Jurisdiction is an interesting concept. At one moment you are affected by one set of laws, and then after crossing an imaginary line, you’re suddenly affected by an entirely different set of them. While it may seem boring, for Pontiacers, jurisdiction has a major impact on our lives. To take a relatively benign example, if you call the police in Quyon, the Sécurité Publique MRC des Collines-de-l’Outaouais will respond. If you call 10 minutes away in Bristol, the Sûreté du Québec from the Campbell’s Bay station will respond.
A more serious example of divided jurisdiction was seen during the peak of pandemic restrictions, when many residents of the Municipality of Pontiac (MoP) couldn’t enter the MRC Pontiac without the proper paperwork, preventing what would otherwise be normal and essential movement through the community. There were also similar restrictions on the Ontario and Quebec border.
Without going into the efficacy or morality of the pandemic travel restrictions, it’s important to emphasize that the roadblocks appeared along the essentially arbitrary lines of political borders. It didn’t matter that many people in Quyon normally do their grocery shopping in Shawville, or that people from all over the Pontiac need to go to the Ontario side for many important services or let alone all the family connections all across the Ottawa Valley; the lines where the roadblocks were set up were determined according to the political lines drawn on a map.
A third example of the seemingly arbitrary impact of jurisdiction on people is language policy. Despite English speakers making up the majority of the population in the MRC Pontiac and a significant minority in the MoP, because of policies determined in Quebec City, we live in a territory where the common language of communication is supposed to be French, causing a long list of unnecessary injustices.
Like with the pandemic travel restrictions splitting the community, the lived reality of the region takes a back seat to the language laws that are imposed on us.
Jurisdiction itself is an administrative and democratic reality that we will likely never be without. The idea that we will ever get to a universal set of standards and laws that can be applied to everyone is unlikely. And fundamentally, different communities should have the right to determine democratically certain laws and customs for themselves.
However, by thinking about some negitive impacts that jurisdiction failure can have on communities, we can start to think about what we could do to create different outcomes. Most obviously, we could create new and more rational jurisdictions.
One change that already has a fair bit of buy-in is the MoP, or at least part of the MoP, joining the MRC Pontiac to better reflect the geographical, economic, and demographic realities of the region. Arguably this change would make the administration of things like Highway 148 and the Ottawa River easier. It could also better allow officials to form more coherent region-wide economic, environmental, and cultural policies.
However, if so inclined, one could start thinking of far more radical jurisdictional shifts, perhaps even going so far as a new province.
It appears that the government of Quebec, with the support of a critical mass of the province’s population, will continue to pursue French language policies at the expense of anglophones, allophones and francophones who want to live in a bilingual community for the foreseeable future. This trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon and there doesn’t really seem to be much of a chance for domestic opposition to succeed against the sentiment. With the imminent multipartisan passage of Bill C-13 at the federal level, it seems that no federal political party sees itself as much of a roadblock to this trend either.
Given these political realities, why not think about something new? In the Outaouais, there are grievances around the lack of government attention in areas like healthcare and infrastructure relative to the region’s tax base, along with a significant population of alienated anglophones.
Across the Ottawa River, a not insignificant sentiment of resentment exists in Northern and Eastern Ontario over the province’s GTA-centric politics. Franco-Ontarians have had their own problems maintaining their language rights in a province where they are a significant minority. Northern Ontario even already has what essentially amounts to a provincial independence party.
Given all this, why not create a New Brunswick-esque bilingual province out of Northern Ontario, Eastern Ontario and the Outaouais? Think of all the problems that could potentially be solved on both sides of the border. The Province of Canada was only split into Quebec and Ontario in 1867, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things.
Obviously, this change seems far-fetched from the onset. A massive change like this would be politically pretty difficult to achieve. Many people are used to and like identifying as Quebecers and obviously a new identity isn’t on many people’s radar.
However, fundamentally all it would take is a shift in political imagination.
THE EQUITY has previously covered the Pontiacers’ desire to separate from Quebec, by either joining Ontario or a new Federal District made of up Ottawa-Gatineau and its surrounding area. After polling its readership in 1971 and 1981, both times THE EQUITY saw that large majorities of the survey respondents in favour of separating from Quebec in some form. So this idea isn’t new.
Overall, things can change quickly if we really wanted them to. And if the Government of Quebec continues to use the province’s anglophone minority as a scapegoat, why not think about a change? It’s all just lines on a map after all, which could easily be redrawn if we wanted to. The threat alone may be enough to stop these regions and their people from being taken for granted.
Brett Thoms
