Quebec Nationalism and Canadian Federalism

Why is there, within Quebec, a strong nationalist movement seeking independence from Canada? This might seem, at first, surprising since Canada is after all a federal state and Quebec is a province within that state. Therefore, Quebec enjoys some level of self-government and it is, for that reason, in a better situation than Scotland, Wales, Catalonia, Gallicia or the Basque Country. These nations would love to be federated states in a true federation. So how do we explain Quebec nationalism? Does the example of Quebec prove once and for all that nationalists, in general, are never going to be happy with less than full sovereignty, no matter how hard we try to accommodate their needs?  I want to show that the choice of independence can be explained despite the fact that Quebec seems to enjoy a certain amount of self-government as a province within Canada. I shall make observations in order to explain what appears to be a very puzzling situation. How do we account for the fact that Quebec is still unhappy within Canada even if it is a federated state?

I shall first show that Canadians refuse to recognize the existence of a Quebec people and I shall then prove that the federal government is engaged into a process of nation building. It wants to create a Canadian national identity while ignoring the Quebec identity.

IS THERE A QUEBEC NATION?

I must first illustrate Canada’s rejection of the existence of a Quebec nation. In order to achieve this aim, we must first distinguish between territorial federalism and multinational federalism. When Canada was created, it might have looked as a multinational federation because Quebec was one of the four founding provinces, and that province was composed by a majority of francophones. So it might be argued that the frontiers of the province of Quebec were up to a certain point created in order to respect the existence of a national majority of French Canadians and to provide for Quebec some kind of self-government.

Indeed, some Quebecers thought at that time that Canada saw itself as a multinational country, a country with two founding peoples. When the constitution was adopted - without a referendum - by a close majority of deputies in 1867, the newspapers within Quebec described the event as the creation of new agreement between the two founding peoples. But it has been argued since then, and in particular by the historian Ramsay Cook, that this constitutional order had never been interpreted in this way by English Canada. The acknowledgment of a province containing a majority of francophones can thus be seen not as an acknowledgement of Canada’s multinational character, but rather as a realistic proposal that Canada was forced to make in order to deal with the French Canadian problem after the failure of a forced union, in the decades that had preceded the creation of the Canadian federation.

So I would disagree with Will Kymlicka who tries in a recent paper to draw positive consequences from the fact that the Canadian federation initially contained a certain multinational dimension, in contrast with the USA where no state were never allowed to be composed of a majority other than Anglophones. We could thus describe the USA as a territorial federation. But I want to claim that even from an historical point of view, Canada was never meant to be a true multinational federation. There is no mention of two founding peoples in the Canadian constitution, and history was never interpreted in such a way by English Canadians. So I’m afraid that Kymlicka is imagining, ex-post facto, a situation that never quite existed at the time. In any case, in the very same paper, Kymlicka recognizes that Canada is no longer a multinational federation, and he quotes Philip Resnick as a political scientist who has prescribed to turn Canada into such a multinational federation. Unfortunately, however, this point of view is now held only by a very small minority of intellectuals in Canada.

Canadians, for the most part, see themselves as forming a single nation composed of all Canadian citizens. Their nation is Canada as a whole. Canada is seen by them as a single nation-state, and not as a multination state. The idea of a Canadian multination state has not yet entered the minds of most Canadians. There is a Canadian nation, but there is no Quebec nation. This was the view of the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau who saw Canada as composed of one nation, two linguistic communities, five economic regions, ten provinces, two territories and a multicultural mosaic. Nowadays, most Canadians endorse that view, and so most of them reject the existence of a Quebec nation. They even reject the idea of a Quebec nation within the Canadian nation.

The demand for recognition of the binational and bicultural character of Canada has been initially made by the Royal Commission’s report on bilingualism and biculturalism in the 1960s, presided by Laurendeau and Dunton. It has then been made by all successive Quebec governments.

Of course, Canada has adopted a policy of multiculturalism. Isn’t this a way to accommodate the needs of Quebecers? It must be emphasized that the policy of multiculturalism was adopted in 1971 under Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government as an answer to the prescriptions contained in the Laurendeau/Dunton’s commission. Instead of accepting the binational and bicultural character of Canada, Trudeau responded by adopting a policy of multiculturalism that celebrates the cultural diversity of immigration. So it cannot be interpreted as a recognition of the existence of a Quebec people.

However, according to Kymlicka, the policy should be described as a policy of multiethnicity and not as a policy of multiculturalism. Trudeau in a way made a mistake by describing this policy as a policy of multiculturalism. And Trudeau also apparently made the mistake of describing the welcoming communities not as cultural or national but rather as linguistic communities. But this is according to Kymlicka what he meant. If we follow Kymlicka’s reading, and if we accept, in addition, the purely cultural account of Quebec’s nation according to which it is essentially composed of francophones, and thus as Québécois, to use Kymlicka’s own phrase, then we could be in a position to argue that the policy is after all compatible with the existence of a Quebec nation. According to Kymlicka, the Canadian multicultural policy is in effect a bicultural policy. It respects the Quebec’s national culture.

But I am afraid that this reasoning won’t do. First, the Quebec nation is a political community composed of all Quebec citizens, and it also includes Anglo-Quebecers. Second, the policy of multiculturalism asserts the value of immigrant cultural diversity and not the value of polyethnicity. Third, it does not assert the existence of two welcoming national cultures but rather of two linguistic communities. The policy stipulates that immigrants must integrate into either of the two linguistic communities, and it does not talk about the bicultural or binational character of these two welcoming communities. Kymlicka would have us believe that Trudeau was in effect trying to accommodate the existence of the Quebec people in this policy. But nothing could be further from the truth. I told him about this problem eight years ago in a conference that I organized on nationalism, but Kymlicka keeps on saying that Quebec nationalists were wrong in interpreting the Canadian policy of multiculturalism as a way to ignore the existence of a Quebec people.

In effect, this is exactly what is happening. With this policy, any immigrant arriving in Quebec is free to integrate either into the francophone community or the Anglophone community. But this goes against the recognition of a Quebec as a nation, for if we were to accept the national character of Quebec’s political community, then we should ask immigrants to acquire the common public language of this political community, namely French. Of course, if they want to, immigrants can integrate into the English community. But they must also acquire the language of the political community as a whole. But this is precisely what they can avoid if they follow the Canadian policy of multiculturalism.

The failure to commit oneself toward the existence of a Quebec nation is even reflected in the Supreme Court reference on secession that was published in August 1998. In that document, the judges refuse to commit themselves to saying that there is a Quebec nation. They deal with the issue of Quebec secession as a particular instance of a more general problem, namely the secession of any province within Canada.

Canada is a de facto multinational federation, but it is not a de jure multinational federation. And if Canadians do not want to turn Canada into a de jure multinational federation, it is because they do not perceive themselves as part of a multinational federation.

Indeed, in perfect coherence with the preceding remark, Canadians reject the idea of giving to Quebec a particular status as a province within Canada. The demand for recognition of a particular status has been made since the 1960s, but it has always been ignored.

All Canadians assert the principle of the equality of the ten provinces. This principle has been endorsed explicitly in the July version of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, namely in the provisions regarding the triple E senate, which had to be efficient, elected and equal. It has once again been reaffirmed in 1997 by the nine other provinces in the Calgary declaration. It was then also endorsed by the nine legislatures. The document states that Quebec is a unique society but this expression has no implication whatsoever, since it has to be made compatible with the principle of equality of status of all ten provinces.

This would be incoherent if we recognized the existence of a Quebec people. The province of Quebec would then be very different from all other provinces, and it would only be natural to give it not only a different treatment, but also a different juridical status. But since Canadians refuse the existence of a Quebec people, it is only natural to refuse also the existence of a special status to the province of Quebec.

Canadians also reject the principle of asymmetric federalism. By asymmetry, I mean the existence of a distribution of powers between the federal government and the provinces that differs from one province to another. There is now, of course, a certain de facto asymmetry in the Canadian federation. Contrary to other provinces, Quebec has its own civil code, its own income tax system, its own pension plan, its own linguistic laws. It has a certain control over some of its immigration and it has also control over its manpower training. But for most Canadians, this tendency must now be stopped, because asymmetric federalism is now unacceptable to them.

Needless to say, it should not be entrenched in the constitution. Canada must not therefore become a de jure asymmetric federation. Any power that is offered to a particular province must now be offered to all provinces in accordance with the principle of equality of the ten provinces. In perfect coherence with the rejection of a particular status, Canadians refuse the formal recognition of an asymmetry present in the distribution of powers. So a fortiori, the asymmetry cannot be increased to meet the other traditional demands of Quebec.

The demand for asymmetric federalism has been repeatedly made in the nineteen seventies. It is one of the main recommendations contained in the report of the Pépin / Robarts commission.

IS THERE JUST A CANADIAN NATION?

As I just mentioned, Canada rejects the existence of a Quebec people, rejects a particular status and rejects an asymmetric federalism. But the federal government does not simply remain passive in its refusal to accommodate Quebec. It is constantly on the move. And it is hard to resist the temptation to describe what is going on as a process of nation-building.

There are a certain number of events that took place in the last twenty years that are of a particular importance in this regard. First, we have witnessed, increasingly, some federal spending in Quebec’s provincial jurisdictions, that is, even within those jurisdictions that were recognized in the constitution of 1867, as exclusively provincial. According to the Constitution of 1967, Quebec like all the other provinces has an exclusive jurisdiction over health care, hospitals, education and natural resources. But the federal government is using its own spending power to intervene in all those provincial jurisdictions. Quebec has contested this abusive use of the federal government’s spending power, but the Supreme Court has ruled that it was constitutional.

Second, Canada has imposed upon Quebec a new constitutional order in 1982, despite the fact that the vast majority of Quebec deputies in Quebec’s national assembly voted against it. To this day, no Quebec government, federalist or sovereignist, has ever accepted to sign this revised constitution. By ignoring Quebec’s rejection, Canada has denied Quebec’s right to internal self-determination within Canada. They treated Quebec as a province, not as a nation. It was, according to them, nine provinces out of ten who had accepted to patriate the constitution.

Third, this new constitutional order denied to Quebec the veto that it had before on any constitutional reform. Before 1982, there was a constitutional convention that gave Quebec a veto on any modification to the constitution. But the Court denied the existence of such a veto when Quebec protested after the patriation and this is why this new constitutional order was declared legal by the court.

Indeed, it must be emphasized, and this is my fourth point, that the judges of the Supreme Court are all appointed by the federal prime minister. So in general, they tend to approve most of the things that are done by the federal government. The Court has, for instance, approved most of the laws that were introduced by the federal government, but it has rejected many laws that were introduced by the provincial legislatures. They approved the patriation of the constitution in 1982 and that they denied the existence of a constitutional convention that gave Quebec a veto. And as I've just said that they approved the federal government’s spending power. I could also mention the fact that in the reference on secession, the court says that the secession process must involve an accommodation between the two majorities, the one in Canada and the one in Quebec. But they apparently did not think that things should be the same when it was time to adopt a new constitutional order in 1982.

So the court is playing an important role in the nation building process that has characterized the policy of the federal government of the last twenty years.

Fifth, the new constitutional order of 1982, the one that was imposed upon Quebec, also included a new amending formula to the Canadian constitution. Any substantial modification to the constitution now requires the unanimous consent of all the Premiers of the ten provinces, and it must be ratified by each provincial legislatures within a period of three years. So in effect, although individuals are able to express themselves in referenda on different political reforms, Quebec as a people cannot choose its own political organization within Canada. It has thus no internal self-determination as a people. It is forced to accept a constitutional order that it did not choose and it is incapable of implementing any substantial reform that it would choose.

Sixth, the Meech Lake Accord, which contained five modest provisions, including the one stating that Quebec was a distinct society, was finally rejected by two provinces in 1990. So even this minor reform was not made possible. It appears that Canadians did not want to accept to recognize Quebec as a distinct society. For 60% of them, in polls that were conducted few months before, the word ‘distinct’ meant ‘superior’. That clause would have enabled Quebec to protect and promote French language within the province.

So there is no formal recognition that the Quebec government can make sure that French is the common public language within Quebec. Because of that, Quebec’s linguistic policies are always contested in the Courts by a federally funded political organization called Alliance Quebec. This group receives each year one million dollars from Heritage Canada, Sheila Copps’ Ministry. They recently went in the Courts trying to defend the principle of the equality of the two languages, French and English, on commercial signs, going against the Supreme Court’s ruling according to which French could have a priority without violating freedom of expression. They also argued in another case that the obligation to send one’s children to French schools was a violation of the freedom of choice of French parents. They fail to see, as the Quebec judge of the Superior court emphasized, that this feature of the Quebec linguistic Charter reflects a reasonable equilibrium between the collective rights of the Quebec people and the individual rights of its citizens. Even if Alliance Quebec lawyers lost those two battles in the courts, they are making an appeal in the supreme court of Canada. And they just won another battle in the courts regarding the accessibility of Canadian children in English schools within Quebec. The Quebec law supposes that in order to have their child in an English school in Quebec, the parents themselves or one of their children must already have been educated most of the time in an English school in Canada. But the Canadian charter of rights prescribes more vaguely that their other children must have frequented an English school, without specifying any duration. The Quebec superior court judge interpreted this provision in a very surprising way, by allowing that a child could attend English schools in Quebec, as long as one of his brothers or sisters would be educated for a couple of weeks in an English school somewhere else in Canada.

MORE RECENT BATTLES

The offensive does not stop here. The recent accord on the Social union reached in 1999 between the federal government and the nine other provinces approves the federal government’s intrusions in exclusively provincial jurisdictions. Quebec was left alone, once again, isolated, in trying to defend the possibility of opting out of any federal program with financial compensation. This demand has been repeatedly made in the last forty years. It was made by successive Quebec governments, federalist or sovereignist. The federal government and all other premiers rejected that principle. The nine provinces had initially accepted the principle, but now they decided to go against the agreement that they had reached with Quebec and that they had signed. They initially had approved the opting out principle defended by Quebec, but they were now going against their own signatures. This reversal is not new. It reminds us that the provinces had done the same in 1981, when eight of them turned their back on Quebec and went against their own signature to approve the patriation of the constitution.

In any case, in the social accord, the federal government and the nine provinces only accept the possibility of opting out of any new shared programs. The federal government is thus allowed, for the first time in Canadian history, by the nine other provinces to spend as much as it wants, after consultation, in exclusive provincial jurisdictions, as long as these programs are financed exclusively by the federal government. And provinces are not allowed to opt out of those programs. For the federal government, this is a perfect deal. With the enormous surpluses that it now has, it is no longer interested in shared programs. So the agreement, in effect, allows the federal government to intervene as much as it wants in education and health care. The Accord on Social Union has been denounced by many federalists, but their voice has not been heard.

There used to be a time when Quebec could perhaps find among some of the other ten provinces allies for an additional devolution of powers. But provinces have now capitulated and are willing to let the federal government interfere within their own provincial affairs. So this argument can no longer be used to counter Quebec sovereignists.

The Canadian government is therefore forcing its way into provincial jurisdictions like never before. The Millenium fund, the Chairs of excellence, the program for parental leave are all recent examples of federal intrusions. All these programs fail to respect a subsidiarity clause.

So is Canada the most decentralized federation? Perhaps on paper, but there is no jurisdiction which has not been invaded by the federal government in the last twenty years. So in effect, the federal government is increasingly becoming centralized. Is it fiscally decentralized ? The growing surpluses of the federal government announces the turn of the tide. In less than twenty years the federal government will be spending more in Quebec than the Quebec government itself. In addition, Quebec must assume all the fastly growing costs of the health care system, while the federal government is accumulating huge surpluses with programs that do not grow as fast as the provincial programs.

In recent years, the nation building process went back at the juridical order. As you probably know, there was in 1995 a referendum on sovereignty and partnership within Quebec. 50,6% voted against this option and 49,4% were favorable to it. After the referendum, the federal government went to the Supreme Court hoping that the judges would declare that secession was illegal if it was done without having to conform to the usual procedures described in the new Constitutional order. They wanted the Supreme Court to rule that the only way for Quebec to leave the federation would be with the unanimous approval of all provinces and the federal government.

So the Supreme Court had to manage a delicate political situation and, perhaps because of that, the document that they produced in 1998, the reference on the secession of Quebec, as an answer to three queries of the federal government, was a fairly well balanced judgment. The Court expressed the opinion that a clear result on a clear question would create a constitutional obligation to negotiate secession, in accordance with four underlying principles. Among those is the principle of the primacy of the constitution. In order to comply with the principle, negotiations with a seceding Quebec must lead to a constitutional amendment. In other words, Quebec cannot leave without an amendment to the Canadian constitution that would adapt Canada to its new situation.

However, the Court also says that in the absence of a clear willingness to negotiate, the international community could be led to recognize an unconstitutional declaration of independence by Quebec. So the Court innovates in an important way, because it formulates in the 1998 reference, a procedural recognition of the right of Quebec to secede, even if Quebec is not a colony or not an oppressed people.

Indeed, the Court argues that if the federal government does not behave in the right manner after a positive vote, the international community could be led to recognize the sovereignty of Quebec, even if the declaration of independence is unconstitutional. The international community could be led to recognize the sovereignty of Quebec by evaluating the legitimacy and the legality of the claims. A unilateral declaration of independence is therefore possible and could even be legitimate according to the Supreme Court.

But the Court’s ruling has been used by the federal government as suggesting that a unilateral declaration of independence would not be acceptable. The Court itself also does not entirely close the door to an abusive use of its own prescriptions, because the question concerning what amending formula would be required for a constitutional amendment, in the event of Quebec’s secession, is left unanswered. In paragraph 103, the Court says that although the issue is not yet justiciable, the federal government could return to the Supreme Court if a referendum on secession were to take place in the near future.

And the Court could, on that occasion, be led to say that the appropriate amending formula should be the one which requires the unanimous consent of all premiers, and the ratification of all the ten legislatures, within a period of three years. In short, in order to be able to secede in accordance with the Canadian constitution, Quebec could be forced to comply with the amending formula that was imposed upon Quebec against its will in 1982. Quebec’s right to self-determination would once again be severely undermined.

I now come to my last claim. It provides additional evidence to the effect that the Supreme Court’s reference on secession is used in a distorted way by the federal government in order to pursue its nation building policy. The so-called “clarity bill”, bill C-20, was adopted by the federal House of Commons in March 2000. It was introduced by the federal government as an implementation of the Supreme Court’s prescriptions on the clarity of the question and the clarity of the results.

Bill C-20 stipulates that an absolute majority of votes on sovereignty, that is 50% +1 vote, no longer holds as an interpretation of the democratic principle. If the YES option wins a referendum on sovereignty in Quebec, the federal government will consider whether the majority of Yes voters is sufficiently high enough. So Yes voters do not have the same importance as No voters. The rules of the game that made the No side win with a small margin in 1995 no longer hold for the next referendum. The rules of the game that were valid for Newfoundland’s inclusion in the federation in 1948 (the vote had been of 52%), are no longer valid if a province wishes to leave.

Furthermore, C-20 also states that any referendum question that would include a reference to a partnership offer with Canada would be an ambiguous question, no matter how it is formulated. According to the federal government, the question has to be on secession and on nothing else. So for the federal government, one cannot consider the possibility of a partnership offer. They cannot make clear sense of an economic union between sovereign countries, or make sense of a confederation between sovereign countries. The referendum question must be on complete independence, even if the sovereignist movement in Quebec was, from its very inception, linked to idea of making a partnership offer to Canada. Nowadays, all sovereign countries entertain close economic and political relations with one another. But the federal government knows that such a proposal would win the approval of a clear majority of Quebec voters, and this is the reason why it is forcing Quebecers to choose between an old fashioned nation-state and the status quo.

Finally, Bill C-20 also stipulates that negotiations will have to include the partition of Quebec. This last provision, of course, is only meant as a way to frighten Quebecers, and to prevent them from exercising their right to self-determination.

CONCLUSION

So let me now conclude. As we have seen, Canada is defending a territorial conception of federalism. The federal government has been engaged in the last forty years in a nation-state building that denies the existence of the people of Quebec. They have asserted repeatedly the principle of equality of all the provinces and thus rejected the idea of a special status to the province of Quebec. They have rejected the asymmetric federalism. They have imposed upon Quebec a new constitutional order in 1982, thereby treating Quebec as a province and not as a nation. This new constitutional order denied the already existing veto that Quebec had, as a matter of constitutional convention. Since then, there has been an increasing use of the federal government’s spending power in Quebec’s exclusive jurisdictions. The Supreme Court has played an important role in supporting this nation building. The recent accord on social union has been a further step in the transformation of the federation into a single nation state, since all the provinces, except Quebec, are favorable to the federal government’s use of its spending power in exclusively provincial jurisdictions. We have also seen that the new amending formula makes it impossible to modify the constitution. We noted that the Meech Lake Accord which involved a recognition of Quebec as a distinct society, was rejected by Canada. We remarked that the linguistic policies of the Quebec government were always contested in the Courts. We mentioned that the Supreme Court’s reference on secession has been used by the federal government to declare unacceptable any unilateral declaration of independence. And finally C-20 has been introduced as a means to frighten the population and as a means to discourage any attempt to secede. Meanwhile, as this nation building process unfolds in Canada, Quebec increasingly becomes economically self confident and self assured. The Quebec culture is flourishing, the economy of Montreal is rapidly growing and Quebecers are increasingly unhappy by the intransigence of the federal government.

Of course, a majority of Quebecers still prefer ignoring the above facts. There are those who do not know what’s going on, and who are indifferent. Others say that they are tired of constitutional debates, and they conveniently invoke their apathy in order to avoid having to confront the provocations of the federal government. A chronic sense of morosity often serves as an alibi that conceals the fear felt by many. There are those who find it more easy to join the ones that they can’t beat, and they engage in the usual and very trendy Quebec bashing. There are also those who find it more useful for their own careers to be above those endless battles. They distribute the blame equally between sovereignists and federalists, and claim that they found a third way. There are idealists who believe that we must envisage a reform of federalism but they fail to realize that any such reform is a complete utopia, much less practical than sovereignty. There are also cynics who are completely apolitical and who think they know better. And finally there are federalists who claim they understand our difficulties but who remain silent and turn their heads whenever they see the federal government exerting a domination upon Quebec.

But in spite of all those centrifugal forces, Quebec is slowly and surely becoming self-confident. So it should not come as a surprise to learn that a growing number of Quebecers are now seeking for independence, and even if Canada is a “federation”. Many Quebecers come to believe that if Quebec cannot be recognized as a nation within Canada, it will assert itself by becoming an independent state.

The criticisms that I have raised against the federal government are not made only by sovereignists. They have also been made by federalists such as Claude Ryan. It is fashionable nowadays to describe critics of the Canadian government as radicals and hard liners. But if I am right, although Canada has a fairly enviable and good reputation at the international level, there is another side to this coin. Most Quebecers would much prefer some arrangement within the Canadian federation, if only Canada was willing to recognize the existence of a Quebec nation and was willing to grant an improvement of its self-government. But as we have seen, Canadians are also as a matter of fact practicing what Claude Ryan himself has described as a “dominating form of federalism”. The official Canadian federation conceals the fact that Canada is exerting a domination upon the Quebec people. So I guess one should not be surprised to find so many sovereignists within Quebec.

By Michel Seymour,  January 2001 at Cambridge University

A Stolen Land of Immigrants

Spanish Conquistadors... conquisting!

There is a certain argument that you invariably hear when advocating independence for Quebec which basically says that Quebec has no right to claim its independence since it is built on stolen land. It takes a jaw-dropping level of hypocrisy for an English Canadian to throw that accusation at us but it does happen… regularly! After all if that makes Quebec illegitimate, it should also make Canada illegitimate. I guess being the default position bestows legitimacy. In any case, from my experience, the person who most often makes this accusation is someone from an immigrant background with a limited understanding of our history. They just know that nasty things were done to the Native people and they see us as a bunch of white people who have been here a while so we must be guilty. Personally, I get somewhat annoyed with this type of simplistic narrative which basically says “white people exterminated the Native people”. It’s a bit like saying “white people exterminated millions of Jews during World War II”. I’m not saying that my ancestors were all saints but I don’t like seeing other people’s crimes being attributed to them nor do I accept the claim that they came to this land as thieves.

Who knows what brought the Innu, Cree, Inuit or Iroquois to this part of the world. It may have partly been warfare or bad directions but I would bet that the main reason was resources. Resources (the fur trade) is what lured my ancestors here.  The fact that they came late to the party doesn’t seem relevant to me since the inhabitants of Quebec at the time did not object to their arrival.  Over seventy years separated the first known European contact with the St Lawrence valley by Jacques Cartier and the first permanent European settlement established by Samuel de Champlain in 1608. During that time, Europeans (Scandinavians, Bretons, Basques, Normans, etc.) began arriving to fish and trade with the native people. European goods were very much coveted by the native people who began competing for access to them turning the St Lawrence valley into a kind of war zone. In fact, by the time Champlain arrived, the people and settlements encountered by Jacques Cartier had all disappeared. 

The fate of these people, known as the St.Lawrence Iroquoians or Stadaconans, is unknown. However there is evidence that they may have been eliminated by the Mohawk, who lived to the south in the Mohawk Valley. The Mohawk had no easy route to participate in the St Lawrence fur trade and may have decided to take one by force. Evidence shows that some Stadaconans survived among the Algonquin and others found refuge with the Huron. Archaeologists have found St Lawrence pottery among the Huron, evidence that some of them at least were adopted by Huron villages. 

When Champlain established permanent settlements in the St Lawrence valley, this wasn't seen as an invasion by the native people but rather as greater access to European goods. Champlain began establishing alliances with most of the Native peoples he encountered. The only enemies he made were the Iroquois and the reason for the conflict was Champlain’s alliance with the Huron. The first thing the Huron asked of their newly found French allies was the use of their guns against their Iroquois enemies. Unfortunately, the Iroquois were the most powerful people in the region at the time and Champlain’s alliance with the Huron would result in decades of war with the Iroquois Confederacy.

As any glance at a map of the time will show you, the French claimed a huge part of North America. This does not mean that they militarily invaded every inch of this land and subjugated its inhabitants. Europeans of this time considered any land not claimed by a Christian monarch as “Terra nullius” and therefore up for grabs. The St Lawrence leads to the Great Lakes and other river ways are not too far off, including the Mississippi basin. The French explored these regions and established forts and trading posts along the way. The English colonists, on the other hand, had established themselves on the east coast and were only slowly moving westwards. However, their growing numbers was creating pressure to expand. New France was standing in the way of this.

Seven Years’ war and its consequences

If you look at the list of belligerents in the Seven Years’ war (North American version) otherwise known as the French and Indian War, you’ll notice that most Native people were on the side of France. I think they probably understood that the main threat to their lands and way of life came from the growing English colonies. This war had profound effects on Native Americans, particularly those in the Ohio River and the Mississippi River regions. After the war, the Ohio Valley tribes lost a powerful ally in France, and therefore their ability to counteract English colonial intrusions into their territories. 

The defeat of the French in this war essentially began the process of opening up the American frontier for British and later American settlers. The French no longer stood in their way, and no longer served as a counter-balance used by the Native tribes to curtail English settlement. The tide of settlers sweeping west across the Appalachians proved devastating for tribes already weakened by warfare and dispossession. They were also being stressed by other, eastern tribes being pushed west into their territories. Inter-tribal warfare erupted in the Ohio River Valley and soon spread to the Mississippi region.

The British took retribution against Native American nations that had fought on the side of the French by cutting off their supplies and then forcibly compelling the tribes to obey the rules of the new mother country. Native Americans that had fought on the side of the British with the understanding that their cooperation would lead to an end to European encroachment on their land were unpleasantly surprised when many new settlers began to move in. Furthermore, with the French presence gone, there was little to distract the British government from focusing its attention on whatever Native American tribes lay within its grasp. All of these factors played into the multinational Indian uprising called "Pontiac's War" that erupted directly following the end of the French and Indian War.

So what's your point?

My point is that for most of human history, the entire planet was a big game of musical chairs. Shit happened, people moved around and they ended up where they ended up. Quebec is no different and is no more a "stolen land" than Algeria or Japan. There certainly was plenty of nasty stuff done to Native Americans, I don't deny that. Some Native peoples were enslaved and worked to extermination, others had their way of life deliberately destroyed in order to drive them to starvation. Even when the Native people basically submitted, their children were taken away from them in order to beat the "Indian" out of them in residential schools. France is not without guilt in all this. Native tribes that stood in the way of their fur business like the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi were dealt with harshly. 

But overall, any rational person has to admit that France also play a positive role in North America in regards to the Native people. Perhaps the best that can be said is that they helped delay the inevitable but I'll take that over the legacy of Cortés or Pizarro any day. In any case, my ancestors came to this land because of the lucrative trade in fur. Their arrival was not very different from the arrival of all the other people who came to this land before them. They certainly were no more land thieves than the Mohawk whose arrival in the St Lawrence valley was likely more violent and less welcomed than that of my ancestors.

A land of immigrants

You'll often hear that Canada is a land of immigrants. There's no denying that immigration has played an important part in Canada's history but to simply say that this is a country full of immigrants seems to be a whitewash of a big part of our history unless you redefine the word "immigrant" to apply to everyone. Calling Canada (and Quebec) a land of immigrants implies that it is a land that belongs to no one (except for the First Nations but we can ignore them) and it is therefore a land that belongs to everyone. Quebec nationalism is then portrayed as something illegitimate because it is supposedly claiming a part of this land for a group of people who came over from France. I would argue that we are claiming Quebec for all Quebecers regardless of their origins but as with many countries there is a certain ethnic group that forms the backbone of this nation. And in Quebec's case this group would be the decedents of the French settlers of New France. But is our history in this land really so different from every other country? So different, in fact, as to render our desire for independence illegitimate? Let's compare with another country...

Hungary, a land of immigrants?

The Hungarians, otherwise known as the Magyars arrived in the Carpathian Basin roughly a thousand years ago. That land was already occupied by a number of peoples (Avars, Slavs, Bulgarians, Vlachs, etc). Nonetheless, the Hungarians established themselves there and built a kingdom which later became a regional power. Centuries later, Hungary was conquered by the Ottoman empire. The 150 year occupation decimated the Hungarian population. The Turks were eventually driven out by the Austrians and Hungary was then ruled by the Habsburgs until the 20th century. During that time Slavic and Germanic people from other parts of the empire settled in Hungary. Somehow the Hungarian culture and language survived all this. In more recent decades, Hungary has welcomed immigrants from countries like China, Vietnam and Mongolia. These last groups are clearly immigrants but can we say that Hungary is a land of immigrants? Are the Hungarians themselves immigrants since their ancestors came from the Russian Steppes a thousand years ago? The Hungarians certainly don't see themselves that way. They see Hungary as their country, as the country that they founded and built.

I don't think Quebec's history is so different. However, unlike Hungary, there are still other nations that exists in Quebec and their cultures, languages and rights should be respected and valued but their existence does not invalidate ours. We aren't trying to rewrite history or fight old battles. We aren't claiming all the land that was once part of New France nor are we claiming the predominantly French-speaking parts of Ontario or New-Brunswick. We live in a state which is currently a province of a federation. We believe this province should leave the Canadian federation and become an independent country. Everyone who lives in Quebec gets a say and there is absolutely nothing illegitimate about that.

The Federal Government: money well wasted!

Every so often, one hears the argument that Quebec receives more money from Canada than it gives, and therefore independence for Quebec would be catastrophic. This argument usually comes from freedom-hating francophobes or colonized but well-paid francophones spouting this nonsense in various right-wing media outlets. The argument is also quite simplistic as it merely compares the sum total of money given to Ottawa from Quebec with the total amount spent by Ottawa in Quebec, or on Quebec's behalf. It is also problematic in several ways. 

First and foremost, it reduces Canada to an annual paycheck. If they were self-consistent, Canadians who invoke it should ask Quebec to leave as this would save Canada a lot of money and that apparently is what Canada is all about. Conversely if it could be shown, as Stéphane Gobeil does in his book Un Gouvernement de Trop (vlb éditeur, 2012), that Quebec wastes about two billion dollars every year just by staying in Canada, then federalists living in Quebec who make that argument should logically advocate independence. If the people making the money argument were motivated by principle, then they should reverse their position on Quebec independence. However, since they are clearly motivated by a self-serving desire to maintain the status quo, the illogic of their position is lost on them.

Nevertheless, I will persist in outlining the problems with the monetary argument, one of which is that it fails to distinguish between money spent and money wasted. As it happens, the Federal government is a very wasteful institution and in many different ways. It wastes money by duplicating many provincial services, and in Quebec’s case it does so in a way that frequently undermines Quebec government policy. Not only that, but when the Federal government provides services in a provincial domain, it usually does so far less efficiently than the provincial government. In fact, it cannot even properly do things in Quebec that are its responsibility, as the deplorable state of the Champlain Bridge attests. 

Furthermore, the monetary argument does not take into consideration transfers between Quebec and Canada that don’t show up on official government statistics. For instance, it probably does not consider hidden taxes and transfers imposed by the Federal government, the most egregious being the ongoing scandal that is the unemployment insurance. It’s no secret that the Federal government has long been tightening the eligibility to the insurance such that only 40% or less of the unemployed have access to it. All the while, the premiums stay as high as ever so that the program produces a huge surplus, which disappears into the Federal coffers. This is both a tax and a transfer, because those who don’t qualify go on welfare which is provincial. This type of passing the buck (not the bucks) is how Paul Martin "balanced the budget" in the 1990’s, by unloading services once paid for by the federal government onto the provinces, thereby saddling provinces with increased costs and forcing provinces to further unload services on to the municipalities.

The monetary argument also neglects all the Federal decisions over the years meant to favor Ontario’s economy to the detriment of everyone else’s. Indeed, Ottawa has always done whatever it can to boost Upper Canada’s then Ontario’s economy, everything from the offloading of half of Upper Canada’s debt onto Lower Canada with the Union of 1841, to the opening of the St Lawrence waterway to the Great Lakes in 1959, to the support of Ontario’s auto industry with Federal money (paid for by Quebec and the rest of Canada). In 2009, $13 billion federal dollars were handed over to this industry. Add to this the concentration of the Federal bureaucracy and financial institutions in Ontario and you get a commercial services surplus for Ontario of over $30 billion, while Quebec gets a deficit of $4.7 billion. 

According to Stéphane Gobeil's rummaging through the public accounts to check line by line to see where federal spending went, we discover that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, with total expenditures of $138 million in 2009, spent less than 10% of its budget in Quebec. We also discover that the Department of Human Resources and Skills Development spends only 12% in Quebec in goods and services on a total of over $500 million across Canada. We even learn that subsidies are included in the portfolio of some departments, such as a check for $108 million to "The initiative to revitalize the Toronto waterfront” by the Ministry of Finance. Another example is the portfolio of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, which amounted to $7.4 billion in 2010. It should be noted that in a period of twelve years the bureaucratic costs of this ministry increased by 140% while transfers to Aboriginal people only grew by 50%. Quebecers finance 19.5% of this portfolio but receive less than half of that from Ottawa since Quebec has only 9.2% of Canada’s Aboriginal people. Despite this, Quebec does not receive the necessary resources from Ottawa to properly develop the North.

The result: 23.2% of spending is attributed to Quebec when in reality, both in terms of services received as actual expenditures, Quebec does not get its fair share in most cases, despite the explosion of spending ($30 billion federal deficit in 2009 and $55 billion in 2010). And this does not even take into account contracts for the construction of vessels for the Royal Canadian Navy: $33 billion to build boats in Halifax and Vancouver while Quebec will receive absolutely nothing. There are many examples of how Quebec gets short-changed on federal schemes that Quebec must pay into but hold little value for us, financially or otherwise. We never really hear about all of those programs, we only ever hear about equalization payments and we're endlessly told by the media that Quebec gets $7 billons dollars from Alberta!?!. First of all we pay about $3 billion into that scheme so the amount endlessly repeated should $4 billion. An important point, however, is the fact that Ottawa does not invest in economic development equally. Ontario and Alberta get the lion's share and the reality is that investing in Albertan oil enriches Alberta but also increases the value of the Canadian dollar which, in turn, hurts Quebec's exports. Equalization can be seen as a kind of compensation for this.

In any case, by establishing the actual share received by Quebec, the expenses that would be incurred by becoming an independent country (embassies, old age pensions, etc.) and the savings that eliminating a tier of government would bring in public administration, Gobeil estimates that Quebec would save about $2 billion. To my knowledge, the only person who has attempted to challenge Stéphane Gobeil's study was Professor Martin Coiteux, a member of the federalist think tank "The Federal Idea". The latter, who by his own admission has not verified public accounts, believes Gobeil underestimated some costs that would have to be assumed by an independent Quebec. He mentions national defense (Gobeil believes that Quebec could have an army and an air force for the equivalent to 0.93% of Quebec's GDP). Coiteux believes this impossible even though Canada spent only 1.1 % of its GDP on defense in 2005 while engaged in Afghanistan. Coiteux’s critique does not seem available on the web anymore but you can read Gobeil’s rebuttal here.

Why Québec has a language policy

The precariousness of the French fact in Canada and North America

The main reason Québec governments have taken steps to protect the French language in Québec is their observation that the French language, a minority language in North America and Canada, is too precarious to develop without state support. Although francophones are the majority in Québec, their language's power of attraction is weak. English, the continent's usual and predominant language, the language of both commerce and culture, vies constantly with French to be the language of business and communications. The French fact in North America is precarious for several reasons: (1) the Conquest of 1760, which put an end to French colonization in North America; (2) the progressive assimilation of francophones outside Québec and the inadequacy of language rights; and (3) the delicate balance of the French fact in Québec because of the lower birthrate and the contribution that immigration continues to make to Québec's demography.

Unforeseen consequences of the Conquest of 1760

It was decisive for the future of French in North America and probably for the French language in general when the colony of New France fell into the hands of the English in 1760. The final ceding of New France to the British crown in 1763 put an end to a century and a half of French settlement in North America. Sixty thousand French colonists suddenly found themselves a conquered people, subject to a foreign language, religion and legal system. After the Seven Years' War, it could have been expected that New France would suffer the same fate as the former Dutch and Swedish colonies on the American east coast. As historian Michel Brunet noted:

The evolution of this new British colony, it was felt, would be similar to that of New York, first settled by Dutch colonists, and of New Jersey, which had been founded by Swedes. In less than a century, these two distinctive collectivities had melted away. The British conquerors of the St. Lawrence Valley sincerely believed that a similar fate awaited the Canadiens.

England quickly exercised its rights as a conqueror. British subjects came by the thousands to settle in the new colony called the Province of Quebec. In 1791, London divided the colony in two, reserving one part, Upper Canada, for some 10 000 of its colonists, and the other, Lower Canada, for the 150 000 Canadiens living in the St. Lawrence Valley. Although they were granted a legislative assembly with limited powers, the Canadiens were still in a position of economic and social inferiority. The predictions of foreign observers on their chances for cultural survival were not very optimistic. Benjamin Franklin predicted:

In less than a half century, because of the mass of Englishmen who are settling around and among them, they are destined to mix with and become part of our people in both language and mores…

Alexis de Tocqueville, the acclaimed author of Democracy in America, visited Lower Canada in 1831. He wrote:

But it is easy to see that the French are a conquered people. The rich classes belong for the most part to the English race. While French is spoken almost universally, most newspapers, signs and even French merchants' signs are in English. Commercial enterprises are nearly all in (English) hands.

In 1837-1838, ideas about democracy and a republican government stirred Lower Canada. The Patriote party of Louis-Joseph Papineau headed a protest movement against the hold London had on its colony's affairs. London's refusal to bring in a truly constitutional and responsible government gave rise to an insurrection in the colony that was quickly put down. London concluded from this popular uprising that it should force the assimilation of Canadiens of French extraction by uniting the two colonies. In 1840, it decreed this union and imposed equality of representation for the former Upper Canada and the former Lower Canada in the single parliament, even though the Canadiens, who numbered 650 000, were the majority, Upper Canada's population being 450 000. Because of massive immigration by colonists from the British Isles, the population of British extraction grew larger than that of the French Canadians. When the Dominion of Canada was created in 1867, French Canadians comprised only one-third of the population of the new quasi federation.

By obtaining a legislative assembly, a province and local autonomy in 1867, French Canadians recovered the little collective freedom they had had before 1840. A minority condemned to assimilation, they thought they had acceded to the status of a founding people, equal as of right to English Canada. With the confederative pact, this minority people hoped to preserve their language, their culture and their civil institutions.

Thanks to a birthrate unparalleled in the West, the population of French extraction managed to increase in the 19th century. History belied Franklin's and de Tocqueville's pessimistic predictions. Between 1881 and 1961, the population of French origin maintained its weight - about 30% - in the country's total population, despite the creation and addition of new provinces and the colonization of new territories by immigrants from around the world.

The proportion was maintained, but at a price. The federal government pursued a policy of massive immigration at the turn of the century in order to develop the country's economy and settle its vast territories. Between 1896 and 1914, Canada welcomed more than three million British, American and Eastern European immigrants. A large number settled in Western Canada. Many poor and unschooled French Canadians may have wanted to emigrate there, too. But with little encouragement to locate in the West, about 450 000 crossed south over the Canadian-American border between 1890 and 1920.

The progressive assimilation of francophones outside Québec and deficiencies in language rights

French seems destined for marginal status outside Québec. It took a long time for francophone minorities to get recognition for their situation as imperilled minorities and to get the rather lukewarm support of governments. Having long been deprived of public services in French, they had to integrate into milieus where French met with indifference, even hostility.

Figures on the rapid assimilation of these minorities speak for themselves. In 1931, 7.2% of the population of Canada outside Québec had French as a mother-tongue. This proportion dropped to less than 5.0% in 1991. If you look at language of use rather than mother-tongue, the proportion of francophones outside Québec declined from 4.4% to 3.2% between 1971 and 1991. Rapid assimilation seems to be running unabated in some provinces. The proportion of Ontarians for whom French is the usual language fell from 4.6% to 3.2% between 1971 and 1991. In Manitoba, it slipped from 4.0% to 2.4% in the same period, and in Saskatchewan, from 1.7% to 0.7%. Only the Acadians of New Brunswick seem to be resisting assimilation, their share in the province's population having stabilized at about 31%.

This assimilation reveals the inadequacy of the legal and constitutional provisions introduced to protect francophone minorities since 1867. Manitoba declared itself a unilingual English province in 1890, even though its constituent law had prescribed bilingualism for legislation and the courts and guaranteed Franco-Catholic schools provincial government support. In 1896, the Manitoba government had to concede to its francophone minority the right to instruction in French; this was withdrawn in 1916, however, and French disappeared from Manitoba schools. In 1897, Ontario made English the only language of the justice system. In 1913, it severely reduced the teaching of French in Catholic confessional schools (Regulation 17), to the great displeasure of Franco-Ontarians who saw this as the sign of a deliberate policy of assimilation.

Manitoba and Ontario have since restored some of their minorities' rights, but only several decades after the introduction of linguistic unification measures. It may have been too late. As William Tetley, former Liberal minister in the Bourassa government and McGill University law professor, observed in 1982, the Constitution of Canada and the courts have done little to protect the language and culture of francophone minorities:

It is clear that the Canadian Constitution has done very little to promote or protect Canada's two great languages which should have been - and should be today - a great national asset. The British North America Act, 1867, failed to protect the French language and culture which were violated in such judgements as Ottawa's Separate Schools Trustees v. MacKell or such legislative action as Manitoba's Official Language Act, 1890, and Regulation 17 of Ontario. The Constitution as interpreted by the courts should have provided a high standard of conduct, a spirit of natural justice, and a tradition of fair play. Instead, there was often harshness and no apparent legal recourse. It was only in the 1960's that political action in Quebec, beginning with the Quiet Revolution, brought about change.

The realization that francophone minorities in Canada are slowly but perhaps inexorably being assimilated has contributed to making the need to support the French language in Québec more acute.

How the French language has fared in Québec

Threatened, losing momentum outside Québec, the French language seems to have had more stability in Québec. The percentage of Quebecers with French as their mother-tongue remained constant from 1951 to 1991, decreasing from 82.5% to 80.7% from 1951 to 1971 and increasing to 82.1% in 1991. In the same period, the percentage of anglophones decreased from 13.8% to 9.6% and the percentage of allophones - those whose mother-tongue is neither French nor English - increased from 3.7% to 8.3%. French as the language of everyday use stayed at the level of 83% of the population.

If these statistics speak to the vitality of the French language in Québec, they should not let us forget the immediate reasons for its precariousness. Québec's demographic weight within Canada has declined progressively since 1931, from 27.7% to 25.8% in 1986 and to 25% today. Between 1875 and 1965, Québec's fertility rate was higher than those of other North American regions. Beginning in the 1960s, however, Quebecers, setting aside the Catholic Church's support for a high birth rate and espousing more modern mores, began to produce fewer offspring. The outcome was that their birth rate became one of the lowest in the Western world. From 1956 to 1961, French-speaking Québec women had a fertility rate of 4.2 (4.2 births per woman of childbearing age). The rate dropped to 2.3 for 1966-1971 and then to 1.5 for 1981-1986 before rising to 1.6 in 1990, which is barely enough to replace the population, the rate of 2.1 being required to ensure replacement. Québec anglophones also experienced a less dramatic decline in their fertility rate which is now about on a par with that of francophones. The low fertility rate worries many Quebecers who fear that Québec's demographic weight is continuing to decline and that the proportion of francophones in Québec is being eroded.

On top of this is the fear that immigrants who have settled in Québec in large numbers since the turn of the century prefer English to French as the language of communication and culture. The proportion of Quebecers of other than French or British extraction was 1.6% in 1871 and 8.6% in 1961. As long as their exceptional fertility compensated for the arrival of immigrants, the francophone majority did not feel threatened. When their fertility began to decline, however, Québec's linguistic balance became shaky. This realization was heightened in the 1960s, a time when immigrants were free to choose their schools and laissez-faire was the practise for commercial signs. Over 85% of immigrants opted for English-language schools in the late 1960s. Statistics show that more and more ethnic minorities adopted English at the expense of French. While 48% of these minorities in Québec were drawn to English in 1931, the proportion had risen to 69.6% by 1961.

The will the majority of Quebecers have affirmed since the 1960s to take control of their social, economic and cultural life and to make French the common and usual language of Quebec

The precariousness of French in North America does not explain everything. The assimilation of francophones in Canada must cease being a hidden reality and governments must find a remedy for it. Although Québec had every reason to be concerned about the future of French culture and language, Québec governments did not choose to legislate between 1867 and 1964. Laissez-faire took the place of policy. What changed in the early 1960s was the perception Quebecers had of themselves and what they could achieve through their political institutions. Since the Conquest of 1760, French-speaking Quebecers had grown accustomed to living under the authoritative power of the Catholic Church which attended to preserving the language and the religion of the faithful. Quebecers saw themselves as belonging to a French-Canadian, minority and agrarian people, with religion and tradition serving as a bulwark against assimilation. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, they experienced the industrialization of the economy, and in the early twentieth century, they asserted themselves as an urban people who, after World War Two, discovered the consumer society and modernism.

From the 1960s on, Québec society was swept by the winds of change that transformed it profoundly. Many of the ideas that had been talked about in Québec for decades were translated into political reforms. Quebecers urged their provincial government to raise the general level of education and to provide the population with public services worthy of a modern society. Many also discovered that although francophones were the majority in Québec and in Montréal, English was the language of prestige, business and public signs and that many company doors were closed to them. This was noted by two government commissions of enquiry on the status of French. In Montréal, immigrants' enthusiasm for English-language schools aroused fears among francophones and fueled heated debates. Francophones saw this tendency as a sign that if nothing was done, French would continue to decline in Montréal, as Marc V. Levine, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee specialist in urban issues, wrote:

By the 1960s, the Anglicization of the city's school clientele seemed to portend a Montreal in which the children of immigrants would become Anglophones and French-speakers would ultimately become a demographic minority. Thus, for important segments of the Francophone community, the individual right of parents to choose their children's language of schooling, historically respected in Quebec, now clashed with the 'collective right' of Francophones to survive and prosper as Francophones. In the eyes of Montreal's rising Francophone elite, the new middle class of teachers, journalists and policy professionals who had displaced traditional church elites as the leading force in French-Canadian society, Francophone minorisation in Montreal would spell ultimate doom for a living French language and culture throughout Quebec.

The slogan Maîtres chez nous (masters in our own house) used by the Liberals of Jean Lesage during the 1964 electoral campaign captures the spirit of the times, enamoured of change and progress. Opening careers in the public service and in companies to francophones, expanding the means of the Québec State, giving it the stature and structure of a modern government, separating Church and State more appropriately, reforming education, nationalizing electricity, providing Québec with a universal pension plan and more - that was the program and the ambition of the governments of the time, driven by the people's impatience and expectations. Quebecers then discovered a springboard for their economic and social progress in their democratic institutions, as Premier René Lévesque wrote in 1979:

The central fact of language makes Quebec the one Canadian province out of ten which is radically (in the root sense of the word) different from the rest of Canada. It makes Québec the home base, the homeland, of a compact, very deeply rooted, and rapidly evolving cultural group - there should be no mistake - which sees itself as a national group. Democratic control of provincial institutions in Quebec supplies the Quebec people with a powerful springboard for self-affirmation and self-determination.

This was also a time when francophones, having long defined themselves by their religious affiliation and their French origin, began to identify themselves in terms of language and the Québec territory. Quebecers stopped seeing themselves as a linguistic minority and learned to think of themselves as a political majority. They also began to demand protective measures for the French language from Québec and federal legislators.

Two commissions of enquiry blazed the trail for the language legislation we now have. In 1963, the federal government of Lester B. Pearson created a royal commission of enquiry - the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission - whose mandate was to review the existing "state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada" and to "recommend what steps should be taken to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races." After holding hearings across the country, the commissioners concluded in their preliminary report in 1965 that Canada "without being full conscious of the fact, is passing through the greatest crisis in its history." The Commission noted how deeply dissatisfied francophones were, convinced they were victims of unacceptable inequalities. The Commission's work demonstrated that francophones were not playing a role in the economy that was proportional to their real weight. It was shown that Anglo-Canadians of British origin dominated the economy; they held the most influential and best paid positions. In Québec, the French Canadian had an income 35% lower than the Anglo-Quebecer. And even bilingual Quebecers earned less than unilingual Anglo-Quebecers. The commission consequently recommended that "in the private sector in Québec, governments and industry adopt the objective that French become the principal language of work at all levels."

Seeing Québec as a model of an officially bilingual society, the Commission recommended that French and English become the official languages of Canada and that New Brunswick and Ontario make them so at the provincial level. Finally, it proposed the creation of "bilingual districts" where French and English would be used currently in educational and municipal institutions when the minority reached ten percent of the population. In the opinion of Jean-Claude Corbeil, former linguist at the Office de la langue française:

...you can say that the Commission made it obvious to Quebecers that the rules of the game on the use of French and English in Québec, especially in the work world, had to change and gave rise to the idea of setting by law the conditions for using one or the other language in order to guarantee a better status for the French language in all areas and more favourable conditions for its development, its growth and its advancement.

The provincial Gendron Commission was created in December 1968 to "enquire into and report on the status of French as a language of use in Québec." Its report was tabled in 1972. Like the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, the Gendron Commission noted the domination of the English language in Québec's work world. Numerous inequalities separated francophones from anglophones: francophones earned less in general, held less important positions, benefited little from their bilingualism and often worked in English, in a proportion that did not reflect the high number of francophone workers. The Commission recommended that a series of measures be adopted to make French the common language of Quebecers. The commissioners summarized the reasons as follows:

In America, French is a fringe language. As such, its use is restricted even in areas where it is spoken by a majority of the population. This situation requires a clear policy: French can survive and flourish on the North American continent only with a maximum of opportunity and protection throughout Québec; and this can be accomplished only by making it a useful communication instrument for all the people of this area.(...) In the vast economic areas made up of Canada and the United States, French is defenceless in the struggle to impose its utility. This situation is not about to change. Thus in Québec, the vigour and dynamism of French can be ensured only through government support. Failing this, the odds in the match between French and English will remain too one-sided. This government action should aim at establishing French as the common language of Quebecers by making it useful and necessary for everyone in work communication.

The Commission recommended that the National Assembly declare French the official language of Québec, and English and French the national languages; that the government take steps to make French the language of internal communications in Québec in the work place and the language of communications in the government, professional corporations and parastatal institutions; that the right of the francophone consumer to be served in his language be recognized and that commercial signs be regulated in order to make the use of French mandatory.

Excerpt from Laws and Language in Québec: The Principles and Means of Québec's Language Policy by Marc Chevrier, 1997

Bilingual Montreal - Montréal Bilingue

Montreal is the most bilingual city in North America... OK, I didn't actually look that up but it's probably true. The statistics are pretty impressive. Over half of the population can have a conversation in French or English and quite often a third language as well. In fact, Quebec is the most bilingual province of Canada with 42% of the population comfortable in two or more languages. Visitors to Montreal are often amazed at how people seem to be able to switch from one language to another or have conversations where one person is speaking French and the other is speaking English. Bilingualism is great! Everyone loves it! OK, maybe not Howard Galganov... but everyone else agrees that bilingualism is great so we can all hold hands on this issue and walk into the sunset together, right? Not quite. You see, there is a difference of opinion as to what exactly is keeping the precarious balancing act between French and English going and what is threatening it. Some say that the threat comes from francophone language zealots who want to eradicate all English from Quebec. In fact, you'll often hear that Quebec's language laws (Bill 101) are unnecessary now since so many Montrealers are bilingual. They feel that Montreal should be officially recognized as a bilingual city and that English should be recognized as an official language.

But what exactly made Montreal so bilingual and what effect did Bill 101 really have on the city and its inhabitants?

Montreal before Bill 101

Ste-Catherine Street in the 1960's

Before bill 101 there was no bilingual Montreal. It was as Jane Jacobs and many others observed: “An English city containing many French-speaking workers and inhabitants”. 

Before bill 101 there was virtually no French in the workplace, there was no French in the boardrooms and there was little or no French in the shops downtown. Before Bill 101 the Canadian National Railway and the big banks could have their headquarters in Montreal and not have to hire a single French-speaking person above the second floor.

Before Bill 101, the median income of English-speaking households was between 20 and 30 per cent above the provincial average. That's changed today, wealth is spread more evenly among all established cultural groups. Head offices still operate mostly in English, of course, but as often as not, it's a francophone speaking English in the corner office. 

Before Bill 101, the rich and powerful English-speaking minority was the dominant group; bilingualism was a one-sided burden for Francophones who needed to understand what their bosses were saying, and immigrants were assimilating massively into English. Imposing French as the common public language has eliminated the old linguistic and cultural ghettos in Montreal.

Before Bill 101, 90% of all immigrants' children registered into an English-language school board. Now, 90% study in French. They have become a new breed: the children of Bill 101 - a multi-ethnic, French-speaking melting pot. That's the most striking consequence of the law, and the new cultural mix that has resulted is often considered its greatest achievement. 

And finally, Bill 101 has spawned another new breed, very rare elsewhere: the bilingual Anglo. Sixty-six per cent of those who stayed in Quebec after the election of the PQ in 1976, or have migrated there since, can speak French. More than half of all those whose mother tongue was neither French nor English can now converse in these two languages; 73 % are able to sustain a conversation in French.

Conclusion: Bill 101 made Bilingual Montreal

Bill 101 greatly increased bilingualism in Montreal. Not only did it increase bilingualism but it helped put an end to the old social inequalities between francophones and anglophones that had existed in Quebec since the conquest. Let's face it, English and French are not equals in the North American context. By protecting and promoting French, Bill 101 levels the playing field and makes a truly bilingual city possible. Pretending that this is killing bilingualism is simply denying reality. There was a lot of hysteria and gnashing of teeth by anglophones when Bill 101 was introduced in 1977 but many have come to realize that, in the end, it was a good thing. Bill 101 offers real solutions to realities on the ground which puts it in stark contrast to the Trudeauist, Canadian approach to bilingualism which has utterly failed. 

Trudeau's Political bilingualism 

Must kill French!

As noted in the 1960's by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, a country is bilingual not because its inhabitants speak both languages, but because different languages ​​are spoken in different regions of the country. That's how Switzerland and Belgium understand their linguistic diversity. Without completely embracing this territorial model, the two commissioners, Laurendeau and Dunton, made it a cornerstone of the reforms they proposed. The important thing was to consider the status and strength of English and French on a territorial basis while taking into account the minority population. In this model, there is no need for everyone to be bilingual. Rather, it is to ensure the sustainability of languages ​​on a regional basis.

This concept of bilingualism did not go over well with Trudeau. He had made hostility to Quebec nationalism his trademark. Bilingualism for Trudeau was to be used as way for him to counter the claims of Quebec nationalists. The territorial approach to bilingualism would implicitly recognize the existence of two nations within Canada. So Trudeau decided to make language entirely a matter of individual choice. Canadians should be able to live in the language of their choice from coast to coast (wherever numbers warrant).

This vision had the advantage of denying any kind of special status for Quebec. Having French too linked to Quebec might encourage independence. It was therefore important to establish this model of bilingualism across the country and to ensure that all provinces are equal. It was hoped that in the end, francophones would cease to feel an attachment to Quebec because they could choose to live in French in Calgary just as well as in Saguenay.

To ensure that this feat of social engineering would succeed, it was essential to make services bilingual, both at federal and provincial levels, hence the importance of enshrining in the Constitution the so-called human right to attend public school in English or French even if education is an exclusive provincial jurisdiction. Trudeau also wanted millions of Canadians proficient in both languages. It simply required that they make the effort and that the federal government spend hundreds of millions of dollars.

Linguistic failure but political success

This project failed for obvious reasons. First, there is no practical use for almost everyone to speak two languages. It's just easier and more convenient to operate in a single language. One may even wonder to what extent it is the responsibility of the state to spend huge sums of money to bilingualize its population. Furthermore, francophones are a tiny minority in most of English Canada. This reality means that anglophones have neither the need nor the opportunity to speak French. Learning a language that you will never use is basically a waste of time for most people.

Even in Ottawa, Trudeau's bilingualism project is not working. Even though there are far more francophones working in government than ever before, they mainly use English at work. To overcome this situation, the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission had proposed the establishment of unilingual administrative units. Like army regiments, some divisions of the public service would work in English and others in French. But this approach was the antithesis of the bilingual civilization Trudeau had imagined. He quickly put aside this proposal.

In the face of such a failure, why is this policy never questioned? Well, almost never... The answer lies in its political usefulness. It denies Quebec's distinctiveness. In this model, Quebec is just a province. A bilingual province in a bilingual country like all the other provinces. This is the vision of Canada that inspired the 1982 constitution and it's the vision that caused the failure of the Meech Lake Accord. The premise underlying Canada's approach to bilingualism is based on political considerations to the detriment of the historical and sociological realities. 

In fact it's worse than that. Trudeau's Constitution and Charter are based on the historical fraud and conceit that the situation of French Canadians outside Quebec – underprivileged in education and income, suffering rampant language attrition, lacking public institutions which function in their language and thus the means to maintain their culture, etc – is somehow “analogous” to the situation of English Canadians in Quebec, where none of these historical indices of oppression were present. The rights of French Canadians to their language was supposed to be protected under the preceding constitution, the BNA, so Trudeau’s “innovation” in this area wasn't as novel as advertised, and came about a century too late, decades after the horse of cultural genocide directed at French Canadians had left the barn and run its mission.

Language policy in Canada has always been a contentious matter; there are no simple solutions. However, in a truly honest approach to bilingualism, Ottawa would conduct a dispassionate discourse on language that admits the demographic realities and the genuine threats to the survival of French. Such a discourse would require that Ottawa acknowledge that as a first language, French is on the ropes outside Quebec and – most importantly – in the Montreal metropolitan area, and cease pretending that the situation of English-speaking Quebec is comparable to that of the French-speaking minorities in the rest of Canada. More specifically, it would require that Ottawa legitimize and promote application of the “territorial principle” within Quebec, and actively support the francization of allophones in the key Montreal area.

Such an unpoliticized and practical approach to bilingualism from the federal government does not seem likely. Ottawa continues, for example, to subsidize English-language pressure group like Alliance Quebec or its successor the QCGN on the grounds that they are formally equivalent to organizations representing francophone minorities elsewhere. Thereby, Ottawa in effect finances a Trojan horse. The goal of these groups is straightforward enough: wall-to-wall application of the “personality principle”. From this point of view, the Quebec government should treat English and French identically; it should not “discriminate” on behalf of either. Such a policy condemns Quebec francophones to a demographic fate similar to that which has befallen francophones elsewhere.

Many Quebecers have come to the conclusion that the current Canadian language regime is inherently assimilationist. In fact, if it were to endure in its present form, Ottawa’s language policy could well turn out, in the long run, to be no more than a subtle manner of securing the slow but sure anglicization of French Canada so firmly recommended by Lord Durham.

The perverse effect

The federal government, since Trudeau, has convinced Canadians that its expensive and largely useless approach to bilingualism is what Quebecers want. In reality, it isn't what we want and never has been. But poor old Billy, who works for Canada post in Saskatoon and had to learn French in order to be ready if one day a francophone wants to buy stamps in French, believes that he did this to please Quebecers. He doesn't understand why we aren't grateful. He also finds it hypocritical that Quebec insists on Canada being bilingual but at the same time only promotes French in Quebec. When the National Post rails against Quebec for whatever reason, Billy tends to nod his head in agreement because he's had enough of those darn Quebecers!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Quebec's approach to language has produced a more bilingual society. The rates of bilingualism in Quebec have increased since Bill 101 and continue to increase whereas they have stagnated and declined in the rest of Canada. English dominates this continent and Bill 101 does nothing to reduce its importance. It's only by making French present and necessary in people's lives that we get a bilingual population. Institutionalized bilingualism for Quebec in general and Montreal specifically, would simply make French optional and for a minority society like ours that accepts a lot of immigrants, that means making French basically irrelevant. Learning two languages is difficult and few people will do it just for fun. They do it because it's necessary.

I can understand why someone like Howard Galganov hates Bill 101. He's not interested in French or bilingualism. He believes that it is his right as a Canadian to never have to speak any other language than English anywhere in Canada. But for someone who ostensibly advocates bilingualism to portray Bill 101 and Quebec's approach to language as the enemy of bilingualism is a sign of either being utterly clueless on the matter or intentionally deceitful. Quebecers routinely get lectured about the benefits of bilingualism by people like this as if we were the ones holding it back... It's a bit like if whites in the US were to lecture blacks about the value of racial equality while depicting Affirmative Action as an unacceptable form of discrimination against white people...