Language Politics: False Division

Quebec's focus on alienating anglophones hurts French everywhere else

After the Bonjour-Hi debacle of 2017, the National Assembly’s war on linguistic minorities only got worse. It hasn’t ended; two weeks ago, the government of Quebec launched a $2.5 million ad campaign to promote “Bonjour” as the only greeting in the province, with the obvious subtext that “hi” is not an acceptable greeting. No surprise that Legault wants the Conservatives in power as soon as possible.

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Pandering to Quebec nationalism is a failing strategy. Everyone who has tried it has eaten dirt and damaged the country; one need only look at Brian Mulroney, whose footsie with nationalists gave us the Bloc, or Paul Martin whose pandering gave them a revival. The current government’s lack of backbone in addressing the issue has in some ways sewn the seeds for a new strong nationalist revival in Quebec by pandering in a completely futile effort to keep the federal government in the good graces of the province’s so-called soft nationalists. I can only hope that Pablo Rodriguez, the Quebec Lieutenant who guided this failing strategy and is now seeking the provincial Liberal leadership, defends federalism with the same vigour in Quebec City as he has had in defending nationalism while in Ottawa.

Attacking anglophones in Quebec, more than anything else, hurts the francophone communities of every other province. The Bloc has long missed an opportunity to be the federal party protecting the French language regardless of province. But so has everyone else. In my decade on Parliament Hill, I never saw the creation of a francophone caucus that did not align with provincial borders.

As the debate over Bill 96, the Quebec government’s attempt to unilaterally remove what rights remain for the English community in Quebec continued through the pandemic, complete with the use of the notwithstanding clause to circumvent the constitution in direct acknowledgement of its objectives, I received a request for comment from the Globe and Mail on May 20th, 2021:

Hi David Graham,

My name is Erika, and I'm a reporter with the Globe and Mail. I was wondering if I could talk with you today for comment on a story​? I would like to speak with you about Quebec's recent announcement that they will table a bill strengthening French language laws. 

I replied to the paper that I am now in private life and not interested in getting involved in this discussion. After weeks of debating with myself whether or not that was true, then-federal Minister of Official Languages Mélanie Joly tabled Bill C-32 on June 15th which mounted another attack on Quebec’s minority anglophone population, putting all emphasis on the French minority in Canada, which does need considerable investment and protection outside of Quebec, without addressing the protections needed by the anglophone population inside Quebec. One cannot survive without the other. I privately contacted people I had worked with on the Hill and was surprised by some of the response I received.

In reaction to one conversation in particular, I prepared a letter addressed to my former colleagues and sent it to a selection of about 40 of them at their private, non-staff-filtered, email addresses, at the start of the Quebec caucus meeting the morning after C-32 was tabled, June 16th. That day, the House was to vote on a motion proposed by the Bloc on whether to recognise Quebec as a nation. In my missive, I addressed a bizarre forty-minute conversation I had with a senior advisor to the Prime Minister, Olivier, whom I had called to address my concerns.

He told me that, years ago, he had been shopping in Kirkland, on the West Island in Montreal, and was outraged to be served in English by three separate employees. How is it acceptable, he asked me, that store staff anywhere in Quebec addressed him in English? If a business does not want to work in French in Quebec, he told me, they should leave.

How, indeed, I asked, is it acceptable that our Prime Minister's advisor on these issues believes it is unacceptable for anglophones in Quebec to have access to English commerce in English neighbourhoods? Should we ban Fromagerie St-Albert from communicating with their customers in French because they are in Ontario? The French belong on the other side of the river, after all!

It is not acceptable for the Liberal Party of Canada to take a position that Quebec must be exclusively French any more than it would be acceptable to demand that any other province be exclusively English. While it is fair to demand that all federally-chartered employers ensure service is available to their employees and customers in either language without any consideration to geography (which would actually defend French without breaking the equality of the languages in the law), it is not acceptable for the Liberal Party of Canada or its spokespeople to take the position that those who live or work in a language other than French must leave Quebec.

After my defeat in 2019, I did leave Quebec. The Bloc’s winning message of “le Québec, c’est nous” — Quebec is us, with the implication: but not you — was received loud and clear by myself and my pentalingual wife, whose five languages do not include French. In spite of my family having been documented in Quebec since at least 1647, I will never be enough of a Quebecer to feel at home in the province in which I was born and raised.

I moved first to Edmonton, Alberta, where my daughter attended only French school, for which she was not required to provide any proof of eligibility. Earlier this year, we moved again, this time to Moncton, New Brunswick, where my daughter again attends French school and where we can live bilingually without judgement in the only officially bilingual province in the country.

Every province in this country, without exception, has a French community. I am as proud to be an anglophone from off the Island of Montreal when in Quebec as I am of being a French-speaking Quebecer when in other parts of the country. If we continue to allow the governments of Canada and Quebec to build these walls, French will be no more welcome in Alberta than English would be in Kirkland, should Olivier get his way.

I did not get involved in politics or run to play in the mud of Quebec's language wars, and mostly stayed out of it in my time in office; I convinced myself that we had moved past it, that my very victory was proof of that fact. I was there to fix real problems - like ensuring rural Canada has Internet and cell infrastructure, ending our continued inexcusable treatment of our Indigenous population, and finding ways to ensure every product built or sold in the country has a lifecycle plan so that garbage dumps may be abolished and greenhouse gases addressed at the source. In talking to those my age and younger, they are over the language fight — this is their parents' fight, and, by and large, Quebec's youth are angry at being excluded from the modern world while real problems go unaddressed.

While several MPs wrote back to me thanking me for and agreeing with the comments in the letter I sent them, that night the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to recognise the Quebec nation in a Bloc motion, with only two MPs — Jody Wilson-Raybould and Derek Sloan, neither sitting in a caucus — having the courage to stand up and vote no, though many of those I had contacted abstained.

Bill 96 itself passed in May of 2022 with only the most tepid response from the federal government, with Parliament passing C-13, a new version of C-32, a year later. Speaking up against Quebec’s increasingly repressive and counter-productive language laws is seen badly, as former Liberal Party of Canada Quebec wing president Chelsea Craig or Saint-Laurent MP Emmanuella Lambropoulos might tell you, following ‘unacceptable’ comments from both in the fall of 2020 criticising Bill 101 and the premise of the decline of the French language in Quebec.

Wanting to split Canada on ethno-linguistic lines, there would ultimately be no room for minorities, and Quebec is, with the stabilising force of US democracy teetering on the brink of failure, on a path toward French purity and all that entails.

With Bill 21’s proactive discrimination on religious grounds and Bill 96’s draconian rules permitting warrantless searches of business to ensure language compliance, and increasing proof-of-eligibility for ever-decreasing English services, it is hard not to wonder what further steps the CAQ government would be willing to take to ensure non-francophones are identified and isolated from society, if there is indeed any limit. It makes it difficult to tell non-francophones living in Quebec that they should stay, given the history of incremental ethnic cleansing we have seen in the past, including here in Canada with the attempted destruction of so many of our founding nations.

Worse, in my view, is the hypocrisy of the nationalist leaders of Quebec, most of whom ensure their own kids are bilingual. Famously, Lucien Bouchard spoke English at home. Jacques Parizeau was educated at the London School of Economics. Quebec nationalist folk hero Gilles Vigneault, the composer behind “Gens du pays”, the de facto national anthem of Quebec, is married to an anglophone. Current premier Francois Legault himself speaks fluent English. The Bloc MP who defeated me traveled to Hawaii in her youth to learn English, unable to do so in her home province. For each of the moral and political leaders of Quebec’s nationalist movement, they preserve for themselves and their families the right to be comfortable in both languages, but work hard to prevent the masses from having that same access. One must ask themselves why that is.

Language is not a zero-sum game. Promoting French need not come at the expense of everyone else.