Ricky Blue

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RICKY BLUE

English Like Me

MONTREAL | When the Bouchard-Taylor Commission finally tables its report at the end of the month, there is one solution to the "reasonable accommodation" problem it will not suggest: Repeal Law 101.

I guess it's too obvious.

Law 101 divides the citizens of Quebec into two unequal groups: those who speak English and those who speak French. And it enforces different rights for each group.

By diminishing and regulating unilingual anglophone participation in any form of cultural, commercial, and social life in Quebec, it ensures that these unfortunate citizens can never grow to their full potential.

It cuts the English-speaking community off at its roots just as a gardener would to create a Bonsai tree, leaving a tiny shrunken facsimile of what it could and should be.

Even though the English language is a key to open the door into the international business community and the rest of North America, Law 101 doggedly insists that the English language is the enemy of Quebec, and by definition those who practice it -- Quebec's unilingual anglophones.

Just to refresh your memory about how institutionalized discrimination against anglophones is in Quebec, think back to last November when Le Journal de Montréal sent a reporter to downtown Montreal cleverly disguised as a unilingual anglophone.

Although most of the stores would not allow the anglophone to work in her own language in her own home town (which in any other jurisdiction would be a violation of her basic human rights), Le Journal implied that Quebecers should not be satisfied until the level of discrimination was total.

Compare this with the famous book from the Sixties called Black Like Me. That was the story of a white reporter disguised as a black man who went into the American South to investigate discrimination.

In Black Like Me, the scandal was that the reporter was always discriminated against solely on the basis of his perceived race. In the Le Journal de Montréal report, the scandal was that the reporter was not always discriminated against on the basis of her perceived language.

This discrimination is so much part of Quebec culture that even the Liberal MNAs that anglophones dutifully send to the Quebec Parliament to represent them every election are mute, and have been since Clifford Lincoln's magnificent but futile "rights are rights are rights" speech twenty years ago.

Even though the idea that one salesclerk speaking English in a store in downtown Montreal will threaten the right of someone to speak French in a hermetically sealed French-speaking environment in another region of Quebec is preposterous.

But now Law 101's unintended consequences have come home to roost. Because of the socially acceptable and state sponsored intolerance practiced in Quebec since 1977, the anglophone population has been greatly reduced.

And whereas anglophones come from the same Judeo-Christian and liberal democratic background as Franco-Quebecers, they now have to be replaced with more exotic immigrants who, in many cases, have very different racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds, and very different values and beliefs.

Which has created the well publicized difficulties of cultural assimilation we now call "reasonable accommodation."

Repealing Law 101 to entice more English speakers to Quebec and keep the ones that are still here would be one step towards solving this problem; because, with the exception of language, anglophones and francophones are culturally homogeneous.

And in this case "the other" you know might be more easy to assimilate than "the other" you don't know. But the Bouchard-Taylor report will say nothing about it. It's just too obvious.