In a rare speech to the Academie Française de France, the body charged with protecting the French language in his home country, one of Quebec’s top ministers said Canadian multiculturalism is a thorn in Quebec’s side.
People don’t see that Quebec’s controversial recent laws, both the language law 96 and even the Securalism law 21, are about protecting a fragile culture, said Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette.
We are at a time when “the diversity of cultures is becoming as threatened as the diversity of fauna and flora,” he said in Thursday’s speech, referring to Quebec’s francophone culture.
Jolin-Barrette is the Minister of Justice of Quebec and also his Minister of the French Language, which makes him deeply involved in both laws.
In the long speech, he reviewed the history of Quebec, from its founding as a French colony to the quiet revolution and beyond.
But one thing is a particular problem, he said: ensuring that newcomers to Quebec learn to live in French.
“One of our big challenges is to involve immigrants in our national project,” he said.
“We are neighbors of a great power, the United States, and we operate within an English-speaking majority federation. Continental and global linguistic dynamics favor English in every way.”
He accumulated criticism of Canadian federal law that protects individual rights, calling this emphasis on the individual “almost absolute,” to the detriment of Quebec’s collective rights.
“While our project is frustrated by Canadian multiculturalism, which finds an equivalent in what you call communitarianism and fights Quebec’s claims to be a different nation,” Jolin-Barrette continued, “the language French must really become the language of use for all Quebecers. “
Although previous laws required all children of immigrants to attend school in French, he said it was not enough, and led the current government to crack down on English in post-secondary universities by curbing the its growth with enrollment limits.
“By the end of high school … an alarming proportion of students, especially those whose first language is neither English nor French, are rushing to the English-speaking network to continue their studies,” he said.
He also explicitly linked Bill 21 to the same struggle. Undoubtedly, the most controversial bill of the current government of its four years in power, banned certain public officials, including teachers and police, from wearing religious symbols at work.
In practice, it further affected Muslim teachers, preventing school boards from hiring or promoting teachers wearing hijabs. The challenges are still before the courts and are expected to end in the Supreme Court of Canada.
“Law 96 on the French language does not come alone,” Jolin-Barrette said.
“It was adopted after Law 21 on secularism, which I also had the honor of piloting, always with the same idea of strengthening the autonomy and personality of the State of Quebec.”
LEGAULT SAYS ALL CULTURES ARE NOT “AT THE SAME LEVEL”
When asked about Minister Jolin-Barrette’s comments today in Paris, Prime Minister François Legault said he opposes putting “all cultures on an equal footing” and stressed the importance of having a “culture of integration “above all.
“That’s why we oppose multiculturalism. We prefer to focus on what we call ‘interculturality’ where there is a culture, the culture of Quebec, where we try to integrate newcomers, but we want to add that culture,” said the first minister.
“I think the new people who come to Quebec, add to our culture. But it’s important to have a culture where we integrate, especially in our language.”
Legault also argued that this is in direct opposition to the Canadian model of multiculturalism.
“I see Mr. Trudeau is driving multiculturalism, so he doesn’t want us to have a culture and a language where we integrate newcomers,” the prime minister said.
JOLIN-BARRETTE SAYS THE REVIEWS OF LAW 96 MEDIA ARE “MANDERS”
In her speech, Jolin-Barrette addressed the criticisms that accepting English and bilingualism is a way to open up to the world, whether you see it as the language of Shakespeare or “Silicon Valley.”
But this is a misconception, the minister argued.
“What is presented as an opening to the world too often masks acculturation, which entails a significant loss of memory and identity,” he said.
He said the times have passed when people can apply to be cared for in English or French in Quebec, such as in a “self-service business.”
And Jolin-Barrette made a special point of attacking the English Canadian media coverage of Bill 96.
“Recently, defamatory articles have been published against Quebec with too much complacency in American and English Canadian newspapers,” he said.
“Lazy authors represent our struggle from the most denigrating and insulting angle, trying to pass it off as a rearguard struggle, a form of authoritarianism.”
“Our struggle for the French language is just, it is a universal struggle, that of a nation that has peacefully resisted the will to power of the strongest.”
For much of the speech, Jolin-Barrette spoke of the time before the silent revolution, when, she said, the Frenchman himself was getting lost in Quebec.
“A vulnerable proletariat was born, whose contaminated language quickly passed into French,” he said.
“The English-speaking oligarchy, heir to British power, imposed its language and imagination … in the 1950s, Franciscans lived in villages where trade signage was often in English.”
At another time, he named French as the largest of the Western languages, with the greatest literary influence.
In those decades, however, “French Canada was one of the few places in the world where the French language was a sign of social inferiority,” he said.