The possibility of applying Bill 101 to CEGEP raises very clear-cut negative reactions. One objection in particular comes up constantly, that of the “free choice” of students.
This objection maintains that imposing the language of instruction on CEGEP students is tantamount to restricting them in their choices and their desires for success. However, it is not so much a question of knowing if we can impose the language of instruction, but of knowing if we want, as a society, to finance higher education places in English so that francophones and allophones can have access, sometimes to the detriment of Anglophones, moreover, and not only the historic Anglophone community of Quebec.
CEGEPs are institutions funded by taxes from the citizens of Quebec, including places in English CEGEPs. We can therefore wonder if we, as a French-speaking state, have this obligation to finance such places beyond the legitimate and inalienable needs of the historic English-speaking community of Quebec, which we are currently doing and beyond, to such point that French as a common language is, particularly in Montreal, threatened.
“Free Choice”
What is a “free” choice? It is a choice that is made without constraint. This implies an environment that guarantees as much as possible this absence of constraint. However, in Quebec, it is for the job market that we want English, that we want to perfect ourselves, to perform there. For employment and not to discover the poetry of Leonard Cohen or the crazy humor of Monty Pythons. What we hear is that our young people are making this “choice” and should be able to do so in order to have access to better jobs and a brighter future.
This means that here, in Quebec, socio-economic advancement once again depends on mastering not an additional foreign language, but English, and only English. Even more: this mastery should be such that it would not require learning in the school of the national language (as is done everywhere else), but in an English language school.
Francophones (and allophones) who go to Anglophone CEGEP already speak English: are we seriously being led to believe that they can enter a higher education institution without having an excellent command of the language of instruction? It’s laughing at the world to say that. What is at stake is socioeconomic promotion, credibility and power.
So we have to look our children in the eye and explain to them that they can only have hope and a future in English, that French is fine, it’s the language of childhood, of the house, of intimacy, but that of power, of success, the serious, adult, civilized language, that of work, it is not the language they have heard and learned since they came into the world, it is not their mother tongue. Speak white, my son. Speak white, my daughter.
The requirement of English
Which brings up a question: where does this requirement come from? Can we not assume that it comes precisely from the labor market and, therefore, from those who control it, who demand not only knowledge of English, but an almost perfect mastery of it? So much for “free choice”.
It should be noted that the sensitivity of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce to these questions is rather low, as the Rousseau affair clearly showed. We can also note that many large companies here do not consider it necessary to have bosses who speak anything other than English (Couche-Tard, SNC Lavalin, the Laurentian Bank, etc.) while others have no francophone on their board of directors (Domtar, Telesat, the Royal Bank, etc.). Overall, only 50% of the members of the boards of directors of large Quebec companies are French-speaking, as noted by the essayist Mathieu Belisle (podcast by Fred Savard, season 4, episode 13), while French is the mother tongue of 78% Quebecers.
French as a working language is no longer self-evident. This “choice” of the English CEGEP is in reality that of an economic elite that holds the labor market and that weighs with all its weight on the institutions and the educational network, an economic elite that considers it more efficient to to have a labor force which easily understands the orders given to it and which understands that any professional promotion remains linked to its capacity to alienate itself in the language of the rich and of the employersas Lord Durham said, the language of jobs, as Montrealer Kevin O’Leary said in 2016.
“Choosing” to go to an English-speaking CEGEP almost systematically guarantees assimilation into the English-speaking world: you continue your studies in English (85% of pre-university students in English-speaking CEGEPs who go to university go to McGill or Concordia), we work in English, we socialize in English, we grow in English.
The so-called “free” choice of young people today has an impact on the future of our society, that is to say above all on the future of the young people who will follow, on their own possibility of choosing. Bill 101 applied to CEGEPs, far from restricting free choice, is on the contrary a way of making it a little more real for more people and, in particular (but not only), for a majority of Francophones who are not part of of the economic elite.