Bill 96 awakens old concerns among Anglo-Quebecers

A businessman said: I often speak to Francophones and when I tell them that I am against Bill 96, that starts a dialogue and that is when we see their ignorance and their innocence, in fact their innocence-ignorance.

A few minutes before this intervention, he had maintained that many French-speaking Quebecers could not leave the borders of the province except to go to Hawkesbury or Ottawa, because they did not speak English.

A lawyer put forward his research and made it known that, even in New France, the official language was not French.

A woman who works in the school environment lamented that, since the Quiet Revolution, only the descendants of New France deserved the epithet of Quebecers.

A feeling of stepping back in time

Anger, indignation, distress, acrimony, concerns, reflections on respect for individual freedoms, the parallel hearings on Bill 96 organized this week by the Quebec Community Group Network (QCGN), a group that defends the interests of English-speakers in Quebec, offer an eloquent sample of the welcome that many Anglophones in Quebec have given to the project to renew the Charter of the French language.

As these consultations are done in pandemic mode, everyone is in front of their computer, in their office or at home. We are well and truly in 2021, even if sometimes the tone gives the impression of going back in time, recalling the good times of the challenge to Bill 101 and, later, Bill 178.

The Quebec community group Network QCGN is also the heir of the defunct Alliance Quebec, which fought many battles against Bill 101 and Bill 178 between 1982 and 1995.

This kind of public consultation, regardless of the groups, sometimes releases singular positions. Let us remember the memorable slippages during the Bouchard-Taylor commission or the one that examined the Charter of Values ​​.

This week, the speaker who deserved the prize for the most remarkable intervention is the flamboyant lawyer, Anne-France Goldwater, who said among other things: We don't need a Gestapo , speaking of a new language policy which would appear after the adoption of the new Charter of the French language.

In his huge downtown office, decorated with toys and stuffed animals, Master Goldwater later received us with a smile. Not only does she not regret the use of ostentatious references, but she persists and signs.

She also ignited by evoking the fact that the Legault government makes use of the notwithstanding clause and that it derogates from its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Lawyer Anne-France Goldwater in her office.

Photo: Radio-Canada / Ivanoh Demers

Anne-France Goldwater told us, in the process, her admiration with a capital A for Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, whom she considers to be the father of the modern Canadian Nation. I believed in his project of a bilingual and bicultural country , she says emphatically.

At the mention of the fact that the biculturalism part had never crossed the threshold of the wishes of the Laurendeau-Dunton commission and that it had been excluded from the Pierre-Elliott Trudeau project, she literally burst into tears.

The abandonment of biculturalism! Yes. That is the fundamental problem. It's true , she says, again, with emotion. I hadn't thought of that, the abandonment of biculturalism , she adds.

How to reach French speakers? That is the question

Strongly denounced by François Legault and the leader of the opposition, Dominique Anglade, the intervention of Ms. Goldwater, ironically, responded to the wishes expressed on numerous occasions by various speakers deploring that the French-speaking media were not interested in the exercise led by the Quebec Community Group Network.

How to reach French speakers? How do we convince francophones to fight alongside us? These questions have been asked many times.

On the phone, the general manager of the Quebec community group Network QCGN , Sylvia Martin-Laforge, explained to us that her organization fears a return to great darkness and that services to English speakers will be reduced by the new Charter of the French language.

While all the federal parties agree to recognize that French is in decline in Canada and Quebec, the leader of the federal Conservative party even made a remarkable exit at the start of the election campaign by affirming his support for the Legault government in its to strengthen Bill 101. As for me, I will be clear: the federal government must now establish an asymmetrical approach that protects French as a priority , he wrote in a letter published in the daily Le Droit, last February.

Ms. Sylvia Martin-Laforge considers the comparison between the situation of Anglophones in Quebec and Francophones outside Quebec unfair. It's not fair to compare ourselves to francophones outside Quebec. We Anglophones in Quebec, 50, 75 or 100 years ago, we set up our institutions.

This is not the case for Francophones outside Quebec , she claims, although the Acadians, in particular, have set up a panoply of institutions in the Maritimes.

Haro on the notwithstanding clause

The Quebec community group Network QCGN is particularly against the use of the notwithstanding clause by the legislator and has invited eminent jurists to enlighten it on this constitutional question.

In this regard, Robert Leckey, the Dean of the Faculty of Law at McGill University, said in his intervention: With the extensive and preventive use of the notwithstanding (or notwithstanding) clause, we are essentially receiving the signal that there is no place for human rights to oppose the majority will and […] it is deeply, deeply troubling ,” he says.

The eminent jurist also specifies that not only is the Legault government derogating from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but that it is also derogating from its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1975.

Robert ^Leckey received us, Thursday, in the huge living room of the 19th century bourgeois house, rue Peel, where the offices of law faculty professors are housed. He speaks excellent French, a language he was able to perfect thanks to the Trois-Pistoles language school.

Robert Leckey in the living room of the James Ross House, home of McGill University's Faculty of Law.

Photo: Radio-Canada / Ivanoh Demers

During the interview, he argued very cautiously that the wall-to-wall recourse in this Bill 96 and, before, in the adoption of Bill 21, to the derogation clause or notwithstanding, is , according to him so excessive that I see there a signal of an attitude concerning the fundamental rights .

During his speech during the consultations of the Quebec community group Network QCGN , Robert Leckey explained to people who were following the work that there are people in this province who really never accepted the patriation of the constitution in the early years 1980 for which Quebec was not really a signatory .

Not really a signatory? The province did not join, but there were many Quebecers in the government of Pierre-Elliott Trudeau , specifies the jurist in an interview.

In fact, this constitution was never signed by Quebec, in particular because the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms jeopardized the application of certain provisions of Bill 101, Charter of the French language of 1977. .

In 1988, Robert Bourassa immediately relied on the notwithstanding clause provided for in this 1982 Constitution, to circumvent a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada which stipulated that the Quebec government had the right to impose the use of French in the province, but could not prohibit the use of English in signage under the rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

The National Assembly therefore adopted Bill 178 on French language posters, which would be challenged before the United Nations Human Rights Committee .

Public hearings on Bill 96 begin next Tuesday at the National Assembly. Will Quebec replay in a familiar scenario?