In 2021, the Minister responsible for the Official Languages Act at the time, Mélanie Joly, tabled a white paper which was to lay the foundations for a modernization of this flagship piece, the first in more than 30 years. The government to which Mr.me Joly had undertaken to take into account the particular situation of French in Quebec in order to move “towards real equality of the official languages in Canada”, in particular by setting up new obligations aimed at protecting French in businesses under federal jurisdiction.
The notion that Ottawa had its share of responsibility for the defense of French in Quebec constituted a break with the traditional role of the federal government. Until then, he had rather presented himself as the defender of linguistic minorities in the country—French speakers outside Quebec and English speakers in La Belle Province. Some saw this as a downright political gesture made by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government to win votes among Francophones in Quebec, even if it meant discarding his father’s linguistic heritage. Others saw it as an evolution in the thinking of Trudeau Jr., who thus took note of the decline of French in Quebec. Regardless, this little revolution had aroused discontent within the Liberal Party of Canada (PLC).
For the Liberal MPs representing Montreal ridings with a high Anglophone proportion, the pill had been particularly hard to swallow. After these backbenchers gave themselves body and soul in the fight against Bill 96 in Quebec, the wording of Bill C-13, tabled in the House of Commons last March by the successor of Ms.me Joly at Official Languages, Ginette Petitpas Taylor, refers to the Charter of the French language of Quebec and the recognition of French as an official language of Quebec.
Moreover, C-13 allows businesses under federal jurisdiction to choose to submit to the Quebec charter rather than to the language of work provisions of the Official Languages Act.
The study of C-13 in parliamentary committee in recent days will have made it possible to measure the dissatisfaction of the recalcitrant Liberal MPs. Their attempts to remove any reference to the Charter of the French language have all failed; opposition parties blocked them all. The Bloc Québécois even succeeded in getting three amendments requested by the Government of Quebec adopted, including one which recognizes “that the existence of a majority French-speaking household in a Quebec where the future of French is assured is a legitimate objective and a fundamental premise of the federal official languages regime”.
For Mount Royal MP Anthony Housefather, whose riding has a majority of English-speaking voters, this reference to the Quebec charter not only repudiates more than 50 years of efforts by Ottawa to protect the English-speaking minority from Quebec, but it also endorses the use of the notwithstanding provision, which the government of François Legault used in passing Bill 96.
The latter “was adopted through the use of the notwithstanding clause in a preventive manner to deprive Quebecers of their right to appear before the courts if their rights under the Charter [canadienne des droits et libertés] are violated and to ask the court to order remedial measures,” Mr. Housefather pointed out in the parliamentary committee, while adding that Bill 96 “stipulates that to receive services in English in Quebec, one must have access to English schools. We are therefore depriving nearly half of the English-speaking community of Quebec of the right to obtain services in English”.
Other Montreal Liberal MPs appeared before the committee, including Marc Garneau (Notre-Dame-de-Grâce–Westmount) and Patricia Lattanzio (Saint-Léonard–Saint-Michel), to support Mr. Housefather’s efforts delete any reference to the Charter of the French language. But the MP for Saint-Laurent, the irreplaceable Emmanuella Lambropoulos, surpassed them all by recounting the experience of her hairdresser, who was forced to accompany her grandmother to the doctor: “During her last appointment you, we had refused to serve her in English. This doctor spoke to her in English before the adoption of Bill 96, but she no longer does so because she fears being the subject of a complaint if she uses a language other than French in the context of from his work. »
The speeches of his Montreal colleagues did not please the MP for the predominantly French-speaking riding of Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, located in eastern Ontario. Francis Drouin wrote on Twitter: “The show of smoke led by some of my colleagues is shameful. The Montreal island does not have a monopoly on Canada’s language policy. Misinformation has no place in this debate. He withdrew his tweet afterwards.
But his comments had the effect of spreading the dirty laundry of the Liberals in public, an extremely rare phenomenon in the PLC. Coming out of a Liberal caucus meeting on Wednesday, Quebec Lieutenant Pablo Rodriguez insisted that “we’re all going in the same direction” and that the adoption of C-13 will not is not in doubt. But the incident will not be forgotten so quickly on “the Montreal island “. It even risks becoming an urban legend.
Konrad Yakabuski is a columnist at Globe and Mail.
IHe is based in Montreal.