Chris Selley: Quebec cannot afford this anti-anglo decadence

Among several live linguistic issues in the ongoing Quebec election campaign, the one that seemed to make the biggest dent in anglophone media in recent days was Élections Québec's announcement that it would only distribute printed election materials, including voter information cards, in French. This is in deference to Bill 96, Quebec's latest decadent attack on minority-language rights. Among other great democratic feats, the law divides Quebec's anglophones into those with 'acquired rights' to English-language services who have roots in the province, and more recent arrivals who have no language rights. Quick tangent here: Radio-Canada reported Friday that sales in adult diapers now exceed sales in baby diapers in Quebec. Twenty years ago, there were 36 per cent more births than deaths in Quebec, according to official government statistics. In 2024, there were three per cent more deaths than births. Does that sound like a society that can afford to pick and choose immigrants? Anyway, Élections Québec asked for an exemption from the law to provide bilingual material to voters. 'For us, the right to vote is … fundamental,' Élections Québec spokesperson Julie St-Arnaud Drolet told CTV News. Both the minister and the commissioner responsible for the French language turned them down. It is petty, pointless, and not the end of the world. The French-language versions come with a QR code that points you to the English-language instructions. (Only certain anglos are entitled to printed elections information, but apparently online is a mad free-for-all.) But as St-Arnaud says, voting is as fundamental a right as there is. It's the last thing we should be meddling with for squeaks and giggles. Reasonable people can disagree on ID requirements and such, but unlike a lot of systems in Canada, while very far from perfect, our relatively low-tech elections usually work within acceptable parameters (if not always to newspaper deadlines). The unilingual voter cards weren't nearly the pettiest or most disquieting language development on the campaign trail last week, though. That honour goes, not for the first time, to Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. And I feel like this got less notice. 'Under the leadership of the CAQ and Christine Fréchette, every indicator related to the French language has declined,' a PQ press release averred. Among the indicators listed were 'mother tongue' and 'language spoken at home.' PSPP is quoted in the release: 'In Montreal, the situation is simply catastrophic. Less than half of Montrealers speak French at home.' Nationalist campaigns have long begged to be asked what Gazette columnist Don Macpherson asked of the PQ way back in 2012: 'How are you supposed to change your mother tongue?' It's a clear tell, as Macpherson said, that for the PQ, 'the problem is not one of behaviour, but of identity.' And 'none of your goddamn business if I can and do speak French' is a very fine response to 'what language do you speak at home?' But it's not true, for the record, that less than half of Montrealers speak French at home. Forty-four per cent was the PQ's figure; it's more like 60 per cent, as La Presse reported in December. The PQ omits from the figure roughly 16 per cent of Montrealers who speak French and another language at home. That distinction is another huge tell: The PQ isn't just concerned with the vitality of the French language; like many in the national-elite class, it doesn't like bilingualism or multilingualism. Another quick tangent: PSPP has a law degree from McGill, whose legal faculty requires entrants to be at least somewhat bilingual. He has a certificate in international law from Lund University in Sweden, whose legal faculty teaches in English. And he has an MBA from the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, which is, notoriously, in England. The school's namesake and benefactor Wafic Saïd, incidentally, is a billionaire Syrian-Saudi businessman and arms broker, and a Canadian citizen who (as revealed in the Paradise Papers) established residency here in part by renting a farcically implausible basement apartment in the not-at-all-fancy Montreal neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges. That's not to say PSPP should have avoided Oxford. Just saying the world is far more complicated than an election narrative. Any Quebec government, especially one with eyes on sovereignty — assuming it wants to prosper in a global economy and not be chased into the St. Lawrence River by an angry mob — should want bilingualism and multilingualism numbers to rise, not view them as a problem. Far more people speak English in the Netherlands than in Quebec. Dutch is still very much a language. I'm not sure I've seen a Quebec leader quite so bluntly say he cares what language you speak on your own time — including at school, even during recess. The PQ intends to launch a study into the 'language of socialization' at French-language public schools in Montreal and Laval, in order to ensure that teenagers don't divide themselves into identitarian cliques. That is going to be quite a battle against human nature. I would bet heavily against victory. I would advise against trying. Alas, I wouldn't put it past either of the parties with a good chance of winning this campaign.