Canadians beyond the boundaries of la belle province likely see Bill 96 as an update of that ancient Quebec tradition called Kick the Anglos.
For those of us on the inside, sadly, the newly passed provincial language legislation doesn’t even make that much of a modicum of sense. The law passed May 24 by the National Assembly is so swamped by mystery that even veteran entrail readers of provincial governance find it serves no actual political purpose. Nor, from the look of things, does it bring real-time hey! presto! resolve to any pressing social problem. Au contraire, its chief contribution to date is generating rhetoric with the self-serving perspicacity of a feral cat gargling mouse-flavoured mouthwash. It’s impossible to separate swill from spit.
How pointless is Bill 96? Well, here’s a clue. Both the provincial Liberals and the separatist Parti Québécois, the Arctic and Antarctic of polar opposites who nevertheless routinely rotated government back in Quebec’s two-party legislature days, have both dismissed it as achieving nothing. Or at least nothing good. For the Liberals, it simply tramples constitutional rights with the delicacy of circus elephants in a minefield. For the PQ, creators of the French-first Bill 101 in the 1970s, it goes nowhere near far enough toward its stated goal of defending the province’s majority language.
That may be, as former senator and venerated Quebec journalist André Pratte pointed out in the National Post, because French in the province is doing just fine and needs no rush of legislators to the barricades to defend it. Pratte cited a recent presentation of census data by demographer Jean-Pierre Corbeil proving that French is spoken at home by 81 percent of Quebecers, exactly the same number as in 1971.
Of course, mother-tongue French in Quebec will always face an existential threat in North America given that it’s spoken as a first language by slightly less than 7 million people in a continent of 579 million. But as Pratte points out, and anyone who has ears to hear in the province can attest, Bill 101’s long-ago brilliance already provides the means to neutralize such a threat. Its measures have worked for years to motivate immigrants to make French fluency a generational fact of life. That’s abundantly clear in the streets, workplaces, and leisure spheres of Montreal, Quebec City, and other urban areas. Demographer Jean-Pierre Corbeil’s census data drives home the point.
If there were room to dispute it—and there isn’t—Bill 96’s provisions forcing newcomers to engage with the government in fluent French six months after arrival seems like it was ordered straight out of the Wile E. Coyote Acme Dynamite Catalogue. It will simply blow up in bureaucratic faces as newcomers vamoose—Meep! Meep!—six months or so after arrival. Then there’s the legislation’s insistence on making life more difficult for students at English-language junior colleges. It will be an economic anvil drop as they scramble to pursue their options for graduate happiness outside Quebec just as their Toronto-bound ancestors did in the 1970s.
In the face of that blindingly obvious outcome, Bill 96’s architects seem to have been utterly blindsided by the fight they’ve picked with Quebec’s indigenous peoples, who declared even before it was passed that the education provisions would never apply on their land. Even educrats with minimal awareness of their own history will hear in that defiance echoes of the violent summer of 1990 and the rising by Montreal-area Mohawks. Can you spell Oka 2?
Utterly zany as all this energy-expending futility appears, it could arguably have a role to play in helping to defend an embattled government clinging to power and frightened to death of the pending October provincial election. Except that argument is, as the French say, hoist on its own petard by Premier Francois Legault’s governing Coalition Avenir Québec sitting comfortably ahead in the polls. A Léger poll released May 27 showed the CAQ have 46 percent support among Quebecers, just over 2.5 times as much as the second-place Liberals at 18 percent, over three times as high as the upstart Quebec Conservative Party at 14 percent, and almost five times the support garnered by the linguistic hardline Parti Québécois, who are dead last with 8 percent support.
So, with the road clear ahead for Legault’s forces to roll to electoral victory, why the need to roll over constitutional rights of the province’s long-suffering English-speaking community? Err … because someone thought it was a good idea at the time? Even that is hard to credit, though, since it is so transparently a bad idea and, worse, a bad pointless idea, and worst of all, a bad, pointless, stick-poking idea that simply goads a minority because it’s there to be pricked.
Here’s the real kicker to it: This province is finally finding its economic feet (adjusting for pandemic aftereffects as everyone is these days) because of linguistic equilibrium that Quebec needed decades to achieve, and which seemed to be here for good until Bill 96 dropped from the CAQ government’s cloud of unknowing.
For outsiders, that might sound like same old same old. In here, it’s a brand-new brand of meshugaas.
