After comparing Quebec to American racial segregation, which led to 4,075 lynchings between 1877 and 1950, after advocating the partition of Quebec in the 1995 referendum, the newspaper The Suburban now accuses us of practicing cultural eradication. Written by Beryl Wajsman, this West Island publication claims that the Quebec government “seeks the cultural eradication of non-francophones of stock in Quebec.”
Three facts illustrate this situation. First, the existence of Law 96, which tries timidly to protect French. Second, the new federal law on official languages, which will refer to this Quebec legislation, thanks in particular to the epic battle of the Bloc Québécois Mario Beaulieu. Third, Minister Jean-François Roberge, who dared to suggest that the hundreds of millions paid by Ottawa to English Canadians in Quebec should be used to protect our language.
Linguistic cleansing
Such accusations are nothing new. In 2019, the mayor of Hampstead, William Steinberg, accused us of ethnic cleansing with law 21. This practice however is the fact of the English. They deported the Acadians during the conquest, causing 5,000 deaths.
Kelly McParland is another example of the presumptuous criticism leveled at us. Last year, this journalist from National Post said that Quebecers wanted to “purify” the province of English and that they had been discriminating against English speakers for more than 40 years.
The columnist went so far as to cite Ontario as a model that Quebec should follow. Let us recall here that in 1912-13 the neighboring province closed all its French schools. His goal was to eradicate French-Canadian culture.
Ontario just followed Lord Durham’s recipe. For our own good, we had to renounce our language and adopt the superior culture of the conqueror, who planned to drown us in a mass of British immigrants.
Destruction of French in the West
That is what the English Canadians did in the West. In 1870, Francophone Métis made up the majority of Manitoba’s population. To encourage them to join Confederation, the federals promised them the creation of a bilingual province.
We know the rest. Louis Riel was hanged. The British immigrants demographically drowned the Franco-Manitobans. The province violated the constitution by eliminating official bilingualism and it closed its French schools.
This is what will soon happen to us in Quebec. Through immigration, we will drown Franco-Quebecers in a country of 100 million inhabitants. The vast majority of these newcomers will assimilate into the English-Canadian nation and their numerical superiority will lead to our assimilation.
Coming back to Wajsman, he claims that Quebec is violating the constitutional rights of Anglophones. This is historically false, as we have just seen, and it remains false today.
Law 96 respects the constitution. It is Ottawa that violates the rights of francophones, in New Brunswick in this case. The Trudeau government was condemned there for appointing a unilingual lieutenant-governor. The feds repeated this violation of our rights with the appointment of Mary Simon, the vice-queen who does not speak French.
This is Canada! The majority eradicates the culture of the minority, flouting its rights, and it has the nerve to say that it is Quebecers who oppress English speakers!