National Post (National Edition)
The PQ’S pathology
Thanks to Bill 101, Quebec’s 1977 Charter of the French language, no language in the world is as regulated as French is in Quebec.
But Pauline Marois’ young minority Parti Québécois government was not satisfied with French merely being protected from erosion. This government seeks to establish the primacy of French in a way that will erode the mere presence of English in every walk of public and private life. To that end Bill 14, the first substantial revision of Bill 101 since its inception was conceived, was written up and prepared for passage.
Bill 14 contains 155 proposed amendments to the Charter of the French Language. The government considers them necessary because the French language “constitutes a stronger vector for social cohesion … and maintaining harmonious relations.” What Bill 14 is actually designed to do is elevate the wish of francophones never to speak another language than French — even the other official language of Canada — to a hu-
Bill 14 is designed to make never having to speak English an enforceable human right
man right on the same level as the right to medical care.
To this end Bill 14 would coopt all public institutions, municipalities, school boards, unions, private enterprises and even ordinary Quebecers as participants and — not to put too fine a point on it — occasional spies in the great common project of suppressing English. That the common project would radically diminish the freedoms and quality of life of non-francophones seems irrelevant, perhaps even a matter of satisfaction, to this government.
Some examples of the proposed amendments:
A regulation that permits English-speaking members of the Canadian Armed Forces who are temporarily stationed in Quebec to have their children schooled in English would be rescinded.
English CEGEPs would be required to give priority to Englishspeaking candidates for admission when resources are inadequate to accept all comers. That would mean francophone students, even if they
had better marks, would be the last to be chosen, and might not get in at all if the “resources” weren’t there. (What the PQ really wanted was to extend Bill 101 to CEGEPs, which raised an uproar amongst francophones. This would accomplish the same thing — curtailing francophones’ opportunities to become fluently bilingual — by this back door.)
Officially bilingual municipalities could lose their bilingual status against their democratic will because of slight demographic shifts.
Daycares will have to facilitate the acquisition of French-language skills by infants.
Employers will be required to justify the need for employees to speak any other language than French. An employee required to communicate in a language other than French would have the right to sue his or her employer for monetary damages.
The PQ is obsessed with language domination to a degree that is, in political terms, pathological. The devastation of English school boards; the linguistic hardships imposed on the men and women who protect our country from harm; the cultural and psychological marginalization of fellow citizens for the Original Sin of being anglophone: What we are seeing with this government makes the patriarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the years before the Quiet Revolution seem anodyne by comparison.
The religious metaphor is apt. In throwing off the Church’s domination, and with it all the trappings of their religion, Quebec also divorced itself from its cultural roots. Without roots, there can be no new branches. All Quebec has that may be called culturally unique is language. The moral panic we have seen over the years — first to preserve French from disappearance, but now the push by Quebec’s new high priests to sanctify it and keep it safe from the pollution of other languages — is unjust to nonfrancophones. But it is arguably more harmful to francophones, whose aspirations have been appropriated as burnt offerings to the language gods. Bill 14 should be voted down in its entirety. The opposition numbers of the Liberal party and the CAQ are adequate to do so. All it would take is a sense of fairness, and a little political will.