In response to François Legault’s announcement of a moratorium on issuing permits for foreign workers, PSPP announced that it would present by October “a plan to drastically and substantially reduce temporary and permanent immigration in all categories.” Since Legault’s moratorium has already been criticized by the economic community, it is all the more likely that the PQ’s more radical plan will also receive some. With the PQ, its leader specifies, no more “half-measures” on immigration.
What both surprises and saddens me about the PQ leader is the form of his message. He describes the reduction in immigration that he wants to implement as “drastic.” Oops! A use of terminology influenced by English that the OQLF’s Linguistic Help Desk advises against and that the Littre does not encourage. You will tell me: “come on, it’s a peccadillo!” It is true that this term is often used in the sense of “radical” (even in France, where, now, anglicisms are commonplace). It is not because it is often used in this sense that it becomes acceptable in French. Moreover, more than one media outlet has corrected PSPP’s remarks by speaking instead of a draconian reduction in immigration (The newsfor example). If we use the term “drastic” to refer to the energetic effect of a drug, such as a purgative (OQLF), this is correct, because it is faithful to the medical origin of the Greek term (drastic). It is certainly not the idea of an immigration purge that PSPP wanted to express by the qualifier “drastic”! This is where we see that the terms that we use thoughtlessly or mechanically can turn against us and become a sneaky danger to our identity. For a political party whose fight for the promotion and defense of our common language is undeniable, it would have been preferable to describe the reduction in immigration that it intends to carry out as “draconian”. If you will, as René Lévesque wrote in Quebec Optionthat French remains our “vital difference” in America, it is urgent to be vigilant, for the current leader of the PQ as well.
Sometimes we let our guard down, even among the most gifted, whose good example could have been beneficial!
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