The readers of Homework were entitled to a whole exclusivity, Saturday in one. The CAQ government, they learned, has found the “perfect formula” to “eradicate” Quebec’s English-speaking minority. To eradicate, which means to make completely disappear, to annihilate, to annihilate, to destroy, to extirpate, to suppress, to kill. Do you understand ?
This declaration — how shall I put it? — striking was stated by the president of the main English-speaking lobby in Quebec, the Quebec Community Groups Network, Marlene Jennings, who was a long-time federal Liberal MP.
If this linguistic eradication operation is underway, it is the most ineffective of all time. As proof, the CAQ government let in, in 2019 alone (latest data available), nearly 12,000 unilingual Anglophone immigrants, not counting the valid permits that year for 51,000 foreign students and temporary immigrants, also unilingual Anglophones. . If we want to eliminate a language from a territory, why invite enough Anglos to add almost three times the population of Westmount?
It is quite normal for an Anglo defense organization to defend the rights and interests of its members, including when it comes to favorable situations acquired over decades, even centuries. I have never met a union happy to let go of even an excessive or anachronistic advantage.
The remarkable Anglo-Quebec institutional heritage is no accident. How do you explain that a community that forms less than 11% of the population (even counting large, with the language of use) has institutions that offer 19% of places at the college level and 25% at the university level? That its universities pocket 30% of total income? That its 37 health establishments employ 45% of all employees in the sector? (Thanks to Frédéric Lacroix for these calculations, found in his invaluable Why is Law 101 a failure?at Boréal.)
Systemic advantage
It is, quite simply, the residue of the colonization of Quebec by the British conqueror. The only places in the world where there were or still are minorities with an institutional over-equipment of this magnitude are those where a minority ethnic group dominates the majority ethnic group or those where the presence of the colonizers is still strong. Dominating Quebec economically from 1760 to 1960 confers a colossal cumulative systemic advantage: significantly higher land revenues to finance its schools for a long time, intergenerational fortunes granting donations to community institutions, not to mention the largesse of banks and large companies, enriched on the back of natural resources and the labor of undereducated and underpaid inhabitants.
To use concepts that are fashionable today at Concordia and McGill: the entire political history of Quebec from the Quiet Revolution to today can be summed up no more and no less than a process of decolonization, of questioning systemic discrimination francophones and what we dare not call anglophone privilege here.
Outraged by the CAQ language bill, Ms. Jennings is not the first Anglo-Montreal representative to confuse the questioning of historically acquired advantages with the sound of boots. Others, before her, spoke of ethnic cleansing and the new Nazi order to designate the desire of the French-speaking majority to work in their language, to be served in French or to integrate immigrants into the official and common language. .
Far from eradicating the historic advantages of the English-speaking minority, the CAQ government makes no gesture of limitation against its health or university institutions, no gesture even demanding that universities ensure that their students master French. On the contrary, the CAQ allows them to welcome unilingual foreign students who anglicize the center of Montreal. For Ms. Jennings, the crime of the Legault government is to have capped the Anglophone institutional advantage at the college level. Not reduced. Not aligned with the demographic weight of the community. No. Capped at its current oversized level. This is homeopathic eradication.
On the usefulness of excess
Oversized is the appropriate term to describe the reaction of Ms. Jennings and several English-speaking spokespersons these days. Last September, the organization held an online consultation on Bill 96. Radio-Canada journalist Émilie Dubreuil listened to it from start to finish. One commenter said the law would lead to deaths. Another explained that the francophones who support the law show ignorance. Yet another explained that French speakers cannot travel across borders because they don’t know English. A lawyer claimed that French was not even the official language in New France. A citizen affirmed that the title of Quebecois was refused to all those who are not descendants of French settlers.
McGill Law Dean Robert Leckey explained that the use of the notwithstanding clause “essentially sends a signal that there is no place for human rights oppose the majority will”. The inimitable Anne-France Goldwater, in addition to evoking a Quebec Gestapo, declared that “François Legault leads a populist government and is part of the trend of Bolsonaro in Brazil and Erdogan in Turkey”.
If these comments seem shocking to you, what about the silence of those who were leading the consultation? We hardly heard them rectify the facts, denounce the nonsense heard, call for a little reason in the expression of discontent.
If these outrages have a utility, it is to indicate to the CAQ government that its language legislation will provoke these exaggerated reactions, whatever it may be. If he added to this the only measures capable of reversing the decline of French, namely the knowledge of French at the point of entry for all immigrants, Bill 101 at CEGEP and French exams for obtaining any post-secondary diploma an English-speaking establishment, could Mrs Jennings really find anything worse than to accuse it of eradication?
[email protected]; blog: jflisee.org