Balarama Holness will not win the next election for mayor of Montreal, but his plan to make Montreal a statutorily bilingual city may well end up triumphing. Brief step back.
After the election of the Montreal Citizens’ Meeting (RCM) in 1986, Mayor Jean Doré’s team was quickly confronted with the need to endow the municipal administration with a language policy. The government of Quebec, with Bill 101, had already consecrated the French-speaking status of Montreal, but the desire of the new administration to decentralize services to citizens to the various neighborhoods, through the creation of boroughs, raised the question of the language of communication to adopt, in the city center, but also and above all in each of the districts. Identical debates arose at the STCUM at the time as to the language of communication in the metro, for example.
I was at the forefront of both the process of decentralization of the city and the discussion of the language policy to be adopted. Obviously, the whole thing was not done without debate. Finally, the policy adopted was perfectly in line with the spirit of Law 101, namely: the language of the municipal administration would be French; communications with businesses and institutions had to be done in French; communications with citizens also had to be done in French. However, to take into account the specific situation of Montreal and the rights inherent in the historic English-speaking community, communications with citizens in boroughs where Francophones were in the minority would be in both languages, however with a clear and visible preponderance. French. This policy has been fairly well accepted and applied for the most part for a little over a decade. Everything changed with the merger of the municipalities on the island of Montreal.
Another model could have been possible
To resolve the issues of fiscal equity that arose between the various components of the Montreal agglomeration, it would have been much more relevant and natural to extend the Urban Community at the time to the cities of Laval and Longueuil; to transfer to this renewed Urban Community additional responsibilities common to the real agglomeration, such as wastewater management, municipal aqueduct networks; to merge the three transport companies, etc.
Instead, Quebec chose instead to consecrate the city of Laval as an autonomous region and to imagine Longueuil as a city of Montérégie; when evidently both were and still are in fact suburbs of Montreal. The balance of power of the French language in regional municipal structures in Montreal would then have been quite different from what it has become.
The risk of dropping out of Montreal
The clear decline of the French language in Montreal is obviously not due only to the changes that have occurred in municipal structures. Montreal is on the front line for Quebec in having to deal with insufficient resources and reception programs for newcomers; with the uninterrupted, almost encouraged, exodus of young French-speaking households to the suburbs; with almost insurmountable difficulties for families to find adequate housing at reasonable costs; with the existence of growing pockets of poverty; with the presence of communities still too often marginalized; and above all, with the uncontrolled transfer to English-speaking networks, and to English-speaking culture, of college students.
So many issues that profoundly change the reality of Montreal and marginalize it more and more every day from other regions of Quebec. This decline in French therefore masks a phenomenon much deeper and heavy with consequences for the future of Quebec as a whole and the synergies that it is essential to maintain between the latter and its metropolis.
An alliance between Montreal and Quebec
It is urgent that the administration of Montreal and the government of Quebec understand that it is in their mutual interest and that of Quebec as a whole to seal a strong strategic alliance, both to guarantee the status of French in Montreal and to ensure the vitality of the metropolis.
Interculturalism, which in Montreal we want to promote, will only have meaning if it rests first and foremost on the prior and unambiguous affirmation of the Francophone character of the host society and its inclusion in the practices of institutions and public administration. Likewise, in return, Quebec must strongly support the administration of Montreal in its various interventions aimed at helping its population if it wants Montrealers to recognize themselves as part of the Quebec nation. Even more, it could develop through various initiatives the feeling of belonging to Quebec which is still lacking in so many young Montrealers.
Without a strong linguistic and social alliance between Quebec and Montreal, the Quebec government will not be able to achieve its linguistic objectives or the level of prosperity that it says it wants for Quebecers to catch up with that of Ontario; the city of Montreal will continue to house more than a third of the poverty of Quebec and will very soon become linguistically irrecoverable. Quebec and Montreal must understand that they need each other and that their destiny is linked.