Quebec rules by language anecdote
Not so long ago, it was possible to look at Quebec and see a glass at least half full. There was the very unfortunate obsession with civil servants and their religious symbols, of course, but on the other hand, separatism was well and truly off the boil and linguistic angst was at alltime lows. The majority of anglophones and allophones were content to live in a society that legally privileged French to a reasonable degree, on the shared understanding that was necessary to ensure its survival.
The sudden evolution in the provincial conversation led in large part to the Coalition Avenir Québec, whose leader, François Legault — a businessman and a “born pragmatist,” as the Gazette's Philip Authier wrote in 2018 — vowed to put fusty old debates on the shelf and focus on the nuts and bolts of Quebec's future.
It isn't going well. On Saturday, protesters will gather at Dawson College in Montreal and march to the premier's office to protest Bill 96, which deliberately tears Quebec's linguistic détente to shreds and is expected to pass next week. On Thursday in the National Assembly, Liberal MNA André Fortin gave a fine summary of just how objectionable this legislation is.
“I'm against this bill because it creates two classes of Quebecers: historic anglophones and everybody else,” he said. Indeed, the bill seeks to confine the delivery of government services in English, including in health care, to existing anglophones — i.e., not to immigrants who might be more comfortable in English.
If you're an employer of 25 or more people, Fortin continued, the Office Québécois de la Langue Française (OQLF) “will have access without any specific mandate to your internal documents, correspondence, communication to your employees to ensure that your business operates in French.”
“Search and seizure without mandates” — i.e., without a warrant — “that's what the CAQ is about to adopt.”
Indeed, those might be the two most viscerally offensive measures to civil libertarians — not to mention people who just think we should be nice to each other. Business groups are understandably exasperated at being told they must take “all reasonable means” to avoid requiring an employee to speak a language other than French, and justify in writing when such means fall short.
“When you work in international trade, it's a bit absurd to have to justify this need,” Véronique Proulx, CEO of Manufacturiers and Exportateurs du Québec, told the Gazette.
Legault co-founded Air Transat, for heaven's sake. He knows this. But the language hawks to which he is beholden — to which all of Canadian politics is beholden — don't care about such practical considerations, or the negative effects they'll have. The language hawks are all bilingual anyway, as are their children and grandchildren. Bill 96 represents pure ideological indulgence of a sort that's unique to Quebec: The belief that every gain made by the English language in Quebec must also be a loss to the French language in Quebec.
Thus Bill 96 permanently caps enrolment at English-language CEGEPs, which will have the greatest effect of shutting out francophones, many of whom are eager to attend — either because they tend to be very good CEGEPs, or to improve their English, or both. Some Indigenous leaders are particularly upset by new French-language course requirements at CEGEPs, arguing they're a whole new impediment to raising graduation rates.
“It's not a disadvantage to speak English and French,” one francophone CEGEP grad told CTV News recently. “It's really something that is good for Quebec, that's good for promoting Quebec around the world, if almost everybody speaks both languages.”
That's obviously correct. But in the fever dream of modern Quebec politics, it's practically unsayable. It's a zero-sum game: Every person who learns English is that much closer to never speaking French again. It doesn't work like that anywhere else in the world. But the view is utterly entrenched among political elites here.
It's all very depressing; it's certainly not the new reality-based Quebec politics we were promised. But there's one thing the CAQ government — or more likely the opposition parties — could do to get a handle on this debate in the future, prevent it from getting worse, or maybe argue for temporary restrictions rather than permanent: Settle on what success looks like.
You have to work pretty hard to find data suggesting French is in decline at all in Quebec, let alone in the sort of mortal peril the CAQ (and every party in Ottawa) insists. This is why you hear so much talk about “mother tongue” and “linguistic transfer” as opposed to actual facility in the language. This is why anecdote rules the day: However many people said “bonjour-hi” to a Journal de Montréal columnist on Ste. Catherine Street last Saturday used as a compelling data point. It's infuriating.
So I would suggest parties choose a very basic statistic to judge how things are going: Say, how many people in Quebec can and do speak French fluently. Once upon a time, that was supposed to be the goal. It could be again. Somehow, politicians need to find the courage and the gumption to stand up to Quebec's creeping cultural and linguistic authoritarianism. Even in this supposedly “post-truth era,” facts can be very useful in that regard.