Sound, fury and little substance on language law

Lysiane GagnonPublished Monday, Oct. 25, 2010 5:00AM EDTLast updated Monday, Oct. 25, 2010 9:13AM EDT20 comments

Should parents be free to pay out of their own pockets to provide their kids with an education in English? Should a state allow moneyed people to circumvent a law? Should one be able to “buy” a right?

These are some of the questions that were raised all last week in Quebec, as a tough battle in the National Assembly pitted the governing Liberals against the Parti Québécois opposition around a bill that both francophone activists and anglophones equally hate, albeit, of course, for different reasons.

At the root of the debate is the Charte de la langue française, which made French the official language of the province in 1977 and stipulates that all immigrants, as well as old-stock families where at least one parent hasn’t been educated in English, must send their children to French schools. This is perfectly justifiable, since the main danger to the survival of French, a minority language in North America, was that too many immigrants would be, quite naturally, attracted to the English school system.

By and large, the law was, and still is, a great success: Generations of new Quebeckers have integrated into the French majority. The co-existence in the same schools of children from various backgrounds allowed the old-stock francophone population, in Montreal at least, to become more heterogeneous and multicultural.

Don’t think for a minute that young, non-anglophone immigrants “stuck” in the French system don’t learn English. They do, with a vengeance, if only because the pressure to learn this international language is irresistible. In fact, these kids are trilingual, which will give them a formidable edge in the labour market.

But the law, as strict as it was, had a loophole. Children who had part of their primary education in English could be admitted into the English school system. This was a window of opportunity for the private, non-subsidized English schools. In exchange for as much as $12,000 a year, one could buy, for their children and all their descendants, the right to be educated in the English public school system. Quebec tried to outlaw these “bridging schools,” but the Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that the law was unconstitutional.

The PQ wanted the notwithstanding clause to be invoked against the Supreme Court decision, but the new law that was adopted last week in the National Assembly is as stringent as it can be: A child will have to have spent three full years in a private English school to have a chance to transfer to the anglophone public network – and this transfer is far from guaranteed, since the application will be judged for “authenticity” by a panel of bureaucrats who will apply a lengthy set of regulations. If, for instance, the child had a sister in the French school system, the application would be denied. Who will risk spending up to $36,000 in vain?

Tellingly, these “bridging” schools were mostly used not by immigrants, but by well-to-do francophone families who desperately wanted their child to be perfectly bilingual – an elusive goal for those who live in a totally French environment, especially considering how badly English is taught in the French school system.

In a sense, this furious debate was much ado about nothing. Very few parents will use a smaller-than-ever loophole. Once again, the new law will be contested in court by anglophone lobby groups. And nothing will have been done to force the French schools to improve the teaching of English as a second language.

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