CANADA: Happy Birthday, Bonne Chance

Happy Birthday, Bonnie Chance

Fireworks blossomed and flags rippled in Ottawa last week, as 23 million Canadians—or most of them, anyway —cheered the 110th anniversary of their national confederation. The $3.5 million birthday bash was a big change from last year, when merrymaking funds were slashed abruptly by an austerity-minded government. This time the question of national unity overrode any urge for thrift. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was determined to show that Canadians want to stick together as a nation despite the election victory of the separatist Parti Québécois last November in Quebec, his country’s largest province. Said Trudeau in his Dominion Day address: “The sort of bickering which has too often been characteristic of Canadian life is giving way to a renewed willingness to open our hearts and minds to each other.”

Big Trouble. Demonstrating that hearts and minds policy, some days earlier Trudeau put in an appearance in Quebec at the annual holiday honoring St. Jean Baptiste, the province’s patron saint. There, Quebec Premier René Lévesque also happens to be making big trouble for Trudeau on the most explosive issue in officially bilingual Canada: language rights. A fundamental goal of Lévesque’s party is that Quebec “will be the country of a people that speaks French.” Stripped of secessionist overtones, that aim makes great sense to many of the 4.8 million French-speaking Quebeckers, who fear that their language and culture are gradually being overwhelmed on their home ground by English. Thus Lévesque has embarked on a drastic program to legislate the language of everyday life in Quebec — meaning parlez français for everyone.

His proposed language law has outraged the 1.2 million non-French Quebeckers, most of whom are English-speaking. Trudeau’s government sympathizes with Lévesque’s aim of preserving French, but fears that the bill is only a first step toward the Premier’s avowed goal of separating Quebec from the other nine Canadian provinces.

The proposed new law would make French the only “official” language in Quebec. In effect, that would mean that all business with the provincial government would have to be conducted in French, and all professionals, like doctors and lawyers, would have to display “appropriate” fluency to obtain licenses to practice. Corporations, traditionally dominated by Quebec’s English-speaking elite, would be monitored by a government board to ensure that French became their “language of work.” One section of the bill would even forbid the sale of toys or games requiring “use of a non-French vocabulary for their operation” unless a French-language version was available as well.

The most hotly debated proposals concern the public education system. If Lévesque has his way, all new residents of Quebec must send their children to French-language schools, unless at least one parent attended English-language elementary school in the province. The rationale: nine out of ten non-French-speaking immigrants to Quebec now choose English-language schooling for their children—a trend that threatens the long-term survival of French as the province’s principal language.

English-speaking Quebeckers argue that the proposed law is aimed at strangling their school system and taking away rights they have enjoyed since Canada became a national confederation in 1867. Even Lévesque admits that his draconian bill needs some amending. For instance, since the measure makes no distinction between immigrants from abroad and those from other parts of Canada, an English-speaking parent who moved from, say, Toronto to Montreal, would have to send his children to French schools.

The issue has put Prime Minister Trudeau’s Liberal government in a bind. Ottawa is deeply committed to preserving the French language, but through Trudeau’s policy of government approval of the use of both languages. Lévesque’s school policy could drive a wedge between Quebeckers and other Canadians that Trudeau cannot condone politically. Yet if federal opposition to the language bill is too strident, it could drive more French-speaking Quebeckers into Lévesque’s separatist camp.

No Confrontation. So the government has decided to waffle. Defending Canadian bilingualism, Ottawa has explicitly supported the right of all Canadians “to have their children educated in the official language of their choice.” But at the same time, a government spokesman has also said that such freedom of choice could be “deferred until present elements of insecurity for the French language and culture are removed or reduced.” In short, Ottawa wants no confrontation on the issue.

Quebec’s English-speaking minority is battling hard against the bill, which has been approved in principle by the Quebec legislature but still awaits formal passage. So far, Lévesque’s government has received 264 public briefs on the language proposals—most of them opposed —in the course of hearings scheduled to end later this month. One association of Anglophone parents has accused the government of building “on the bones of the English-speaking community.” The Quebec chamber of commerce warns that if the bill is passed in its present form, an exodus of corporations could cost the province, which already has an unemployment rate of 10%, an additional 23,000 jobs. While Lévesque may back down somewhat on the schooling issue, he remains staunchly in favor of the language law as a whole.

Whatever the final shape of the law, increasing numbers of English-speaking Quebeckers are uncertain about their future in a province run by the fractious Parti Québécois. Already, a kind of ethnic exodus has begun. In English-speaking areas of Montreal, so many houses are for sale that real estate men no longer bother to put up FOR SALE signs—A VENDRE that is—on the front lawns.