Thursday, June 02, 2022

NATIONALISM IS REACTIONARY
Legault doubles down on decline of French as Bill 96 is signed into law
Philip Authier, Montreal Gazette - Yesterday 

Quebec Premier François Legault responds to reporters' questions after Bill 96 was adopted on Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at the legislature in Quebec City. Simon Jolin-Barrette, minister for the French language, looks on.


QUEBEC — In the hot seat for comparing Quebec’s language situation to that of Louisiana, Premier François Legault dug in his heels Wednesday, announcing he now wants a more complete statistical picture of the use of French in all aspects of society.

“Everyone has to concede there is a decline in French,” Legault told reporters as he arrived for question period at the National Assembly. “When we look at the statistics, the language most used in the home is in decline, the language most used at work is in decline.

“It becomes a question of time. If this decline continues, it will take how many years before French is not used a lot?”

Legault quoted government statistics showing the number of people on the island of Montreal using French in the workplace has gone from 59.5 per cent in 2011 to 56.8 per cent.

He said the data is one reason his Coalition Avenir Québec government adopted Bill 96 to bolster the Charter of the French Language.

“There is an urgency to act,” the premier said.



Legault made the statements to justify his new campaign to pressure the federal government into surrendering more powers over immigration to Quebec. Specifically, he wants the province to have control over the category of family unification, a request Ottawa has already denied.

At his party’s policy convention over the weekend , Legault said immigration will be a key issue in the October general election, and that obtaining more power is a question of survival for the Quebec nation.

“If we continue with a system where Ottawa picks these immigrants and only half speak French, in a matter of time we could become a Louisiana,” he said at the convention.

At the same time, the CAQ government has been trying to ease the fears of the English-speaking community over Bill 96. It took out a full-page ad in Tuesday’s Montreal Gazette titled Bill 96: The Facts and stating “several falsehoods have circulated.”

Pundits and critics have complained the ad does not respond to the concerns of the anglophone community.

But on Wednesday Legault re-tweeted a comment made by a citizen complaining about the Gazette’s coverage of the bill. “Having to pay for full-page ads in a newspaper to respond to the disinformation in the same newspaper,” said the tweet.


All this comes as Legault is being accused by the opposition of inventing a crisis over immigration for political reasons while Quebec heads into an election campaign.

Liberal MNA Saul Polo, who was born in Santa Marta, Colombia, and moved to Quebec 30 years ago, told the legislature on Tuesday he “refused to accept the label that immigration is a threat to the Quebec nation.”

He said it’s not the government’s business if he chooses to speak Spanish at home and French outside. He was especially irked to hear Legault say Tuesday in the legislature that Polo’s success at integrating into Quebec society was an “anecdote,” and that the overall problem remains.

“Being treated as an anecdote by the premier wounded me profoundly,” Polo told reporters. “I and many Quebecers made all the necessary effort to integrate and become full citizens.”

Legault said he meant to say Polo is an example and that the premier is more concerned with the global situation. Data shows fewer people are speaking French in the home and the trend will continue, he said.

“The data we have, language spoken at home and the language of work, are important,” he said. “I would like to add another statistic. So I have asked (minister of the French language) Simon Jolin-Barrette and his team for data on the language used in the public sector.

“What we are saying is, we want French to be the common language. Well, we have to look what is the language at home, what is the language at work, what is the language in the public sector. They go together.

“If there is nobody who speaks French at home, well, that means French will eventually disappear.”

Legault grew irritated when pressed by a Gazette reporter to expand on the issue of languages spoken at home.

“Do you agree with me that if 50 years from now, nobody is speaking French at home, that the future of French wouldn’t be good? Do you agree with that? So you have your answer.”

He then left the room.

D’Arcy-McGee Liberal MNA David Birnbaum, the party’s point person for the English-speaking community, later reported hearing Legault make remarks about citizens in the West Island in the legislature during the question period that followed the news conference.

“Shameful,” Birnbaum tweeted. “Just now, François Legault, off-micro(phone) but audible and twice, said: ‘C’est le West Island qui s’énerve!’ This was his outrageous response to our question-period intervention on his on-the-record attacks on Quebecers whose mother tongue is other than French.”
Legault grew up on the West Island, in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue .

The premier received a strong rebuke from the Quebec Community Groups Network, the umbrella group for English-language organizations, which responded with its own tweet.

“Premier François Legault — officially the minister responsible for relations with English-speaking Quebecers — is showing incredible disrespect for his constituency,” said the tweet.

Sparks were already flying in question period, with the opposition parties ganging up on Legault for a second day in a row because of his decision to wade into the emotional subject of language and immigration.

“If the premier thinks 14,000 people (the approximate number of family-unification immigrants per year) are going to lead us to Louisiana in a few years, it is because he is trapped in his ideology,” Québec solidaire co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois fired across the floor at Legault.

“In the ideology of the premier, immigrants are a threat to French.”

Legault continued his offensive on the same day Bill 96 became law.

In a short signing ceremony early Wednesday, Lt-Gov. J. Michel Doyon signed the bill, which was adopted last week in the National Assembly .

Jolin-Barrette said Bill 96 will give Quebec the “tools it needs” to protect and promote French.

He said some measures will take effect immediately, such as the creation of the Ministry of the French Language. Other measures, like those applying to commercial signs and francization requirements for small businesses, will apply in three years.

The ceiling on enrolment in English CEGEPs will kick in next year, but the requirement to take additional French courses will come into effect in two years.

Within the next year, Jolin-Barrette will table a new government linguistic policy.

“There’s time to get things done correctly and we’re giving people time to adapt,” he told reporters.

pauthier@postmedia.com

Related

Jamil Jivani: Quebec's Bill 96 hardly at odds with conservative movement

There is an emerging consensus among Canadian journalists and politicians on Quebec’s Bill 96, which requires most government and many business services to be offered exclusively in French, with specific exceptions. Before jumping on any bandwagons, we should try to understand what exactly is happening in our country’s second biggest province.

Anglophone Canadians may reasonably conclude that Premier François Legault and his ruling Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) are on an island unto themselves. Five of six Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidates have publicly opposed Bill 96, as has the Conservative Party of Quebec, the Quebec Liberal Party, and numerous members of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal caucus.

The general criticism of Bill 96, which was signed into law Wednesday, comes down to its potential to marginalize anglophone minority communities and non-francophone immigrants. Comments from the political left and right sound remarkably similar: former NDP leader Tom Mulcair described the bill as a return to a period of “great darkness” for Quebec, while the Washington Post’s JJ McCullough said it detracts from “Canadian progressiveness.”


But, outside of Canada, premier Legault is far from alone. In fact, there is a growing global conversation about national conservatism that is philosophically aligned with what the CAQ is implementing in Quebec. Critics of Bill 96 should account for this reality, rather than dismiss the legislation as simple pandering for votes.

The term “national conservatism” has been popularized by Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony, who serves as president of the Herzl Institute and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. Hazony’s most recent book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery , outlines a vision of conservative politics that is based on the view that a person’s political obligations grow from his or her belonging to a family and nation. This vision conceives of language as one of a handful of traditional institutions (in addition to religion, laws, government, business) that families and nations use to pass their values on to future generations.

Quebec fits Hazony’s definition of what constitutes a nation: “a number of tribes with a common language or religion, and a past history of acting as a body for the common defence and other large‐​scale enterprises.” In fact, given Quebec’s commitment to secularism, the French language is an even more important bond between the province’s diverse communities than it might be otherwise.

National conservatism is gaining significant traction . In the past three years, Hazony’s Edmund Burke Foundation has hosted conferences in London, Brussels, Washington, Orlando, and Rome featuring some of the biggest names in politics and media: Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, entrepreneur Peter Thiel, former European Union MP Daniel Hannan, and The Spectator’s Douglas Murray. Earlier this year, in Brussels, the Foundation welcomed two prime ministers: Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki and Slovenia’s Janez Janša.

I don’t mean to suggest that premier Legault is part of the national conservatism network, or even knows that it exists. But what’s clear is that in the context of this global conversation, the CAQ are not nearly the outcasts that other politicians or journalists might make them out to be. Leaders from around the world share Legault’s view that language is central to national identity, and that a nation’s traditional institutions should be primarily focused on passing its values on from one generation to the next.

That Premier Legault finds himself in international company doesn’t mean Bill 96 is without flaws. The bill’s most incisive critics will argue that this legislation goes too far by curbing the constitutional rights of citizens. There is certainly a debate to be had on that point. It’s also worth questioning if Bill 96 is the best way to achieve its stated purpose. Research published by the Review of Economic Studies in 2020 indicates that heavy-handed assimilationist policies can have the opposite effect than what’s intended.

But the fact that Legault’s vision for Quebec can be easily placed in a global context does strengthen the case for taking Bill 96 seriously. The ideas at play are bigger than one politician’s re-election campaign. This is about the future of Canada, and how the nation of Quebec fits into our country.

National Post

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