A future Liberal government will relax the Charter of the French language. All the candidates for leadership want to amend it.
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“We should scrap (Law 96),” declared Denis Coderre categorically, regarding the CAQ legislation which strengthened the Charter of the French language by imposing in particular the freezing of registrations in English-speaking CEGEPs.
His rival in the leadership race, Frédéric Beauchemin, is of the same opinion. As a father, he deplores that the Legault government has limited the access of French speakers to the college establishment of their choice.
“As a parent, what I would have liked for my children was to send them to the CEGEP of their choice so that they could go to the university of their choice. And if they want to go to an English-speaking university because they want to have an international career or a career based in Montreal with international clients, speaking English is a good deal for them,” explained the member for Marguerite-Bourgeoys, on the sidelines of the PLQ Congress which was held this weekend in Lévis.
According to him, removing this provision from the Charter of the French Language will not contribute to weakening our common language.
Rodriguez the child of Law 101
Another pretender to the liberal throne, Pablo Rodriguez also plans to end the freeze on registrations in English-language colleges.
Child of Law 101, he is committed to the Charter of the French language. When he arrived in Quebec at the age of eight with his parents and two sisters, he did not speak a word of French.
But he believes that the recently added provision which forces immigrants who have settled in Quebec for more than six months to receive communications from the state exclusively in French does not hold water.
“Six months to learn French is not necessarily easy!” he told journalists. He at the same time recognized that his learning of the language of Molière had been relatively rapid. “Because I understood one thing, which was that if I didn’t learn French, I wouldn’t have many friends. So I scrambled,” he recalled.
What annoys Charles Milliard are mainly the measures imposing more bureaucracy on companies. “There are major pitfalls for entrepreneurs,” he noted. Consider, for example, the translation “of all contracts in all areas”.
He is also in favor of a “little housekeeping” in the new measures added to the Charter of the French language.
