Zachary Bolduc, one of the best junior hockey players in the country, who plays with the Quebec Remparts, was not selected by Team Canada for this year’s world championship. He reacted by denouncing the discrimination suffered by French-speaking Quebecers by Hockey Canada.
Former coach Michel Bergeron praised his courage and agreed with him. In elite hockey, mostly run by Anglophones, “it’s always how it has worked and it will always work like that,” added Bergeron.
At the same time, Blaine Higgs, Premier of New Brunswick, declared that he was the victim of discrimination as a unilingual Anglophone.
No need to waste time wondering which of the two men is closer to the truth. In everyday life New Acadia, Higgs’ lament was greeted as it should be, with a brick and a beacon. In an editorial, François Gravel established its falsity by pointing out that a high percentage of civil servants and deputy ministers in the province are unilingual English.
Luc Swanson, a Dieppe resident and federal public servant for more than 30 years, pointed out that in the four cities where he worked — Hull, Moncton, Saint John and Ottawa — 100% of his French-speaking colleagues were bilingual, which This was the case for only 5% of his English-speaking colleagues. “The very idea that Mr. Higgs could have been treated with injustice and discrimination is laughable,” Gravel concluded.
In 1951, 30% of the Canadian population was French-speaking. In 2021, it was 19%. The Canadian Francophonie today is about 7 million people, 6.5 million of whom live in Quebec. Now more than ever, these Francophones must resist the strong trend that favors English in Canada, North America and around the world. Their misfortune is that they are divided.
Who, in Quebec, for example, is concerned about the fate of the Acadian community, whose linguistic rights are currently threatened by a Prime Minister such as the excellent columnist Rino Morin Rossignol describes as “Lord Durham in breeches short ” ? Who, in the Francophonie outside Quebec, mostly opposed to Quebec separatist desires and often associated with Anglo-Quebec lobbies, supports our language laws?
In The official languages trap (Septentrion, 2022, 500 pages), a learned brick stuffed with legal considerations, Franco-Ontarian lawyer and essayist Éric Poirier explains in great detail that this sad division of French-speaking Canadians is the result of the trap set for them by Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1969 with the Official Languages Act.
By establishing a symmetry between the rights of French in Canada outside Quebec and those of English in Quebec, writes Poirier, Trudeau sows division in the Canadian Francophonie. The case is simple to understand. If, for example, Quebec intends to restrict the right to English schooling to historical Anglophones only and the Supreme Court ratifies this decision, the same rule applies to attendance at French schools in the rest of Canada, thus threatening their survival.
The same logic goes the other way. Broadening access to French schools in Canada should apply to access to English schools in Quebec. Result: before the courts, Quebec and the Francophonie outside Quebec behave like enemy brothers. Meanwhile, French is declining across Canada.
The preparatory documents for the new version of the Official Languages Act, currently under discussion in Ottawa, recognize the fact that French must henceforth be protected everywhere in Canada, including in Quebec. The inclusion of this observation in the law would be a step forward. However, we must go further to defend French, by forcing the Supreme Court to adopt an asymmetrical interpretation of language rights.
Constitutional amendments along these lines, that is to say insisting on the need to see French progress in Quebec and Canada, are desirable but improbable, recognizes Poirier. Just like a reform of the Supreme Court which would allow Quebec to appoint three of the nine judges and which would reserve one of its nine seats for the Francophonie outside Quebec.
For Quebec, independence would be a solution to the problem, but it cannot rally francophones outside Quebec and barely appears on the Quebec radar. What to do then? Poirier proposes “a concerted action plan between Quebec and the French minorities for a common position before the Supreme Court” which would aim to force the latter to base its decisions on the obvious: it is French which, everywhere in Canada, has need to be protected.