Sewer backup: the image was recently used on my microphone at QUB by constitutionalist Patrick Taillon to qualify the insults (“full of crap”) belched by Liberal MP Francis Drouin in front of two Quebec researchers.
The latter recalled a scientifically based observation: higher education in English in Quebec accelerates assimilation to the dominant global language.
Bilingual Quebec
Since then, Liberal elected officials in Ottawa have united to apologize for their foul-mouthed colleague.
One of them, last week, added his two cents. For Quebec to be “stronger,” argued Angelo Iacono, it should have two official languages: “I believe that Quebec and I believe that Canada should be a bilingual country.”
Always the same refrain. As if, since a government (liberal, that of Bourassa, in 1974) made French the official language of Quebec, it had “weakened”. As if the only bilingual province in fact, in this damn Dominion, was not, precisely, Quebec.
It is even “by far the province where the proportion of the population capable of carrying on a conversation in French and English is the highest,” recalled The Canadian Press a few days ago. This proportion increased, from 2001 to 2021, from 40.8% to 46.4%.
So don’t worry, liberals: despite all our laws, English has progressed since 1974. If we even applied law 101 to CEGEP, it would still progress.
Real equality
The constitutionalist Taillon also underlines this: the federal government promotes, in all areas, so-called “real” equality. Concept which is opposed to “formal equality”, that which is proclaimed, without regard to results. On the contrary, real equality wants results and, to get there, it is prepared to treat certain groups unequally. (In the past, we spoke of “positive discrimination”.)
The federal government is also obsessed with systemic discrimination. Hence these Canada research chairs which immediately exclude an advantaged group: (allegedly) “white” men without disabilities, cisgender and heterosexual.
Formal equality
Curiously, the federal government, in linguistic matters, adapts very well to formal equality. It places French-speaking minorities in the ROC (“rest of Canada”) and English-speaking pseudo-minorities in Quebec on the same footing. Totally incomparable situations.
Even when a researcher like Frédéric Lacroix points out statistical disparities in which the funding of English-speaking universities in Quebec is systematically unequal compared to French-speaking universities, elected officials like Iacono or Drouin complain.
“For the promotion of French in the rest of Canada, the federal government does a lot,” admits Taillon. But his real project, he continues, based on the formal equality of the Official Languages Act (OLA), “is English stronger in Quebec”.
Certainly, in the new version of this same LLO, Ottawa made a small opening to real equality in the linguistic field, by admitting that French in Quebec also needed help.
But listening to the Liberal MPs, we say that the update of the “linguistic software” did not really work, which is causing some pushback.
