March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Quebec expected to ease French-only law

In the wake of a United Nations ruling that Quebec’s ban on English-language signs is a violation of human rights, the province’s legislature is expected to approve a bill by the end of June to allow English to be used along with French.

French community leaders warn that this threatens their language and culture, while English rights activists complain the legislation doesn’t go far enough.

The case that led to the April ruling by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva began five years ago when Quebec officials informed Gordon McIntyre he had to change the sign in front of his Huntingdon funeral home. The sign, “Kelly Funeral Home,” was in English, a violation of Quebec’s decade-old law mandating that all outdoor commercial signs be in French only.

“To them, my sign contained `dirty words,”‘ says McIntyre. “They wanted me to change it to `Salon Kelly Funeraire.”‘

McIntyre refused, arguing that most of his customers were English and wouldn’t know what a salon funeraire was. For a while he put black tape over the words, but that eventually fell off. The “language police,” as he calls them, persisted.

Frustrated and angry, McIntyre took his case to the United Nations, complaining that Quebec’s language law was an infringement of human rights.

The 1977 law that dictated French-only commercial signs, Bill 101, also forced all French Quebeckers and immigrants to send their children to French schools. The separatist government of Rene Levesque wanted to put a “French Face” on the province, particuiarly in Montreal, where an influx of immigrants was increasingly choosing to live, work, and study in English.

Since then, the French language has resurged, but not without a price. Hundreds of thousands of English speakers and many businesses have left Quebec, dealing an extra blow to an economy already suffering from a nationwide recession.

“The Anglophone youth see no hope in the province of Quebec,” says Maurice King, who heads the Chateauguay Valley English Speaking Peoples’ Association in Huntingdon.

Four of King’s five children have joined the exodus. In Huntingdon, he says, as the English-speaking population has disappeared so have the health and social facilities that served them, making life difficuit for the remaining unilingual Anglophones.

“I know of one person who needed psychiatric treatment. The psychiatrist only spoke French, so they had to bring in the doctor’s secretary to translate while this guy discussed the intimate details of his life,” says King.

During the past two decades one-third of the English community’s schools in Quebec have closed as English speakers migrated out of the province, and as immigrants coming in were forced by law to put their chlldren in French schools.

“When you start closing your institutions the community starts to dissppear,” said Hobert Keaton of the Montreal-based English rights group, Alliance Quebec. “We’re becoming more and more like a small colony abroad. But this isn’t supposed to be a colony here, this is supposed to be our country.”

The English community has gained support from immigrant parents, such as Steve Potter, who came to Canada from England 13 years ago. Potter says his own limited French will keep him from helping with his sons’ homework, and from communicating well with school administrators. He also worries about the trauma some immigrant children face when suddenly expected to cope in a foreign environment.

“In some cases children are ridiculed, humiliated. I know of one case where a child raised his hand to answer questions, shouting `I know! I know!’ The teacher snapped back `Pas Anglais!’ The child became very withdrawn and it took the parents a few years to get him to open up again.”

Despite these complaints, Quebec’s government has chosen not to lift its restrictions on English education. With one of the lowest birth rates in the Western world, French Quebeckers say their only hope of cultural survival is to assimilate those coming into the province.

The strategy has worked. Two decades ago French was threatened as English dominated Quebec’s workplace and a growing number of households. Today French is the language of business and, according to polls, is spoken in about 80 percent of the province’s homes. But Guy Boutiller of the nationalist French Quebec Movement believes if given the choice, immigrants again would choose en masse to study and live in English.”

“In 25 years you could change the face of Montreal.”


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