Legault changes the channel to language
The linguistic battle lines are being drawn on the backs of Quebec anglos
On Friday, Quebec intergovernmental affairs minister Sonia Lebel fired the opening salvo in what promises to be a drawn-out battle with Ottawa over minority language rights.
Lebel is one of the most thoughtful and capable ministers in Premier François Legault's government and the fact that she has the file means that it will be more important than ever for the English-speaking community of Quebec to come to the debate united and in full mastery of the facts.
The battle lines are being drawn on the backs of an anglophone minority perceived as being a spoiled child in comparison to the truly hard-pressed francophone minorities outside Quebec. That perception is impossible to shake and Legault will use it to his advantage.
For Legault, this is also about preparing his next election. His handling of the pandemic has been tragically inept, with Quebec's death rate being nearly three times that of neighbouring Ontario and almost five times that of B.C. He needs to have something to change the channel as he enters the final year of his mandate.
Lebel will be the level-headed interlocutor federally. The pincer movement will begin when the less subtle Simon Jolin-barrette gets into position to present his new version of Bill 101.
The gist of Lebel's analysis is that there is only one minority language in Canada: French. That is of course true on a national scale. But both the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (now almost 40 years old) and the Official Languages Act ( just over 50 years old) are designed around recognition of language minorities on a provincial basis, meaning the Franco- Ontarian minority and Anglo-quebecers have been in legal lockstep for decades.
That seems about to change. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's emissaries, Mélanie Joly and Pablo Rodriguez, are already signalling that the symmetry between franco and anglo linguistic rights under the Official Languages Act will be dropped as part of its modernization. That Act is just a statute of Parliament and can be changed by a simple majority vote.
The charter, of course, is constitutional and the unwieldy amendment process means it is very unlikely to be changed. It protects the right to control and manage English school boards, for example, but that hasn't stopped Legault from attacking that right with Bill 40.
On minority rights generally, Ottawa has been extremely weak in recent years, and there is a strong tendency to simply duck. In the 2015 election, support for minority religious rights in Quebec became a flashpoint in Quebec, and this had an impact on election results, including my own. Trudeau, Conservative Leader Erin O'toole and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh are unlikely do anything to support those rights for fear of political retribution.
Against that timorous backdrop, don't expect any of them to be defending official-language minority rights here, either.
A justice minister, of course, is supposed to defend rights. Jolin-barrette has a history of doing the opposite, as with Bill 21. Last week, he gave another disquieting indication that he's unclear on the concept. When questioned in the National Assembly about the tragic denial of the rights of wrongly accused Mamadi Fara Camara, he began to testify in favour of the Crown prosecutors, even though he had no first-hand knowledge and with the inquiry into those events yet to begin. It was pure Jolin-barrette. He has a great CV, but so little expertise and experience in the real world that instead of uniting all Quebecers in a desire to promote and protect our common language, French, his “new and improved” Bill 101 will undoubtedly be another ideological flashpoint.
All Quebecers deserve better. Legault seems to be trying to softly and de facto separate Quebec from Canada, bit by bit. It looks as if he has a clear plan. Too bad no one in Ottawa seems to.