Among outgoing premier Pauline Marois’ parting lines as she went down in flames Monday night — unable even to hang onto her own seat in the Quebec provincial election — was: “I am worried for the future of our language. For 400 years, we’ve been speaking our beautiful language in North America.”
French is indeed a beautiful language, and it deserves to have a secure future in Quebec and Canada. But Marois never understood that the way to achieve that is not by making people hate you, and not by attacking the faiths of immigrants who came to Quebec seeking a better life and who willingly learned French so they could contribute to Quebec society through work in the public sector.
Preserving French does not require trampling on anyone’s human rights. In other words, Madame Marois, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
The way to preserve French is not by using the language as a legislated sledgehammer with which to hit anglophones over the head. Rather, it’s through bilingualism, by encouraging unilingual adults to learn the other language, and ensuring that children growing up in Quebec are able to move between the two languages with fluidity and ease. It’s a privilege and an advantage to be bilingual; the more languages you know, the richer you are intellectually and culturally, and the more opportunities are open to you.
There are French-immersion schools in Quebec for anglophone children, but there also ought to be English-immersion schools for francophone children.
When both languages are on an equal footing, they will both flourish. International examples abound. Finnish schoolchildren are required to learn Swedish. Switzerland has four official languages, and they have equal status — French, German, Italian and Romansh. Belgium has three official languages — Dutch, French and German.
Yet, from the days when René Lévesque was premier of Quebec, the approach whenever the Parti Québécois has held power has been one of antagonism. You’d think by now the separatists would learn that it accomplishes nothing, but they just kept pushing even harder in the wrong direction. An EKOS poll conducted in January 2013 found 42 per cent of anglophones had contemplated leaving Quebec after Marois took office. It’s hard to endear your language to people when you seem hell-bent on driving them away.
In the name of preserving French, Marois’s term in office, including her fractious election campaign, has been one bozo eruption after another. Remember Pastagate, when the provincial language police cited an Italian restaurant for using the word “pasta” on its menu? The government backed down when it became the laughingstock of social media and the rest of Canada, but still, Pastagate did happen.
The government also backed down a second time when things got even more ridiculous, after the language police ordered a Chelsea, Que., store owner to post to her Facebook page in French, not English. That move turned out to be a decided “Unlike” among Quebec anglophones.
Marois’s final attempt to shoot herself in the foot came when she said that any public-sector workers fired for wearing kippahs, hijabs, turbans or what-have-you would be helped by the government to find jobs in the private sector, even though days earlier, she had said the private sector was free to implement the same firings and human-rights violations (my words, not hers) that the public sector would use. By that time, everybody seemed to be under attack, and the French language appeared to be a side issue.
Let’s hope that under Philippe Couillard’s leadership, with the emphasis he has sensibly placed on bilingualism, French will truly be preserved and cherished and nurtured.
French really is a beautiful language and it never deserved to be the target of any antipathy in Quebec — that antipathy should have been reserved strictly for the bigoted, small-minded people leading the province who thought the way to save French was to drive everyone away instead of trying to bring them closer together.
In the meantime, we should all be thanking Pierre Karl Péladeau for helping deal the fatal blow to his own party’s hold on power. Good riddance to them — and vive le français!
