Montreal: Liberal MNAs abandon their constituents

[Harold Schiffman]

 Monday » March 10 » 2008

Liberal MNAs abandon their constituents

The Gazette


Monday, March 10, 2008


There might well be a thorny legal question in the Bill 104 case that
the Supreme Court of Canada has now agreed to hear. But the political
dimension of the issue is simple: It's about the two-faced shame of
the Quebec Liberal government, and the lamentable silence of Liberal
members of the National Assembly from Montreal Island. You recall the
case. It starts with the fact that Quebec's language charter says you
can't get into an English grade school or high school unless you, or
one of your parents, received the majority of your, or their,
schooling in English in Canada. (Oddly, this arrangement means that
only anglo parents have full freedom of choice.)

This painful restriction on basic free choice is part of the
linguistic compromise that holds sway in Quebec. Many parents,
including a lot of francophones, rage against this ham-handed social
engineering, but the consensus - shared by many anglophones and
allophones - is that the price is worth paying to ensure linguistic
peace. Still, it sits poorly with many of those anglophones and
allophones that a Liberal government - which would have only a
corporal's guard of MNAs without anglo and allo votes - insists on
policing the edges of this school-language policy like prison guards
in a bad movie.

When a law is restrictive, human ingenuity gets busy. Some parents,
from all three language cateogories, worked out the fact that if a
student's first school year was in English, then he or she had a
golden ticket into English schools right through Secondary V The trick
was to get that first year, and the solution was a fully private
school, one that gets no government subsidies. Such schools are exempt
from the language rules. This was buying your way around the law, and
only a few could afford it. And so a cottage industry was born.

In 2002 the Parti Québécois, devoted as usual to making life here hard
for people not just like them, enacted Bill 104 to weld shut this tiny
hole in the language law. That sturdy rationalist Brent Tyler, on
behalf of 26 families, challenged the law in court, saying it violated
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms - and he won. Whoosh! That sudden
sound was the Liberal Party of Quebec rushing to the barricades to
repel this assault by menacing Grade 1 tykes. With not a murmur of
dissent from even one of the anglophone and elected-by-anglophones
Liberal MNAs, Quebec vowed within hours to appeal to the Supreme Court
to get Bill 104 reinstated.

That's the case the Supremes will now hear. Nine justices will decide
what seems reasonable to them. Meanwhile anglophone and allophone
voters should consider what seems reasonable to us. Yes, we understand
that the Liberals live in mortal fear of any accusation of slackness
in "defending the French language." But too many Liberal MNAs have in
the process left themselves open to the accusation of abandoning their
own constituents, without even a word of explanation. Shame on every
single one of them.

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=cb7eca11-8f76-41c6-b171-105d24cc252e
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