Montreal: Charest and Marois must both face their language hard-liners

[Harold Schiffman]

Charest and Marois must both face their language hard-liners. Charest
wants party to boost nationalism, while Marois fights with anti-anglo
crowd

DON MACPHERSON
The Gazette


Saturday, February 09, 2008


Liberal Premier Jean Charest and Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois
have a couple of things in common. Both are facing important policy
meetings of their respective parties, on successive weekends in March.
And this week, questions of language and identity emerged as
potentially divisive issues at both meetings, pitting the leaders
against part of their memberships. The difference is that while
Marois's problem might be to hold back her party from going farther
than she wants, Charest's might be to bring it along as far as he
wants to go.

Marois is resisting another expected attempt by PQ language hawks to
extend to CEGEPs the restrictions on admission to English primary and
secondary schools when the party holds a mini-convention to adopt its
platform for the next election. As for Charest, he originally wanted
the Liberal policy convention to restore some of the nationalist
credibility his party has lost and make it competitive again in French
Quebec, where it was reduced to third-party status in last year's
election. To that end, the party created three task forces last summer
to draft policy proposals for debate and adoption at the convention,
the most politically important of which was on identity.

Along with the other task forces, the one on identity presented a
preliminary report to the party's general council in September. It
unabashedly referred to Quebec as a "francophone nation" that must be
recognized in the Canadian constitution, along with its "duty to
protect and promote the French fact" not only in this province but
across Canada as well. It called for "concrete follow-up" to
Parliament's 2006 vote recognizing "the Québécois" as a nation. And it
said immigrants must be required to have a better knowledge of French
before arriving here and have a responsibility to adhere to common
Quebec values such as secularity and to "integrate the civic culture
of the host society." But the unconditional federalists and minorities
who dominated the September meeting in Montreal were overwhelmingly
critical of the report, saying it was not federalist enough and
divided Quebecers between "us" and "them." After further consultations
with party members, some of the task force's proposals were watered
down in its final report, made public this week.

Instead of a Quebec "nation," it calls for constitutional recognition
of this province's "uniqueness" in English and "specificity" in
French. The duty to protect and promote French and the follow-up on
recognition of a Québécois nation are not mentioned in the general
framework resolution to be proposed at the convention (available in
English at www.plq.org/ congres/en/). Neither are the
"responsibilities" of immigrants to adopt Quebec values, though
newcomers would still have to sign a "knowledge declaration" aimed at
giving them a "better knowledge" of those values. But at the same
time, some new proposals introduced in the task force's final report
might be too much for some delegates to the convention.

There would be no changes to the language legislation itself. But more
"francization counsellors" would be hired to "educate" business owners
about their legal obligations under the language legislation and there
would be a "significant increase" in fines for non-compliance after a
warning. And the task force proposes that Quebec be given a veto over
decisions of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications
Commission "exclusively pertaining to the Quebec territory." This
means Quebec could stop new English-language radio or television
stations from going on the air or even force existing ones to shut
down when their broadcasting licences come up for renewal.

Two of its language proposals contradict each other. On the one hand,
it says the government must "defend the integrity of our linguistic
laws before the courts." On the other, it calls for the restoration of
the federal court challenges program for linguistic minorities - which
could provide funding for more challenges to the language laws by
lawyer Brent Tyler and others.

(c) The Gazette (Montreal) 2008
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=4ee2ac3a-6ebc-4176-bb05-7a0f925d7c58


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