was higher than for the province as a whole (43 per cent), francophones in general (49 per cent) and any other region (37 to 48 per cent).
In Montreal, it was anglophones (12 per cent) and allophones (20 per cent) — people with mother tongues other than French or English — who pulled down the overall level of support.
Jean-François Lisée, the Parti Québécois minister responsible for Montreal, subtly pointed this out last week in telling the city’s major mayoral candidates to shut up about the values charter, and that the voters aren’t as “unanimous” in their opposition to it as they are.
The charter isn’t the only area where evidence suggests that, contrary to the contact theory, firsthand experience with diversity makes French-speaking Montrealers more culturally insecure than other Québécois, not less so.
Voting patterns have led the media to describe Montreal as federalist, and the isolated, exclusively French-speaking Saguenay/Lac-- Saint-Jean region as the most nationalist in Quebec.
While the PQ is increasingly a rural-based party, however, its roots are in Montreal, which elected six of the first seven PQ members of the National Assembly in 1970.
Since then, support for sovereignist parties and for sovereignty, whose appeal is based primarily on identity, has generally remained highest among French-speaking Montrealers.
This is supported by results of a CROP poll conducted in August 2012, obtained from polling expert Claire Durand of the Université de Montréal.
In this poll, 51 per cent of francophones on Montreal Island were in favour of sovereignty, compared to 36 per cent in the rest of the metropolitan area, 29 per cent in the Quebec City area and 36 per cent in the remainder of the province.
Again, it’s the concentration of us non-francophones on the island that makes Montreal predominantly federalist, as well as more “tolerant.”
For some of our French-speaking fellow citizens, however, to know us is not necessarily to love us.