Читать книгу Language planning and policy in Quebec - Jakob Leimgruber - Страница 20

There is a long history of legal specificity for the province of Quebec. The link between language and citizenship, state institutions, and national identity is important and multi-facetted. The special status of Quebec can be traced back to the Quebec Act 1774, in which French civil law was allowed for francophone ‘Canadiens’ within the province. Later, the British North America Act 1867 permitted both French and English in the Quebec legislature and judiciary. With patriation in the early 1980s, and the intricate constitutional complex that came with it, a federal-level solution to language rights was sought with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which is Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982). This part of the constitution was always rejected by Quebec, partly because it was seen to give the federal government too much power, partly because of a sense of betrayal for having been left out of critical phases in the negotiation process. Minority education rights were also an issue, as they were seen to be too favourable to English in Quebec.1 Two subsequent conferences (the Meech Lake Accord in 1987 and the Charlottetown Accord in 1992), aimed at integrating the province into the larger Canadian constitutional order, were equally unsuccessful. Opposition to the Charter within Quebec – while still being subject to it, as federal law trumps provincial law – is evidenced by the government’s routine invoking of the Charter’s section 33, the so-called ‘notwithstanding clause’, which allows legislatures to pass acts that contravene provisions of the Charter. This section is rarely invoked by other provinces, and while it was included in every Quebec act between 1982 and 1987, this practice has now stopped and is only used occasionally.

The special status of Quebec is further evident in its partial rejection of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act 1988. The mandate to ‘promote and enhance’ (s 3(1)(i)) non-official languages has, at least, the potential to be in conflict with the province’s concern for protecting the French language and investing it with the status of ‘common language’. The Quebec policy differs, as mentioned above, from the rest of Canada’s embrace of multiculturalism by the use of the term interculturalism, where the focus is on ‘acceptance of, and communication and interaction between, culturally diverse groups’, all the while maintaining ‘the unquestioned supremacy of French in the language and culture of Quebec’ (Dewing, 2009, 15). One defining point of this interculturalism policy is that it is ‘distinct from both the US multicultural melting pot and the Canadian multicultural mosaic, the latter treating the various components that make up Canadian society as merely juxtaposed and largely isolated entities’ (Oakes and Warren, 2007, 29). Interculturalism, on the other hand, allows for different cultural groups to interpenetrate, mutually benefit each other, and contribute equally to nation building, all ‘within a common civic culture and a French-speaking framework’ (Anctil 1996, 143, cited in Oakes and Warren 2007, 29).

The root causes for language legislation in the province of Quebec are to be found within the so-called ‘Quiet revolution’ of the 1960s. This ‘revolution’ itself is a reaction to societal changes that began in the late 1950s: an increasing number of Francophones left the countryside and, in the course of urbanisation, came increasingly into contact with the English language (d’Anglejan, 1984, 29). English, at that time, was very much the language of the business élite in cities such as Montreal. Poorly educated and newly urbanised Francophones were inadequately prepared for this socio-economic situation, in which knowledge of English was the key to upward social mobility. As a result, many Francophones found themselves in the lower tier of the socio-economic pecking order. This apparent discrepancy in the economic situation of two groups differing in language and ethnicity, with the minority being economically advantaged, was one of the leading factors of change in the 1960s.

There were other factors, of course. For instance, the age-old influence of the Catholic church on every aspect of private and public life, began to decline, with the province effectively secularised by the end of the 1960s (Wardhaug, 1983, 64). It was the Roman Catholic Church that administered welfare and education, with the result that much of public administration was carried out along denominational lines. The secularisation that began in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) also saw many of these social services coming under the direct administration of the provincial state – although it was only in 1997 that the school system was fully secularised in Quebec, and separated no longer along religious lines, but into a French-language and an English-language system.

The 1960s were also a time when Quebec nationalism regained in importance. Bothwell (2007, 438) situates this in the larger context of postwar decolonisation, which had seen ‘European colonial empires collapse almost completely’ in various now ex-colonies around the globe. These struggles for independence, such as the one in Algeria, struck a chord with some activists in Quebec, who resorted to force to bring about similar change in their part of the world: a couple of bombs were found in politicians’ vicinities, but they had little effect beside prompting the federal government to appoint a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963 (which itself did have some results, influencing parts of the Official Languages Act, 1969). Of graver concern was the 1970 October Crisis, in which militants from the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) abducted the British consul in Montreal and the provincial minister of labour, Pierre Laporte, who was eventually killed. While the crisis sent shockwaves throughout Canada, and the provincial authorities demanded federal military assistance under the hitherto never-used War Measures Act, these shockwaves did not affect public opinion as the FLQ intended: whatever support the militants had in the population dwindled away, and the armed struggle for independence was reduced to a fantasy of a few extremists. Separatist (or, with less negative connotation, sovereignist) aims were now being pursued within the political realm, leading to two referenda on sovereignty (1980 and 1995), both of which were rejected by popular vote.

The quest for more self-rule within francophone Quebec is epitomised in the rallying cry maîtres chez nous ‘masters in our own home’, coined after the 1962 election of the Liberals under Jean Lesage, at first with the aim of nationalising the hydroelectricity industry, but so catchy that it also came to be used for wider social and linguistic emancipatory movements. In their pursuit towards more local and francophone autonomy, proponents of what is nowadays easily subsumed under the moniker ‘Quebec nationalism’ also resorted to symbolic actions, such as renaming the provincial Legislative Assembly to Assemblée nationale ‘National assembly’ in 1968 (see also Bibliothèque nationale ‘National library’, etc.), divorcing the term nation from its federal meaning of ‘pertaining to the country of Canada’ to mean ‘provincial’ – a tricky shift, since nation in Canada already had at least two distinct uses, as in First Nations (ethnic) and national capital (= federal). The fact that the provincial capital of Quebec, the city of Québec, is also officially called Capitale nationale, illustrates this brilliantly: in French there are two ‘national’ capitals in Canada: Ottawa (federal) and Québec (provincial). The recognition by the federal parliament, in 2006, of the Québécois as a ‘nation within a united Canada’ did little to disambiguate the use of the term within Quebec, since the ethnolinguistic nation québécoise in the federal sense is not defined in terms of provincial boundaries or authority, as it is in the provincial government’s usage, but rather on self-identification as Québécois. Present-day francophone immigration into Quebec (typically from the Caribbean and northern and western Africa) finds itself in the situation where this nationalism is potentially beneficial, being, as it is, grounded in the language of the Francophonie, but also problematic, in light of the presence of a discourse on the ethnocentric definition of Québécois identity – a discourse that most of the Quebec intelligentsia (both sovereignist and federalist) rejects, focussing on civil elements such as the common language French as defining factors, with some accusing the federal government of actively portraying advocates of a Québécois identity as basing their approach in ethnic definitions, which is seen as a way of ‘delegitimis[ing] the independence project’ (Seymour 1999, quoted in Oakes and Warren 2007, 31).

On the linguistic front, the increasing self-confidence of Francophones in Quebec led to several legislative measures to strengthen the status of French in the province. A first such attempt was the so-called ‘Bill 63’, officially titled Loi pour promouvoir la langue française au Québec ‘An act to promote the French language in Quebec’. It was the first to mention the objective of making French the language of the workplace and the dominant language in public signage; it also made the teaching of French compulsory at state schools. Bill 63 was superseded in 1974 by ‘Bill 22’, the Loi sur la langue officielle ‘Official language act’, which statutorily made French the official language of the province, imposed its use in public signage, required companies to implement francisation programmes, limited access to the English school system, and ensured the priority of the French versions of legal texts in case of ambiguity. This Official Language Act paved the way for ‘Bill 101’, the Charte de la langue française ‘Charter of the French language’, to which I shall turn in the next section.