If Quebec wants to succeed in the matter of integrating immigrants, it will need the contribution of the City of Montreal. It is there, in fact, that the majority of immigrants decide to live. In 2016, these people represented 34.3% of the population of Montreal, 28.5% of that of Laval and 20.3% of that of Longueuil. In the rest of Quebec, immigrants represent only about 4% of the population. We can therefore see the importance of the Montreal region in this mission.
Does the City of Montreal live up to Quebec expectations in this matter? This is the question posed by political scientist David Carpentier in The metropolis against the nation? (PUQ, 2022, 232 pages), an enlightening essay from a master’s thesis. “What is the City of Montreal doing concretely to promote the integration of these populations on its territory? asks Carpentier. Is it along the lines advocated by the Quebec government or does it contradict its action?
Carpentier is a researcher. His essay is not controversial. The fact remains that his conclusion that “there is thus unfolding in the metropolis a hidden form of multiculturalism giving free rein to a civic life freed from the national framework” will rightly cause a reaction. According to Carpentier, in fact, “the principles on which rests a certain conception of integration, established by Quebec’s democratic processes, are being short-circuited by the City of Montreal”, without any real political legitimacy.
According to the Canadian Constitution, immigration is a jurisdiction shared between the provinces and the central government. Municipalities, for their part, enjoy the responsibilities delegated to them by the provincial governments.
In Quebec, moreover, the matter is complicated by the fact that we are a minority nation in a state whose policy of integration, multiculturalism, competes with ours, interculturalism. As “creatures of the province” in legal terms, the municipalities should therefore be subject to the application of Quebec policy, but a certain vagueness in the latter is causing the machine to seize up.
Canadian multiculturalism has been an official policy since 1971. It “promotes the manifestation of ethnocultural, religious and linguistic particularisms in the public space”, sums up Carpentier, and affirms that “there would not exist in the country a culture or a group having precedence”. As the political scientist notes, it is easy for Canada not to insist on the need for integration into a host society since the presence of the latter is in fact essential, “given the hegemonic status of the Anglo tradition -Saxony and its majority demographic reality”.
As a minority nation, Quebec cannot afford this luxury, hence its adherence to interculturalism, a “middle road”, specifies Carpentier, between assimilationism and multiculturalism. Interculturalism promotes pluralism, but gives priority to the majority host culture, into which newcomers must integrate and which is based on “gender equality, democracy, secularism, French as common public language, the rule of law [et] respect for human rights and freedoms”, sums up the political scientist. However, this integration model has never been formalized by the Quebec government, which makes its application uncertain.
In certain public documents, the City of Montreal claims to adhere to a minimalist interculturalism. In practice, however, his action often reveals the “tacit adherence of the municipality to the Canadian model and its circumvention of the discourse promoted by the Quebec state,” observes Carpentier.
In public interventions, for example, Mayor Coderre and Mayor Plante both pleaded for so-called open secularism and for more flexibility in the use of English. Thus, in the name of Montreal difference, they challenged two of the main bases of Quebec interculturalism.
According to Carpentier, the players in Montreal’s integration policy are divided into two camps: supporters of interculturalism, mainly civil servants and researchers, and those of multiculturalism, found mainly among elected officials and associative players. For the moment, because of the legal and political vagueness surrounding the status of interculturalism, it is the latter that prevail, thus leading to a dramatic “disconnection” between the metropolis and the rest of Quebec.
So what is the Government of Quebec waiting for to make interculturalism its official integration policy throughout the national territory? It should be part of a serious national revival program.